Down an alley from Alchemy Row, the air is thick with the burnt-oil stench of factory effluence dumped into Parity Lake, waters that even the governor’s druids can’t keep clean. But the view here is free of the looming walls of industrial warehouses, free of the crowds with their pageant of protesting dockers, proselytizing deists, and proper dandies who’ve come to experience some real culture among the common folk.

Here on the shore of this leather-brown lake, it’s possible to forget that the beachfront foreign intrigues are afoot in the extravagant embassies a mile to the north, that the fresh air of the Cloudwood and all its teeming fey are an afternoon’s walk east, and that the foremen repairing the royal airship dock west alongside Flint Bay pay well for a strong worker who isn’t afraid of heights.

But no one ever forgets Cauldron Hill.

Look south, and there the haunted mountain peak rises above the smoke of Flint’s industry, the one place in the city where the skyseers can clearly watch the heavens for warning. In living memory, the hill produced three disasters – called the three ravens by the prophet who foresaw them.

Black oil that shimmered with souls of the dead oozed down its rocky face. A steel titan burst forth from the mountain’s hunched spine and trampled half the city before the great King Aodhan banished him to the Dreaming. And then the stars themselves vanished for a year, and everything atop the hill – the stones, the trees, and the foolishly curious – were devoured into darkness.

The heavens eventually came back, only a bit jostled from the journey. The world had been saved, said the sages and scholars. People became more aware of what limited time they had, and yet how long the world would live and outlast them. For a time, even, the shared salvation inspired a few industrialists to sincere magnanimity. 

But that didn’t last, which explains the thickness of the throngs here at Alchemy Row: another protest, no doubt filled with provocateurs and spies, perhaps demanding justice against the Unseen Court, or calling for another war in the Yerasol Archipelago, or doomsaying about a fourth raven alighting atop Cauldron Hill.

It’s always a novel scene, the food is lush, and the music is commanding. But what really draws people out is the chance at revolution, to set the spirit of the age: the zeitgeist.