Urban Planning Case Study: The Haeverian Fountain Incident

This incident report is set on the continent of Gelid, one year after the events of Mage Errant. It is an excerpt from a text on magical urban design, intended for advanced students from the subject.

The Haeverian Fountain Incident is little known outside its immediate surroundings, but is an illustrative case study for those seeking to participate in the design and management of cities in regions of moderate to high aether density. Cities with low aether density do not share their concerns for maximum ward and enchantment density, of course, with insufficient mana to reach those levels, but the causes of the Haeverian Fountain Incident are fundamentally human, not magical, in origin. No matter how well-considered urban designs are, they can and will be stress-tested by their residents in ways never considered by the designers.

Historical Background: Haeveria is a small, little-known city in north-central Gelid. It’s one of the Free Cities, a loose alliance of city-states that fiercely defend their independence from two powerful neighbors. This can be a source of significant confusion, because there are at least two other polities on Anastis known as the Free Cities, one of which is on Gelid as well. That one is arguably poorly named, considering its status as a brutal, isolationist autocracy.

These particular Free Cities are bordered on one side by the Moonrise Chorus, one of the mightiest and most martial of the sphinx Choruses on Gelid; and on the other by the Spiral Synods, one of the strangest governments on Anastis, where all issues and crises are addressed by temporary assemblies of experts called synods that are disbanded at conclusion— or, for longer-term issues, have complex appointment term limits that ensure constantly shifting membership of individual synods.

Counter-intuitively, the Spiral Synods are usually the more aggressive neighbor, but complex geopolitical factors have kept the Free Cities independent for nearly seventy-five years, with sporadic incursions and a few temporary conquests of member cities. (Those conquests usually by sponsored independent great powers or Synod exiles, not directly by either major state.) The biggest factor of course, is that both larger states view the Free Cities as a buffer zone, and would take a major incursion into that buffer zone is a threat, and neither can currently afford to worry about the other— both have plenty of other significant threats to worry about. The low, arid mountain range the Free Cities occupy also makes invasion a mildly aggravating prospect.

That said, the Free Cities’ independence is also thanks to their own impressive defenses. Though they are an alliance, not a nation, they share a common military and defensive philosophy that emphasizes fixed magical defenses and cultivation of archmages over training and maintaining great powers— to the point where several of the Free Cities ban great powers from their territory entirely. Haeveria, though one of the smaller Free Cities, is also one of the wealthiest and best defended, and lies close to the border of the Spiral Synod.

Geophysical and Urban Overview: Haeveria is located in one of the ruggedest regions of the mountain range the Free Cities occupy— which, admittedly, is only impressive by its own standard, the Svuer Mountains are an ancient, heavily weathered volcanic range with few peaks that even approach the tree line.

Haeveria itself is built into the slopes of one of the most unusual geophysical features in the Svuer Mountains— an ancient volcano that collapsed downward into its own magma chambers, leaving an incredibly deep caldera that has filled with water over millennia. Haeveria’s resulting water wealth drastically alters its economic positioning and incentives compared to most other Free Cities— and also vastly changes its planning needs.

The internal and external slopes of the ancient volcano and its caldera have been completely terraced. The majority of Haeveria’s residents dwell on the inside slope, on the high-density urban terraces there. The outside terraces of the caldera are taken up by low density housing and agriculture. Water is pumped up from the lake by a series of magical and mundane means— with, surprisingly, the mundane means taking the fore. The Svuer Mountains are one of the windiest locales on Gelid, if not all of Anastis, and the Haeverians have built massive, lightweight windmills  to take advantage of it. The windmills pump most of the water needs to the top of the caldera rim, where it is stored in massive reservoir tanks, then descends through elaborate pipe and aqueduct systems when needed. Wastewater from the inner urban terraces are pumped through channels in the caldera wall to lower agricultural terraces, to prevent any contamination of the lake-water. Thanks to that and other measures, the lake water is unusually compared to most urban water supplies. 

