After breakfast, the team gathers at the palace entrance, looking out over the sprawl of the Dwarven capital below. From up here, the whole city unfurls like something poured from a forge rather than built brick by brick.
Terraced streets cut in concentric rings down the mountainside, each level threaded with copper piping that catches the morning sun in long, burnished streaks. Steam vents hiss lazily from a hundred rooftops, curling up to join the thin haze already hanging over the district, and somewhere far below, the low, rhythmic thrum of the great forges pulses up through the stone itself, a heartbeat the whole city seems to move to.
Vuvi points off toward a building near the district's edge, brass piping wrapped around it like veins, strange rooftop contraptions spinning lazily in the wind, and a single narrow tower jutting up from its center, taller than anything else nearby.
