The Inner City
1. It is hard, in the architectural chaos that characterises it, to tell which is the true inner city in Adamantia: the oldest citizens say it is just where its personality is stronger. Because Adamantia is like a person, like a rich, debauched lady, with its whims and its vices, bountiful with its favourites and merciless with those that defy her. The will of the city manifests itself through bizarre coincidences, and engenders bizarre superstitions.		2. Adamantia seems fond of towers, and everyone considers falling one of them bad luck. And every emperor that has ever tried to eliminate the horrendous Maze has soon encountered an ill fate: the city won't lose her dreams. The nobles dismiss this, officially, as fairy tales in the central Hilmi quarter. It is girt by a thick wall, defended by sentinels all day and all night, laden with high towers and temples, and it spreads around the huge Imperial Palace, a city within the city.
3. But nothing is second in magnificence to the merchants' quarter, around the gate of the Western Imperial Way. Here the Arvarian love of arts, through the centuries, has made it so that no nook or rooftop is left without sculptures, mosaics, frescos, bass-relieves. Troubadours are heard and dancers are seen at all times through the windows of the palaces.
4.In the northern part of the city, in a small and noisy enclave, live, and continually brawl, the many Clenians of Adamantia, in their unplastered houses. They are the first to kindle their fires in the morning, the first to lock their doors at night. Most of them are soldiers or fishermen. Here the alleys are narrow, but the squares ample and always crowded with people discussing, fighting or betting over fights. Practically no good is traded here aside from ale, food and weapons. Strangers are met cordially, and respected if they show ability in combat. No place is so unike the rest of the city, with its mysteries, dark roads, whispers and riddles.

	5.Towards the port, immense slums extend, with dark houses as crowded as beehives, supporting each other with fly-overs and partly dug underground. The closer one is to the river, the deeper he seems to sink in a sea of crumbling palaces, among which the sky is harldly ever seen as a distant blue ribbon. The ground slowly but relentlessly slopes down, and one is in the Maze before he realises it.
6. at the very end of the city is the old Arena, now abandoned in favour of naumachies. The poorest people live in its dangerously crumbling walls and in the cages that once hosted ferocious beasts and criminals condemned to be a public amusement. The place is reputed to be haunted and unhealthy, and every proper citizen of Adamantia will avoid it if he can; it adds to the sinister reputation of the place the fact that one side of the building, where the emperor's seat was, has crumbled in two places, making it look like a gigantic skull grinning with teeth made of colums. Fortune tellers and talisman peddlers abound in the old walls, making a trade of the foolish superstition. But is it?