Jyrek

Jyrek is a city within the kingdom of Thaemor.

Background
Designed and commissioned by Kaldon to keep eleven sons and four daughters safe from any future wars so that his legacy might live on, Jyrek is as much a fortress as it is a city. Today, it houses around 30,000 people, but it was originally built to hold just sixteen. With its triple walls (one of redstone, one of limewood, and one of electrified synth), interconnected walkways between buildings, and guard towers at every corner of the city, Jyrek might be one of the best protected places in the Steadfast.

And that doesn't take into consideration the city's most unusual defensive mechanism: a floating, self-contained structure tethered in the center of Jyrek. This egg-shaped structure, called the Eyren, was also commissioned by Kaldon. He brought in as many numenera experts as he could find and had them design a structure that would support up to twenty people for two months, providing food, shelter, recycled air, and, once the tether were cut, an escape route from whatever war might might be raging on the ground. It took the experts more than ten years to build such a machine, and by the time it was finished, Kaldon's children were teenagers, disgruntled at being stuck inside a single city due to their father's paranoia. But in the end, he had his egg.

Jyrek turned out to be an expensive waste of time and money. Kaldon's heirs used the city as their personal playground, but it didn't protect them from anything. Although no wars were waged during their time there, another danger presented itself - the Eyren caught a virus from Kaldon's youngest daughter, Ampel. Believing this new thing to be an inherent part of human physiology, the Eyren duplicated the virus and spread it to the other children. Within six weeks, all of Kaldon's children were dead and his wife incapacitated. The Eyren was sealed off, and a law was made prohibiting anyone from entering the structure. The city gates were left open out of respect for the deceased. Although Kaldon ruled for nearly twenty more years before his death, he never returned to Jyrek.

Today, the city has all but forgotten its original roles as protector and murderer of Kaldon's dreams of the future. Although the Eyren sits tethered above the center of Jyrek, the residents barely notice it. It has become just another part of the history of which they live.