The previous article involved a long form discussion of the history and potential formation of a necrostate that could, hypothetically, in the future, integrate with the Eresh Protectorate. With all that preamble out of the way, this article presents the first part of the long-form writeup of the city state that is known by its name:
Hecsenfore
Coastal heavily urbanised independent city-state, The Land of White Ravens, the Graveless State, The Internal Labyrinth, The Obsession, The Eresh Outcast
Cultures
Hecsenfore is a cosmopolitan, culturally diverse city-state in the northern quarter of the world, which does mean it is biased towards cultures that don’t mind the cold or wet very much. What is notable about Hecsenfore’s population is that’s the most densely populated city of Vampires in the world – roughly 4% of the population is Vampires, meaning that for every Vampire, there are about twenty-four people.
Culture and heritage background are not as deterministic in Hecsenfore as much as being from Hecsenfore, and being from one of the Districts that have their own distinct take on the broader meta-culture of Hecsenfore, which is otherwise best described as ‘Modern Vampire Gothic.’ The people of Hecsenfore know what trains are, they use magepunk technology in their daily lives, they recognise a regulatory body that tracks the behaviour of Vampires with threat of protective violence known as the Stakeholders, they have national education and healthcare systems, free domestic housing and minimum basic income all guaranteed by the city-state, which they pay for with a hard-to-exploit blood tax.
The people of Hecsenfore are known as the Hessen and have iconography and symbolism that isolates them from neighbouring identities (mostly), and are mostly seen as attempts to emulate the Eresh Protectorate without actually obviating them. For example, there is no national church of Hecsenfore or Knightly Orders because doing so would create problems when Hecsenfore eventually joined the Protectorate. Which it wants to do. The most commonly seen piece of iconography, and commonly forms part of signatures or stamped on goods transported to them is the VIIV glyph, meant to represent both a 6 and a 4, but also the fangs of a Vampire standing apart.
Hecsenfore is one of the necrostates of Cobrin’Seil, where the ruling body of the city are undead, and they are one of the asterisks when someone says ‘everyone hates necrostates.’ While it’s easy to point to Uxaion, Voolfardisworth, Uxaion, the Osteon and Uxaion and point out how places with political power resting entirely in the hands of an undead body politic are terrible places for everyone else, Hecsenfore is the exception that at least makes the conversation more complicated.
Hecsenfore is a city state situated in the north-east of the Bidestran continent. It sits in space carved out from the Corrindale Forest, and on the edges of one of the Winter’s Seas, known as the Frozen Harbour. Hecsenfore is a recent enough polity that its history is well documented and there are even notations and letters from the establishing parties that explain things like why things were named as they are and who has responsibility or authority over things throughout the development of the city. It does not hurt matters for this record keeping that the political body maintaining Hecsenfore are detail-oriented diarists with obssessive attention to detail, what with them also all being Vampires. The name Hecsenfore is one of those many strange derivations; originally, the city was known for its Quarters, each one of which seen as holding the space of a Vampire Lord that Lochestow was using to help build his city. But these were ‘quarters’ in the term of ‘a place to store someone’ not ‘one fourth.’ When first dealing with Eresh representatives, the six quarters prompted questions – why does this city have six quarters, when quarters are things you only have four of? – this formed the origin of the name.
Making it more complicated is that now there are seven or eight Quarters of Hecsenfore, depending on how you count them. It is these Quarters – now known as ‘Districts’ – that serve as the defining cultural spaces of the city, and the people who live there.
The Estate Of Mercy
When a Vampire Lord calls herself Mercy, and adorns herself with a halo and wings, there’s probably a vibe she’s already laying out ahead of time. Mercy’s Estate is sometimes called the Cathedral Districts, and it is a triumph of a space dedicated to an individual Vampire Lord’s personal focus. Mercy loves religious faith. She has a complex relationship to it, which is that she sees it as pure and beautiful and entirely ennobling. She also loves to defile it and do destructive things within that space to satisfy her own wants and needs. As a direct result of this, Mercy both wants to be surrounded by religious iconography (which appeals to her) and for its love to be authentic (which is important to her) and also knows she does things with that imagery and art that its adherents don’t want.
To this end, she strives to meet a compromise, which is composed of three parties:
The Faithful: The Estate of Mercy is a district full of religious buildings, churches and dedicated worship spaces. They range in size, with some communities being as small as four or five people, and some being large, well established churches that are familiar to people across the whole continent.
