Where We Are

This post is a quick orientation to Port Ashraven and the pressures around it. It is written to give the city context without slowing down the story.

This setting is roughly comparable to the mid-20th century. Technology and everyday life resemble the 1930s through the 1960s, and this level of development has held for centuries. The current year is 421, though parts of the series take place earlier. Many familiar reference points still apply: industry, bureaucracy, newspapers and radio, and a culture built around paperwork.

Port Ashraven is a northern city in the Republic of Videlia, wedged between the Dravoskan Directorate to the west and the Pact of the Eastern Kingdoms to the east.

Port Ashraven is one of Videlia’s largest cities and an industrial center, with historical ties to Pact nobility. During the Expanse War (405–413), Port Ashraven aligned with the Pact to push back Directorate forces. That decision left a lasting complication: in the north, people remember fighting alongside the Pact, while in much of the rest of Videlia, the Pact is remembered as an adversary. Directorate forces were never able to hold the city as a whole, but they did capture and lose a few districts during the war, and the city endured sustained shelling throughout. The damage was extensive: roads, rail, utilities, and whole districts.

That unfinished recovery shapes daily life. Port Ashraven is still operating on patched infrastructure and deferred repairs. Recovery was also uneven. Central and eastern districts were repaired faster, helped by greater wealth and better access to administrative and commercial influence. Western neighborhoods, which were poorer and more heavily damaged, were patched rather than rebuilt. The gap is still visible, and it continues to create friction inside the city.

Port Ashraven also has a large underground tunnel network. During the bombing, a significant part of the population moved underground for weeks, and sometimes months. As conditions stretched on, the authorities lost practical control over parts of that space, and organized crime filled the vacuum with rackets and illegal trade. In the years since, large sections of the tunnels have been sealed, and entering them is now illegal. The underground rail network also suffered heavy damage and was never fully restored, with repairs judged too expensive.

In the first years after the war, crime rose sharply. The city did not have enough police, and many soldiers were deployed to other fronts, leaving fewer resources for internal security. Today the pressure shows up differently. Bureaucracy is slow and budgets are tight, which means basic services are reduced or closed more often than people can comfortably absorb, including hospitals, schools, and other forms of public care. There is limited funding for veterans, healthcare, and long-term support, and many residents rely on informal arrangements to get by.

Many of the city’s day-to-day tensions show up in predictable places:

• uneven access to healthcare and schools by district
  
• informal markets filling gaps in supply
  
• veterans and other war-affected residents falling through support systems, including widows, orphans, and people living with long-term injuries
  
• corruption inside city institutions, especially where permits, contracts, and enforcement intersect
  
• a local media culture that tends to avoid sustained coverage of sensitive issues
  

The Reunifed Republic of Videlia sits between the two powers. It is made up of three nations that have alternated between unity and separation across history; for the last few centuries, they have been unified. Videlia’s terrain is a defensive advantage, with long mountain ranges, lakes and swamps, and wide rivers that are difficult to cross and easy to misjudge. Its people have developed a reputation for toughness and self-reliance, and that has helped the Republic hold its independence for generations. But Videlia’s strengths are not evenly matched to every kind of threat. When danger is direct, the Republic knows how to endure. When it arrives indirectly through influence and patronage, the Republic shows its weak side.

To the west, the Dravoskan Directorate is an autocratic technocracy led by a committee of arch-directors. It emphasizes unity, merit, and effort as civic values. In practice, society is tightly structured, social mobility is limited, and the state relies on hierarchy, discipline, and a highly organized military.

To the east, the Pact of the Eastern Kingdoms covers a large territory made up of thirteen kingdoms under a High King. Each kingdom is an absolutist monarchy, with political power concentrated in the nobility and a social order that is still partly feudal in structure. The Pact can mobilize large armies when needed, and it maintains a large intelligence service across its member kingdoms.

Port Ashraven is not background decoration. It is a working city with a specific history, a specific set of pressures, and a specific way those pressures get distributed. The books use that reality as the operating environment for every decision: what institutions can realistically do, what people learn to accept, and what they risk when they push back. If you enjoy settings that behave like places, where politics, infrastructure, and social class are part of the same system, Port Ashraven is built to hold your attention.