Yumenes

Yumenes is a city, more or less the capital of the Empire. It is described as the oldest, largest and most magnificent city in the world. It used to be the heart of an empire, and it has existed for twenty-seven centuries.

Architecture
"The city's walls are a masterwork of delicate mosaics and embossing detailing its people's long and brutal history. The clumping masses of its buildings are punctuated by great high towers like fingers of stone, hand-wrought lanterns powered by the moder marvel of hydroelectricity, delicately arching bridges woven of glass and audacity, and architectural structures called  balconies  that are so simple, yet so breathtakingly foolish, that no one has ever built them before in written history. (But much of history is unwritten. Remember this.) The streets are paved not with easy-to-replace cobbles, but with a smooth, unbroken, and miraculous substance the locals have dubbed  asphalt . Even the shanties of Yumenes are daring, because they’re just thin-walled shacks that would blow over in a bad windstorm, let alone a shake. Yet they stand, as they have stood, for generations."

Places

 * The Fulcrum
 * The Black Star