Lion's Head

The capital city of the Lion's Regency, located to the west of the Warring Continent.

In ancient times it was known as the Crown and was sacred to Prajmatara, containing a massive garden home to the great Lion.

Description
The city curls around the port of Lion's Mouth, perched upon the high cliffs, protecting the point where the many rivers meet and flow out through the Mouth. Long ago Nerta set the great walls in a circle around this point, like a crown perched where the seas and the plains meet, a beacon upon the western shores of the continent. They are stained white with the sea salt, worn smooth by the howling of the wind and the shifting sands. A metropolis somehow both sprawling and constrained, Lion’s Head contains itself mostly within these ancient walls. There is the occasional village dotting the wide plains and farms, but the bulk of the city writhes and grows like a living thing trapped. The walls have crumbled in places and been patched haphazardly. These bulge outwards, entire homes and districts swelling from the sides. Some, even more daring and perhaps more desperate, have suspended their dwellings from the edges through elaborate pulley systems, ropes and ladders tying these neighborhoods together, their only access point an unbarred window some thirty stories up. Even on the tops of the walls life seems to have grown and spread; there are buildings here of rough sandstone, some accented with colorful glass, shining blindingly in the noonday sun. Inside the thick walls themselves are the living quarters of perhaps seventy five percent of the city. Warren-like, abandoned and rediscovered, with their interior walls rebuilt and knocked down as needs changed, the walls hold the seething underbelly of the city. Inside the circle the rivers have made their presence known, winding through ancient streets and aqueducts, turning one into the other as time passes. Here the wealthy keep their estates, shaded and protected from any sandstorms, cooled by the waters that flow around them. There are a few towers, primarily for defense, that dare to rise even beyond the ancient walls, their colorful heads visible from miles around poking up like flowers from the dirt. At the center of all this, hemmed on all sides by trickling streams, is nothing. Well, not nothing, but certainly nothing built by human hands. The sun shines through the circle of the walls for most of the day into a lush park, wide enough that it would take a day to cross, with a wild tangle of shrubbery and trees. There, at the heart of Lion’s Head, is the lion himself.