These people are subsidised by the city; they can buy space very cheaply, and if they’re very small they’ll be given their space for free. People are given freedom to practice and represent their faiths. If you’re wondering ‘what about churches to evil gods’ that’s not really a thing in this setting. Anyway, then there’s…
The Profane Partiers: The reason Mercy wants a district full of cathedrals and religious worshippers is because she is fascinated with sacriliege. She oversees a small coven – partly vampires, but not entirely – who she wants to party with, and indulge this want. It’s not really possible to defile an altar that nobody believes in, and so, Mercy’s particular interest needs the special support of actual, authentic, zealously supported individuals overseeing their actual places of faith.
Mercy’s partiers, at random times, pick a church in the district they like, and have a raucous party there, probably doing nasty and inappropriate things in them until their needs and wants are met. Then they leave, and turn the place over to…
The Cleaner’s Guild: The third part of the district that gives the entire system its sinew to work. The Cleaner’s Guild serves Mercy’s needs for a regular, repeated restoration of Cathedrals she has used for her parties. The Cleaners guild are so good at their job, and so capable of restoring a religious space after Mercy and her partygoers have had their fun that a number of cathedrals Mercy favours for her parties have no idea that their cathedral has ever been used and assume Mercy’s interest is elsewhere.
Agents of the Estate of Mercy are probably travelling the world, wholeheartedly and sincerely trying to find minority worshippers who want some support and safety. Mercy’s Estate is 100% a genuinely, sincerely, and entirely functional preservation state for minority faith positions, and the Agents of the Estate of Mercy can entirely reasonably present this as a reason to come to the Estate!
The Helikos Byblos
The Helikos Byblos is the name for the great library on the edge of the Hummingbird District. Notably, it is its own district, set apart from the official rule of Empress Du’Miel, despite being, at a glance, one building. It is not untrue to say it is one building but it is understating the scale of what it is. The immediate apparent building is a wide three storey building with multiple wings, a public library for anyone to take books and borrow from freely. Notably, you don’t have to check books out from the library, but the librarians seem to know where the books are and will show up to ask you to return them after your time is up.
Anyway, the Helikos is notable not because of its height but its depth; under the building lies an expanding set of cellars and almost mineshaft like structures that have dug out a large cavern for the storage and maintenance of a vast library, the actual Helikos Byblos of its name – a set of spiralling stairs that coil downwards and have multiple floors spun off them in odd shapes, full of shelves, with library books being sorted and stored all throughout the constantly expanding space.
The Helikos is the project of the vampire Lord Sleti, who loves books. Loves books. So much so that Sleti has decided to collect, if possible, all the books. There’s no need to collect truly famous, truly well known books; instead, Sleti wants to catalogue what would otherwise be forgotten. To this end, Sleti seeks books that are lesser books by authors with successful books, books that are misprinted or bound wrong, single examples of books that have something about them that would make them forgotten in some other way.
Sleti’s dedication has led to the Helikos, and with it comes its three wings of operators:
The Acquisition Union: Individuals who travel the world and acquire books that may or may not be of interest to Sleti. Headed up by a Vampire Liege named Bosht Phima, the Acquisitions want to make sure they’re not bringing redundant copies, so they are reliant on the Engineers’ union being able to provide them with a meaningful, clear indexing of all the books that are present in the Helikos already. This task is extremely difficult, though. Books can be delicate, preservation and duplication are difficult, and books that aren’t magically protected are often treated extremely poorly.
The Engineer’s Union: The Engineers’ job is making sure that the library is sortable, accessible, and clearly indexed. This is a job that works against two different needs, though, because there is a lot of unsorted text being brought into the library by Acquisition and kept there by Sleti. Rather than find the best place to put these books, they wound up put on the next immediate space, and this leaves the Engineers, under the head of their extremely longsuffering, ex-builder Cyan (no surname, don’t ask), struggling to address their daily threefold problem of ‘what do we have,’ ‘where is it,’ and ‘how do we get there.’ Because the ongoing need for space tends to lead to work from…
The Builder’s Union: Under the current leader of Eli Deener, the Builders Union are the workers who most know what they’re going to do in any given day: They need to make more space. There is always more room for shelves, more supports, more braces, more spaces, and whether or not what they’re used for is the best use, doesn’t change the fact the stuff needs doing.
