"We sell powder to one, a knife to the other, and blessed wax to both. When the war ends we sell peace. When peace lasts we sell war. That is why the Serenissima never sleeps — and why Hell does not either." — Doge of Sails Aurelio Mattei, inaugural address, 1872
Velinia is the world's only archipelago city: built on eighty-four islands and islets, joined by four hundred and twelve bridges. Roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people in 1890, the highest urban density on the continent. Political, mercantile and diplomatic capital of Serenissima Velinia.
The canonical duality is that Velinia is two cities at once: a mercantile capital, holding the largest raw-mineral exchange on the continent and the centre of liturgical credit; and a frontier city in permanent war, sixty kilometres west of the Red Stretch, where the Sea of the Choir turns into the Tenebrum Sea.
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