Valkyrie: Building Notes for the Everburning City

The Beginnings of a Map

So, when I first imagined the Everburning City, it was supposed to be a single city of some nebulous, unspecific number of people surrounded by a world killing mist of some kind. It also had a lot of fire, because fire looks really cool.

But a lot of what made the Everburning City solidify in my head was having to try and make decisions work. For instance, shortly after I started writing The Dragon Chase, I needed to decide how many people lived in the City.

So I just threw out a big number and said forty million people.

Very quickly, this lead me into some problems.

For instance, how are all of these people getting food?

Farming, obviously. Forty million people can't live on moss and underground mushrooms, and only unicorns can subsist on sparkles and sunshine, so farming sounds like the appropriate answer. Which meant the City needed to be a bit bigger to accommodate some farmland.

The next question was, how much farmland?

So I did some Googling, and currently we use 0.848 acres of farmland per person to feed everyone. So I borrowed that number wholesale for the Everburning City. Which meant the entire Everburning City as of the Dragon Chase sits on that many acres of land per person.

(0.848 acres / person) (40,000,000 people) = 33,920,000 acres of land
/ 640 acres per square mile = 53,000 square miles.

53,000 square miles. It took me a while to realize that's bigger than Greece.

If the City is a square, it means the whole thing is 230 miles across.

Which left me with some appalling dimensions. It means the Everburning City has a rough radius of 115 miles. The Last Wall alone, the outermost fortifications, is over nine hundred miles long. Don't I need to add in some mountains or hills? Asides from one very big river, I hadn't planned on there being a lot of other bits of natural geography.

Now, there are no mountains in the Everburning City. The City ate those mountains to make the walls.

Seriously.

Nine hundred miles of wall. The Walls are 100 feet high and forty feet thick. Sloped on the inside to reinforce against direct kinetic force, so sixty feet thick on the bottom, sloping up to forty feet. Averaging fifty feet thick. So every foot of wall length has five hundred cubic feet of stone.

2.64 million cubic feet of stone per mile of wall. Nine hundred miles of wall, and we have about 2.37 billion cubic feet of stone. Just for the Last Wall.

Another quick bit of Googling and I found out the Great Wall of China is about 34.5 billion cubic feet. So I realized that these absurd scales do actually make sense.

What follows is a map of all the land The Everburning City occupies.

There's a little demarcation near the bottom that shows a five mile length.

The small grey lines are the layers of walls, the thick blue line is the river, and the middle is the urban heart of the City, or what everyone in the City actually thinks of when they call it The City.

I'll round it out better in the near future.

Now, the next part was trying to get a map of the urbanized part, because that's where all the fun happens.

This is what I have so far, with a layout of the City's sixty-one districts. There are actually sixty-three, but Lower Central is beneath High Central, and the Undercity isn't on the map for obvious reasons.

From here, I intend to get a general layout of how the basic structure of the City flows, and work at it from there. It will only be moderately detailed, because if you look at my notes on the left side, the Agora is that bigger round dot. And the Agora is over 800 feet long.

A single district has the rough population of six or seven hundred thousand people, not all are equal. Roughly forty million people, in three hundred and sixty square miles. (For reference, New York is about 302 square miles)

If I manage to turn this into a reasonably detailed map, my next step will be to do up a map of a few specific districts, probably High Central first, just to show how the City is actually laid out.

Anyway, that's where I'm at so far. I'll keep at it.