These three unions are working constantly to keep the Helikos’ ongoing needs met, and they almost always are working at odds with one another, all without actually hating one another. It’s a strange thing too because given the work in the city, these people can just leave to do something else they’d rather do, which presents the interesting quandrary that the angry, shouting, difficult work of managing the immense eternally expanding library is something that everyone here wants to do.
The Frozen Harbour
Hecsenfore is a coastal city; it isn’t connected to the great southern seas that surround Dal Raeda directly — its harbour is a large inland sea on the northern edge of the continent, meaning that to the fastest sea route to other nearby states is north, then east, all half the Szudetken province to the city of Seibelmarsh and from there, around the body of the continent to the south to Kyranou. This is a journey roughly six times the length in distance than covering the same distance by land, and yet, Hecsenfore still trades with the Halfling Trade Houses to ensure the passage of Hulks to them, because nothing moves bulk like they do.
The Frozen Harbour is so named because even in the warmer months, Hecsenfore Harbour has to deal with drifting chunks of ice from the northern polar caps. Over time it has developed its own dock district, with warehouses and drydocks and ports for the building and maintaining of boats. But it wouldn’t be a Hecsenfore district without some truly weird Vampire Lord messing things up, and in Hecsenfore, it is the two Vampire Pirate Princes of Jamer and Ansius.
The idea that Vampires can’t cross running water is one of those many things that ties into Vampire Anxieties (as previously mentioned). The more correct way to describe it is that no Vampire is capable of leaving the space their mind tells them is where they should be, that there are places to be that are wrong and they will resist them with all their inhuman might. Such is Ansius and Jamer’s plight; two pirates who became quite accomplished in their own times and beholden to their own homelands’ rules, they became Vampires and as a result have a hard time ever being off their boat, and never can handle being on land. Since they started out as dreadful rivals, then obsessive rivals, then deadly rivals, then obviously, boyfriends, this contention means that in the Frozen Harbour there are two of the most well-equipped pirate vessels in the world that mostly scud around sailing for the joy of it, engaging each other in skirmishes, and only occasionally kidnapping one another’s captain for a few nights of extremely raunchy romance.
The paperback novels you can buy about them do not really describe these two pirates properly, since Ansius has been compared by those who meet him to a depressed shaved teddy bear, and Jamer’s official portrait in the warehouse district was criticised for resembling a frog that chooses to be the class dobber.
But they care about boats and they care about shipping and they care about transport and they care about the ongoing rivalry – acquiring things and transporting them to one another to show off how good or clever they are, a neverending game of pointless one-upmanship that also happens to result in a lot of treasure and trade routes being discovered or recontextualised. They also do a lot to keep actual piracy down, with a privateer fleet of Hecsenfore vessels shepherding and protecting Halfling tradeships all the way around the Szudetken.
Ansius’ The Roaster: Ansius’ boat is an absolute triumph of spooky, winter-themed undead sailing ship. A tall ship with high sails and a crew of all sorts of nonliving type, it lumbers through the waves with a relentless, inexorable certainty that whatever it is going to do, whatever it’s on its way to fight, it will win and it will do so without grace or wit. The Roaster is a broad and heavy ship and its organisation leaves much to be desired – but when half the crew don’t need to eat, and the captain’s relentless attention to detail means he can tell where every object on the vessel is, down to every individual screw and nail unless he’s drunk enough to forget about it, the lack of organisation seems more of a byproduct.
There is a sloppy might to the Roaster and its people. Operators for the Roaster are less ‘flamboyant’ and more ‘demanding’ – not the bellowing roar of a northern waste raider, nor the cackling vibrancy of an equatorial pirate crew. Roaster agents tend towards being relentless and blunt in what they’re doing and what they want to do – which is usually, acquiring something delicate and ornate that must be transported with care. Think of them as sailors who are also repo men.
Jamer’s The Second: In all technicality, Jamer’s name is actually Jamesjames – the James that is more James, and hence, the title Jamer. This struggling with titling lasts through everything of Jamer’s career. A decidedly uncreative man, given to little mistruth even as a pirate, Jamer is a technician par excellence, with exquisite maps and carefully planned operations across his history. Those agents who serve his ship, literally titled The Second, as it is his second boat, are often on the lookout for things that Jamer thinks should appeal to Ansius.
Often, this is alcohol.