Waste-water pumped into the outer terraces isn’t lost to the city, by any means— instead, it slowly seeps down into the bedrock and the aquifers below the mountain, the process purifying the water as effectively as any water mage. Over the last few generations, the city’s stone mages have carefully manipulated the porosity of the bedrock below the city so that the water percolates only down into the acquifer, not back into the caldera lake, to prevent insufficiently filtered water from entering the city supply.

Haeveria is often known as the City of Fountains— the powerful water pressure from its reservoirs allow for impressive decorative displays, often without any magical assistance whatsoever. So long as the fountains feed back into Haeveria’s water systems, the city is usually free with permits for their construction.

Thanks to the relatively low magical demands of the city’s infrastructure, Haeveria has been able to instead sink most of its magical capacity into its defenses.

A Note on Magical Budgets: When the average layman hears discussion of budgets, their first thought is liable to be monetary budgets. It’s not a foolish thought, for we cannot ignore such mundane concerns. However, we have several other forms of (largely magical) budgets to concern ourselves with.

The first such budget is aether density. City-scale enchantments are notoriously mana hungry, and the aether density of a region is the ultimate limit to how many enchantments, wards, and other magical functions can fit. While specific measurement can get complex, the base principle is quite simple and obvious. You can’t operate magics you lack the mana for.

The second such budget is resonance risk. Too many different enchantments in close proximity can potentially cause an explosive failure known as a resonance cascade. These failures, when it comes to city-scale enchantments, have been known to level buildings, neighborhoods, and in a few thankfully rare circumstances, even an entire city.

The third magical budget of concern is ward capacity. Like enchantments, there is an upper limit to how many wards can be fit into an area before they begin interfering with one another. Thankfully, the effects of failure are usually somewhat less destructive than resonance cascades, but simply because a house fire is less destructive than a forest fire does not make it appealing.

There are also other, intersecting mundane “budgets” for a project, such as geographic space and public goodwill, but those are beyond the scope of this work.

Haeveria’s Defenses: With the bulk of Haeveria’s infrastructure handled via mundane means, the city had far larger magical budgets than usual to handle their designs— and yet they still took their defenses to arguably dangerous levels, testing the limits of both resonance risk and ward capacity. The sheer diversity and redundancy of both were impressive even by the standards of the rest of the Free Cities.

Haeveria also possessed a significant number of archmages for a city its size, as well as several impressive mage corps— most especially its wind and lightning mage corps. The wind mages usually harnessed the powerful Svuer winds to craft a respectable wind shield around the city, while the lightning mages went on the offensive.

Incident Background: Most Synod raids into Free City territory occur immediately following the completion of a major Synod’s duties, or the reformation of an old Synod judged to be stagnant by its peer Synods. This process often results in exiled archmages or minor great powers— usually, though not always, a temporary self-exile to rebuild political status. (The politics of the Spiral Synod are absurdly complex, to the point of self-parody at times.)

The self-exile in question, that of Stephis Sten, was the result of an environmental crisis Synod dissolving. The ten year Synod had been formed in response to a major alchemical reagent leak into a middling-importance watershed, and dissolved when the affected lakes, rivers, and wetlands had been cleaned to the satisfaction of the residents and the observers of other Synods. Stephis Sten had been a subcommittee head of waste disposal— one of three such subcommittees in said Synod— whose plans had largely been rejected over the course of her three year tenure.

At the dissolution of the crisis Synod, Stephis Sten fled in exile into the Free Cities, intending to seize and rule over one of the city-states for the duration of her exile, in time-honored Synod fashion.

Of course, she also assassinated several of her rivals before fleeing, in equally time-honored fashion. Not hard to do, for a keratin and fiber mage— Stephis didn’t even need to use her infamous primary weapon.

The following is a non-exhaustive timeline of the Haeverian Fountain Incident. Certain events have been excluded for the sake of conciseness, these include quite a few specific details of the battle that have little to do with urban planning concerns.

