Essex, the City of light and sound
Essex is the first and largest stop on the Bravado Line - the iron wrought path of industry being blazed across the San Saba Territories by the newly formed Railroad Conglomerate. A city of light and sound and rare beauty, Essex is a metropolitan cousin to the boomtown, Bravado. Essex is built on the ruins of a city that came before it, and perhaps those ruins sit atop older ruins still that date back to before The Fall. A network of labyrinthian corridors run beneath the city, their nature yet unascertained.
The most recent iteration of this city was founded by one Augustine Amberdraught, distiller-prince and merchant-governor formerly of New Austen. Following a scandal in New Austen that revealed the Amberdraughts as nefarious drug dealers and gangsters the Amberdraught family picked up and moved east to partner with the RRC and Ms. Felicity Redfield. Essex was founded at the same time as Bravado - and it was the Amberdraughts who provided half the effort and capital to construct the Oxline between the RRC work camps and the young city of Essex. Amberdraught was deposed and sent to the depths of Prudence Penitentiary following his actions during the Fountainhead Incident, and the city is now led by his daughter and new governor, Missy Amberdraught.
Following the world-shaking happenings of the Fountainhead Incident several years ago now; Essex remains a hub city, but has otherwise been fundamentally changed. Larger than Bravado by a few thousand citizens and populated mostly with townies and tradesfolk, Essex was and is known for its party culture (a function, most likely, of their founder’s distillery located in the heart of the city) and for the heavy presence of Kings Courtiers and Hedonites that followed the Amberdraughts like loyal vassals from their late New Austen holdings. After a series of events that nearly destroyed the city, the population has swelled with tourists, traders, and merchants seeking new opportunities in the misty bows of the shadowed streets and allies.
The Railroad Conglomerate, and by proxy, the San Saba Board, heavily taxes the use of the railroad and the imports from Bravado allow Essex to grow fat off Bravado’s toil. Many RRC workers have families in Essex, considering it safer than the delving frontier. In the wake of the tumultuous year, both the Grave Council and the Tribes Disparate have reinforced their interests in the city, joining the RRC in their attempts to profit from the new conditions of the city.
The Fountainhead Incident
Less than a year ago, the city of Essex was rocked by what has become known colloquially as the Fountainhead Incident. A fifth morgue emerged in the center of the city, devastating the site of the Amberdraught mansion and prompting an arms race as the different factions of the region competed to control and understand the strange edifice that emerged. The structure was made of some poured material, not quite stone, not quite clay, but something ancient and new at the same time. Aided by a recently awakened Semper Mort nicknamed The Scientist, the city struggled to understand the purpose and meaning of the newest morgue - the Fountainhead.
After weathering a siege of zed and Bloodghasts, ferocious half-dead raiders birthed from hidden facilities, labs, and cryo-tubes beneath the city, the Grave Council claimed the right of stewardship over the morgue as part of their contract for all morgues of the region. Contested by the Governor, the Grave Council set about trying to understand what they had claimed and tried to understand the keening music that began from behind the steel door of the Atrium; the heart of the Fountainhead.
In the month that followed, something else was awakened, or perhaps created by the Fountainhead. Emerging in a scene of carnage and psionic music, a terrible Monster haunted and hunted through the streets of the City of Light and Sound. After being cornered and chased through the morgues of Essex back to the terminus of the Atrium within the Fountainhead, the collective might and will of the people beat back the darkness through the use of crystalline lattices infused with song and intent. The Fountainhead, miraculously, seemed to assist in this effort. Some called this an act of a tiny god, others happenstance, and others still, of some education and regard, insist the Fountainhead was guided by the will of the consciousnesses who made mythos out of it, in an act of self-fulfilling genesis.
There are many stories of what supposedly was born by the Fountainhead. The church of a tiny god, founded by terrified pilgrims, the sacrifice enacted by a zealot who cast herself into the Fountainhead to be reborn, fantastical journeys or hallucinations into some other place within the morgue, but none can deny that something went wrong. The morgue appeared to sing its first and frantic song with the notes the Survivors gifted it. In the first throes of harmony it killed the Monster that plagued the city of Essex and consumed it entirely before the melody became discordant. The Crystodyne Principle.
The purpose of the Fountainhead was corrupted by the Monster, thought destroyed, and perverted its ability to remake the city in a new and terrible image - a barren desert veined with black sludge with a sky choked with mold spores, a perfect ecosystem void of any survivor. Slowly but surely, strange zed-like simulacrums of the Fountainhead known as the Faceless invaded the city, attempting to replace the citizens and pour the strange clay over and through buildings and residents alike to terraform the center of Essex into something wrong.
The Fountainhead was stopped from its task at the last possible moment by the heroic actions of a few that succeeded in stopping the process, perhaps “killing” the tiny god. Instead of a vision of something dead and lifeless, the Fountainhead instead created new life within the heart of the city. The “death” of the tiny god created thousands upon thousands of trees, mushrooms, plants and flora throughout a vast green space in the heart of Essex. Some say the reinvigorated landscape was exactly what the Fountainhead was supposed to create. Every corner of the city is now filled with flourishing remains of the Fountainhead’s melody and the city has been forever changed. Galatea.
After the Fountainhead
The Fountainhead’s last act changed every aspect of the City of Light and Sound. At the heart of Essex towers a massive tree that can be seen for miles in every direction, and vibrant plantlife has overtaken the city in a strange harmony of buildings and nature. Surrounding the site of the Fountainhead and the former Governor’s Mansion is now a thick and tangled forest full of new life and strange new flora and fauna known generally as The Thicket. At night, the lights that gave the city its name have been joined by fireflies and bioluminescent fungi that, in the shadow of what was The Fountainhead, now glow as steadily as the unflickering electric lamps that predate them.
While the Railroad Conglomerate is still heavily invested in the Oxline, their focus has shifted to the floating city of Waking Prime instead as the new capital of the San Saba Territories. The Grave Council and the Tribes Disparate have focused their renewed efforts on Essex, with the Antler Queen declaring the tree that grew in the place of the Fountainhead a holy site for her faction, and her faith.
The Tribes Disparate have shifted much of their trade routes and established as permanent of a home as they are capable of within the city. Essex now serves as a pilgrimage for the faithful as they continue their nomadic travels across the Lone Star. Antler Queen Jaspar is still of poor health but renewed fierceness, as there is hope that some newly discovered plant life with the Thicket may be a cure for her sickness.
The Grave Council continues to be a dominant force in the city thanks to the presence of so many morgues and the beacon of their financial might, the Grave Bureau. Despite rumors of a schism within their ranks the leader of the faction, Takheeta Firstborn, is still an effective icon for the organization. The Council’s focus has withdrawn inward, but the Sanctioned Graverobbers and Tax Collectors still constantly travel to and from their headquarters in the Grave Quarter.
The daughter of the former Governor, Missy Amberdraught, now stands as the leader and new Governor of Essex, but she is young and unsure. Missy Amberdraught spends more time gambling in the Brass Rose than worrying about the influences of the three factions that have their sights on cultivating the new vibrant life within the city for their own profit and power.