The Dockers: There’s a body of dock workers in the harbour. These are all trained to and in alliance with Halfling Trade Vessels though they are not nearly as large a population. Still, these are the transport experts who do things with their hands, though they are just as much going to be very aware of the weather. Once, a Halfling Trade Ship ignored the Dockers and got frozen in during the unload. That was a terrible day, financially.
If you’re wondering ‘are there Northumbrians‘, yeah there are Northumbrians.
The Locker Cannoneers: One of those very special Hecsenfore traits that could not be avoided is the organisation known as the Lockers Cannoneers. The Lockers work in a base at the bottom of the Frozen Harbour, with a supply of carefully transported floatation devices. This is staffed by some Merfolk and Hadalan, because a real concern that can happen when dealing with undead citizenry and falling into the Frozen Harbour is the potential for an individual to sink to the bottom and then be left with no useful idea of how to get out.
The Lockers provide a valuable service of finding Vampires on the bottom of the harbour and then getting them to hold tight to a barrel full of air, launching them skyward at the rate of buoyancy, which is both a valuable way to recover lost people who may be going very mentally unwell in the isolation, and extremely funny to watch when it happens, as a whole body gets jetted out of the water like a cork from a champagne bottle, adorned with seaweed and sometimes with months of lost time behind them.
Lockers are practical and methodical, typically tied to the deep ocean in some way, and are often brought with other vessels for treasure hunts since they can just walk around on the bottom of the ocean.
The Academies Immortal
Technically the largest medical research establishment on the continent, the Academies Immortal is sometimes conflated as the largest hospital in the world. It’s not – after all, a large part of its impressive estate is dedicated to multiple stables and veterinary hospitals and a towering tree that extends its branches into a miniature feywild. It is a large hospital, of course! But the irony is that most people who live in Hecsenfore never bother going to it. They tend to get medical care around the city in one of their own district’s local Lunaria – the term the city uses for free medical care stations that are also used for the paying of Blood Taxes.
Still, every District is the product of the special interest of a single weirdo in Hecsenfore, and the weirdo of notice in The Academies Immortal is Molandon Fidemar. Fidemar is a Vampire whose fascination is with the body as a medical entity, and who has collected thousands of dead bodies over the course of his life, for medical study. Coming to Hecsenfore and becoming for lack of a better term, a respectable gentleman led to him trying to find ways to legitimise and authorise the pre-existing interest he had in autopsy.
It is not, he insists, for sensual or depraved reasons.
Molandon is not a wizard nor a doctor, merely a dedicated and interested amateur fascinated by the way that bodies work and has dedicated lifetimes’ worth of time to studying them. The Academies Immortal has, as a direct result, become an actual medical academy that trains actual doctors in care for cases more complex than the Lunaria can manage. Also, because of self-analysis, most of what is known medically about Vampires and what can be determined as truth from fiction is known thanks to Molandon’s Academies Immortal.
The Convalescentry: The conventional hospital component of the Academies Immortal is still a full blown magical academy, which focuses on the intersection of life-giving divine magic and death-manipulating arcane magic. What this means is that it’s a college where you can have a buddy comedy of a sun paladin rooming with a skeleton focused necromancer and that they both have to make sure they don’t get in the way of one another’s experiments.
The Convalescentry is so named because one of the central ideas of the Academies Immortal is that everything has a neutral state to which it will return if you give it time. For the necromantic students, this ‘eventually all things are dead things,’ and for the healers, this is things like ‘eat healthy and be kind to one another.’
The Lodges Quadropea: The veterinary research wing of the Acadames as a direct result of needing ethically sourced cadavers for study maintains a number of small animal farms that let the researchers understand the animals at all parts of their lives. This is also one of the best stables in the world, with horses renowned for being unscareable and also understanding ideas like how to hold steady for a spellcaster riding it.
The Apothecary Trystum: While Molandon asserts clearly, repeatedly, that his research into bodies and their function is in no way ‘a sex thing’ the Apothecary Trystum is a somewhat-secret faction inside the Academies for whom the study is very much a sex thing. Headed up by one of Molandon’s personal research assistants, Reya, they are proud to assert that if your body and its relationship to itself is a current problem for your sex thing, they will offer drugs, pills and potions and even extensive transformations to make your body fit what you want. A number of the Trystum researchers and field operators are direct beneficiaries of this and often fantastically loyal.