Seven months prior to the incident: Casta Gold-Skin, a prominent metals merchant with the well-noted habit of coating her skin in gold-dust (though there is disagreement about whether this was for advertising or bragging purposes), applies to install a new enchanted fountain in front of her outer slope villa. The proposed fountain design would be several times larger than the average home on Haeveria’s inner slope, contain light enchantments to color the waters in a number of garish patterns at night; gravity and water enchantments to loop and weave the fountain streams into artistic patterns in the air, even to play music for observers.

Six months, three weeks prior to the incident: Casta’s building application rejected, due to being a frivolous waste of the city’s enchantment budget. 

Six months, two weeks prior to the incident: Casta’s agents resubmit her fountain design. Though the new proposal is no smaller, it claims to significantly reduce resonance risk compared to the last blueprint, relying more on mundane water pressure from Haeveria’s caldera rim reservoirs. 

Six months, one week, four days prior to the incident: Second design rejected by the application committee.

Six months, one week prior to the incident: The crisis Synod for the Dragonfall River Watershed cleanup project releases a preliminary report indicating that contamination levels are lower than even the most optimistic projections.

Six months prior to the incident: Casta Gold-Skin submits her fountain plans for the third and final time, containing the most significant changes yet. 

Five months, three weeks, three days prior to the incident: The proposed changes to the fountain were deemed barely acceptable by the planning committee, and Casta was forced to pay significantly higher-than-usual fees— though those fees were well in line with the standard scale outlined in Haeveria’s bylaws. (Though they fiercely resisted domination by the Spiral Synod, the Free Cities did share their propensity towards elaborate bureaucracy and rules.)

Five months, three weeks, two days prior to the incident: Construction on the fountain begins— using not the revised plans, but the original plans. Whether Casta hoped the swap would go unnoticed or intended to bribe inspectors from the start remains unknown.

Five months, one week, one day prior to the incident: The first known bribing of an inspector occurs. The inspector in question was also named Casta. (No known surname, was frequently referred to as Casta Windmill-Born, due to literally being born in a windmill when her mother was trapped there by a storm, the stress sending her into premature labor.) Inspector Casta’s encrypted journal details her plans to hide the money through remarkably creative accounting, then to “discover” Casta Gold-skin’s fraud later on. It might have worked, save for later circumstances.

Five months before the incident: Follow-up inspections reveal that save for a small number of problem areas, the cleanup of the alchemical spill in the Dragonfall River Watershed has indeed been far more successful than expected. The leaders of the watershed crisis Synod introduce a measure to begin the long dissolution process for their Synod— colloquially known as ‘unspooling’ in Spiral Synod territory. It is one of the peculiar quirks of the Synod system that leaders are actively incentivized to end their Synods and let go of power— doing so allows them opportunities to manage even greater Synods in the future. Many lower members of the watershed crisis Synod whose contributions had been minimal, including Stephis Sten, oppose the dissolution.

Four months, three weeks before the incident: The opposition within the watershed crisis Synod introduce new evidence of contamination, alchemical reagents of middling toxicity that have sunk down into the mud of several riverbeds in the watershed— though not into the riverbed of the swift-flowing Dragonfall River itself. The affected rivers are all small, slow-moving tributaries. (This is a fairly well-understood phenomena by water mages— the faster water flows, the greater its carrying capacity for sediment of all sort. Slower moving water allows the sediment to settle out of the current into the channel bed.)

Four months, two weeks, three days before the incident: A minor accident in construction of Casta Gold-Skin’s fountain results in a worker losing a toe, which is reattached safely by healers. This could have been an opportunity for Haeveria’s bureaucracy to use its discretion to examine the fountain’s construction process more closely, but the overworked city bureaucrats chose to use their discretion not to— aided by the generosity of Casta Gold-Skin in paying for the necessary healers.

Four months, two weeks before the incident: A partial (mostly nonviolent) overthrow of watershed crisis Synod leadership occurs, followed by a withdrawal of the dissolution resolution. The members of the opposition raised to leadership positions did not, however, include Stephis Sten. This was an unquestionably foolish move by the opposition leaders, as Sten was unquestionably the most powerful member of the crisis Synod— but petty politics often cause their participants to overlook such important matters.

