The Place
Aelfarion is a city carved into the white cliffs of the coast, and the cliffs are the city, and the city is the silence. The spires are silver stone and they rise three hundred meters up the cliff face, and the sea below is the color of gunmetal on a day without wind. The city spreads four kilometers along the coast, and every hall is a hollow in the white rock, and every stair is cut, not built. The light is the spell's light, cold and blue and never still, and it does not come from anywhere you can point at. The air tastes of salt and of cold stone, and in the deep halls it tastes of old magic, which is the smell of a word kept too long. The sky over the city is a flat grey in the morning and a pale silver at noon, and the sun touches the spires for eleven minutes before the cliff takes it back. The highest spire is called the Needle of the First Word, and it is two hundred and forty meters of carved silver stone, and the first word ever spoken in Aelfarion was carved into its base. The lowest hall is the Deep Vein, where the water comes from, and the Vein is a river in the rock that the spell-keepers tend like a garden. The wind off the sea is the only sound the city allows, and even that is kept low, because the cliff reads loud. What makes Aelfarion itself is the care: every thing in the city is done slowly, done correctly, and done once.
How They Live
The High Elf keep this place, and they keep it the way the cliff keeps the sea, by not moving. They build in silver stone and white rock, and a new chamber is carved at a rate of one meter per year, because a year is the time it takes for the stone to stop remembering the cut. The light of the hall is the spell, which is lit at the hour the sea is flattest, and the spell is the only light the city has, so a broken spell is a dark hall, and a dark hall is a grave. Food comes from the cliff and the sea: the kelp, the grey fish, the salt garden, and the careful honey of the cliff bees, which the city trades out but never eats. Water is the Deep Vein, and the Vein is a river in the rock that runs four hundred kilometers under the city before it touches the sea. Heat comes from the spell in winter, which is to say the spell does everything, and the winter is the reason the city is careful. The defense is the cliff, and the cliff is the defense: the only way up is the Silver Stair, nine hundred steps of silver stone, and at the top of the Stair the word is spoken, and the word is the alarm and the welcome and the sentence. The day is measured by the spell, which is also the calendar, because the cliff is the only clock the word needs. Every citizen must speak one word a year to the cliff, and the word is kept, and the keeping is the oath.
People
Home of the High Elf, whose spires are counted by spell. A hundred and odd spires, each with its line of keepers, and the city holds a few thousand souls in total, which is a crowd by the city's measure. The line-keepers lead, and rank is decided by the keeping, because a keeper who keeps a word for a hundred years is older in the city than one who keeps it for ten. No one is welcome who cannot keep a secret, and the sea takes the ones who try. A human trader who has ever been allowed up the Stair calls it the place where the silence is load-bearing.
In Stories
The place where the spell is the only honest thing, and the thing is the word, and the word is the oath, and the oath is the end. The Forgotten have not been there yet, but Uaellaen knows the city by its absence, the only place in the unknown universe where magic is done quietly. When they go, they will go quiet.