Three months, three weeks, four days before the incident: Construction on Casta Gold-Skin’s fountain is completed.

Three months, one week before the incident: Casta Windmill-Born dies in a tragic accident during her inspection duties. After the incident, there were numerous suspicions that Casta Gold-Skin had orchestrated the accident, but so far as investigators were able to determine, the accident was purely a result of shoddy code compliance on the part of the builders at the relevant construction site, which had no relation to Casta Gold-Skin. Due to Casta Windmill-Born’s death, Casta Gold-Skin’s malfeasance goes undiscovered.

Two months, three weeks before the incident: The final silt-cleanup by the watershed crisis Synod approaches completion.

Two months, one week before the incident: Irregularities in the mana flows of Haeveria’s defensive enchantments are detected. They are within standard variances, however, so no formal investigation is launched.

Two months, two days before the incident: The irregularities in the defensive enchantments persist, leading a lone clerk and enchanter, Ulnoma Grey, to launch his own private investigation in his free time. This is not the first such project Ulnoma has undertaken— he is, at this time, notorious as a quiet loner who lives for his work.

One month, three weeks, one day before the incident: The final inspections by the watershed crisis Synod reach completion, and the Synod officially enters its unspooling phase. Stephis Sten begins political maneuvers in an attempt to end her tenure in said Synod in as good a position as possible.

One month, three weeks to two weeks before the incident: Both Ulnoma’s inspection and Stephis Sten’s political maneuvers proceed without result. Ulnoma is not dissuaded, having spent months or even years on such investigations. Stephis Sten’s plans, on the other hand, are thoroughly foiled by her rivals in the Synod to their own benefit.

One week, four days before the incident: Stephis Sten murders three of her political rivals. None are mages of note, and one is mindblind— yet all had amassed considerably greater power than Sten in the watershed crisis Synod. While warrants for Sten’s arrest are put out, they are not pursued with significant fervor, and she is allowed to flee into Free City territory. If she successfully seizes enough loot or territory from the Free Cities, her crimes will be quietly forgotten, as is traditional in the Spiral Synods. (Raids by self-exiled great powers and archmages don’t solely go into the Free Cities, but also against the other neighbors of the Spiral Synods. It is unknown why Stephis Sten targeted the Free Cities, or Haeveria in specific.

Five days before the incident: Ulnoma successfully narrows down the source of the mana flow irregularity to a specific neighborhood of Haeveria’s outer slope, within two terraces of elevation.

Four days before the incident: Ulnoma files for permission to perform an in-person inspection. This is almost always granted, and Ulnoma has never been turned down, but he still turns to alternate methods of research, searching through building permits and blueprints on file.

Three days before the incident: Ulnoma narrows the irregularity down to five potential sources. Casta Gold-Skin’s fountain is the second highest on the list. Ulnoma’s permit is granted in the late afternoon, and he immediately sets out to inspect the sites. He gets to the fountain around dusk, and within an hour, has confirmed that it is the source of the mana flow irregularities. Most of that hour is spent arguing with Casta Gold-Skin’s employees about his right to be there.

Two days before the incident: Ulnoma files an emergency shutdown injunction for the fountain. This should have been carried out immediately, but Casta Gold-Skin’s political contacts interfere with the normal process through a mix of bribes and angry lawyers. Under normal circumstances, this would be the end of Ulnoma’s involvement in one of his investigations, aside from later testimony if needed.

One day before the incident: Haeveria’s bureaucracy begins sinking its teeth into itself, as normal routines and procedures begin eroding Casta Gold-Skin’s interference and corruption. 

Four hours before the incident: Seers in the neighboring Free City of Illam sight Stephis Sten’s Skinhawk armor flying through their territory. Their windtalkers quickly report the sighting to other nearby cities. Stephis Sten’s timeline between her self-exile and her assault on Haeveria remain unknown.

Three hours before the incident: Haeveria begins mobilizing its forces and activating its defenses. Normal civic functions are put on hold as the city enters emergency footing. Evacuation of the outer slopes begins, to the irritation of the residents— it had been years since enemy spells penetrated the outer defenses.

Two hours before the incident: Ulnoma, attending to his usual pre-battle enchantment monitoring duties deep within the tunnels in the caldera walls, realizes that the mana flow irregularity is still present. Up until this point, he had assumed that the city would have shut down the fountain immediately.

One hour, fifty-one minutes before the incident: Ulnoma abandons his post— though not before carefully marking his time of departure in the duty roster— and begins moving towards the outside of the city.

One hour, ten minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten’s Skinhawk armor enters Haeverian airspace, and Haeverian seers begin monitoring her progress directly.

Fifty minutes before the incident: Ulnoma reaches Casta Gold-Skin’s neighborhood, where he is confronted by Haeverian soldiers, there nominally to ensure the evacuation was fully carried out. (Public and departmental criticisms of the policy paint it as a risk of lives and a waste of civic resources to guard the property of the wealthy from petty thieves.) Ulnoma begins reasoning with the guards.

Thirty minutes before the incident: Ulnoma successfully convinces the guards that there is a real risk, and that he lacks larcenous intent.

Twenty-three minutes before the incident: Ulnoma and his guard escorts reach the fountain, and Ulnoma begins emergency dismantlement of the fountain’s enchantments. 

Sixteen minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten makes her first attack run against Haeveria’s defenses. Her winged armor, the Skinhawk, is one of the more disturbing weapons wielded by a great power— it is formed entirely of skin, hair, finger- and toe-nails, and other keratin harvested from her own body, and is nearly the size of a fully grown dragon. While it carries an impressive arsenal of glyphs and defensive wards, its primary weapons are keratin blade projectiles and several hundred foot-long whips or tentacles woven of hair. No significant damage is done to either Haeveria nor the Skinhawk during the first exchange of spells.

Fourteen minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten makes her second attack run against the city. She loops three times around the outside of the protective dome the various defensive magics form around Haeveria, exchanging destructive spells at high frequency with the city’s defenders. Ulnoma’s dismantlement efforts continue at a swift pace.

Eleven minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten’s third attack run against the city begins. Rather than strafing around the city while bombarding its defenses, this time Sten crashes the Skinhawk directly into the defensive dome over the mountain. While protective integrity holds, it isn’t by much— leading to half of the guardsmen escorting Ulnoma to fleeing.

Eight minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten’s fourth attack run against the city begins. This one is near identical to the third, save for her attempt to infiltrate the city’s defenses with one of her hair-whips, which briefly penetrates into the actual dome before being forced out. 

Seven minutes before the incident: Ulnoma switches tactics, and recruits the remaining guardsmen into a plan of percussive dismantlement of the fountain with hammers and chisels. This is a high-risk plan— destruction of enchantments can often have explosive results, but Ulnoma believed it to have been worth the risk.

Five minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten makes her fifth attack run, returning to her prior tactics of bombarding the city while circling. It is believed that she was repairing damage to the Skinhawk during this time. 

Two minutes before the incident: Stephis Sten makes her sixth attack run, utilizing her most lethal weapon, the Dragonbreath Shield. The Dragonbreath Shield is one of those rare enchantments capable of making an individual into a great power by itself. (Like most such enchanted items, however, it usually ends up in the hands of another great power.) It possesses only two functions— one shields its wielder from fire and heat, and the other unleashes one of the most powerful fire magic spells known on Gelid. This is a firm indicator that Sten failed to do sufficient research before her attack on Haeveria. Witness accounts claim that nearly a quarter of the Haeverian protective dome was enveloped by fire. On seeing this, Ulnoma orders the remaining guardsmen to flee to safety, but continues his dismantlement efforts on his own.

One minute before the incident: One of Haeveria’s secondary defensive enchantments activates, and begins draining the excess heat from Stephis Sten’s ongoing attack. The heat is magically conducted into a series of pipes running through the caldera walls— pipes whose only inlets and outlets are in the depths of the caldera lake. This temperature differential immediately starts up a current of water flowing through the pipes, using the lake as a colossal heatsink. This defensive strategem renders Haeveria nearly immune to fire and heat based assault— By best estimate, it would take a half-dozen fire mage great powers, or a truly absurd number of dragons, to overwhelm the system’s heat-transfer capacity. Overcoming the caldera lake’s total capacity as a heat sink seems nearly impossible, save in the most extreme hypothetical circumstances. And as an added bonus, the system helps cool the city during the heat of summer. Unfortunately, many of the heat pump enchantments lie directly on the same mana conduits as Casta Gold-Skin’s enchanted fountain.

Thirty seconds before the incident: The mana interference from Casta Gold-Skin’s fountain, too low to cause issues during normal function of the city’s enchantments, destabilizes the heat-transfer enchantments during heavy use. Ulnoma would have received no warning as this occurred— his copper and dust affinity senses would not have been of any use for this, and his enchanter’s tools were lying a short distance away from him as he attempted to dismantle the fountain.

Incident summary: The enchanted fountain built by Casta Gold-Skin, as well as Ulnoma himself, were completely annihilated in a blast of superheated water from below. Several of the fleeing guards died in the blast, while the remainder suffered severe burns. Within seconds of the blast, more of the heat-transfer pipes connected to the same enchantment spellforms began to rupture, leading to explosions all across the outer slope, with minimal casualties. Unfortunately, the effects kept spreading throughout the city’s enchantments, leading to ruptures of seventeen additional heat transfer pipes both inside the caldera and in the tunnels of the caldera wall. Three hundred and eleven people died in under two minutes, mostly of steam scalding, and a few struck by debris and shrapnel. Another fourteen people would die within the next ten minutes of drowning. Over the next few days, more victims would die, largely of the consequences of their burns, leaving a final death toll of three hundred and ninety-four. More than thirteen-hundred citizens of Haeveria would suffer severe burn scars and other long term health consequences in the year to come. A relatively moderate death toll from a great power attack, but far worse than Haeveria had seen in generations. Thankfully, the rest of the heat-transfer system stayed intact, allowing the rest of the city to ride out the Dragonbreath Shield’s assault safely.

Incident Analysis: The aftermath of the battle is of considerable public interest— Stephis Sten giving up after another ten minutes of failing to penetrate the defenses, her following rampage throughout lesser Free Cities, and her political fate in the Spiral Synods on the one hand; and the recovery in Haeveria, the investigation into what had gone wrong, and the trials and gruesome executions of Casta Gold-Skin and her collaborators on the other.

We, however, have a much more focused interest, one firmly rooted in the lessons the Haeverian Fountain Incident offers us in the realm of urban design. While there are some immediate, pragmatic lessons to be explored— those about the risks of pushing so close to the limits on magical budgets, for instance— the more important lessons have to do with the unavoidable conflicts between magical design and good civic governance. 

No matter how elegant your designs, they must still make compromises with the messy politics of the real world. As much as we would like to…

(Student graffiti, scrawled angrily over the remaining text: Or just crack down on some of those rich assholes, maybe? Make an example of a few of them, they wouldn’t get away with this shit. Because it absolutely wasn’t just Casta Gold-Skin cheating on her share of Haeveria’s magical budget, I can promise you that. Her fountain wouldn’t have caused such a severe issue if the tolerances hadn’t already been strained. The Haeverian Council didn’t want justice, just a scapegoat— if some of them weren’t violating building regulations themselves, I’ll eat this stupid book.)

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(This short story was inspired by the Goiânia Accident's wikipedia page, linked to me by a friend of mine. For a nonfiction encyclopedic description of events, that article is absolutely riveting reading, especially the timeline- and it features one of the most horrifying sandwiches in human history. Anyhow, while I have fun with experimental short story structures like this, gonna head back to more traditional story structures next month! ....Probably.)

(No, YOU'RE considering writing a full-size history text for a fictional nation on a fantasy world.)