Anchorage Bay remains as it were established centuries prior in the earliest days of our Migration, first ports of Mevhettar and womb of continental civilisation, jewels strung along a bountiful crescent coast.
The bay itself is a vast sheltered crescent around the Heart River's maw, near fully enclosed by two headlands meeting at a narrow mouth on the western extreme. Beacon Hill crests on the southern peninsula, a great lighthouse built where wrecks once burned to light the way of their fellows. Sweeping out from the cliffs and fjords that make the Breaker's Coast, gentle sheltered slopes rise to inhospitable crests keeping storms from the heartland cities.
Within the bay lie several islands of scattered settlement, estates and vineyards, but of little note to the traveller without specific business or experience in such rarefied cultivars. The coasts hold Anchorage Bay's four great cities of the Assembly and their satellite townships, those of note to be described in similar guides to this one for the cities of their charter.
As the first city of Mevhettar, and the most populous, Old Anchorage fittingly lies upon the western bank of the Heart River. Our gateway to and from the Sweetseas, across fully half of Mevhettar and under hundreds of sails. Fittingly, to the east Farbank stands proud, tall gates and towers crowning the twin bridges across the Heart. A symbol of famously stubborn refusal to unify, the two cities having warred on this matter both before and after the construction of each grand bridge.
Similarly founded in opposition to Old Anchorage, the sprawling cityscape of East Anchorage crowns long wharfs at the Bay's deepest point, nestled beneath a steep rise into the highlands. First republic of the Continent and model to many more, the city has feuded with its namesake near as often as Farbank, but in our current days is one of the liveliest markets to make a name for one's self. Finally, at the southern pinnacle of the bay and as the first sight from sea shines Beacon Hill, narrow terraces stacked upon the leeward. With sheltered docks for the deep-sea ships not seeking to navigate the Bay itself, Beacon Hill thrives where otherwise might only be the lighthouse itself, taller twin to the village of Beacon Flats below.
Old Anchorage - Home to near a million souls and a continent's wealth, Old Anchorage was once first port to fully half our ancestors, and remains first port of Mevhettar in grandeur and scale. Wide avenues, vast markets, and tall homes of the many who call her home, architecture and infrastructure without equal set the city above any lost to ice. Resplendent and teeming, Old Anchorage goes so far as to fund the import of grain by taxation and thus the common breads are found cheaper than anywhere else, feeding culinary innovation in its many uses.
Farbank - Once merely a village on the Heart's far eastern bank from Old Anchorage, namesake purely in location, the necessity of more docks for Migration ships made for a rapidly growing second city of the Bay and one righteously free of the apostate crown still reigning on the western bank. Now built nearly as grand, and keeping to layered walls against the shore, Farbank wears wealth without shame or undue growth in the city proper, and strives always for finer crafts, finer produce, than the western sprawl.
East Anchorage - Founded to be freer and fairer than the old city's former crown, and proud of that egalitarian lineage today, East Anchorage's republican system became the model of governance on the Bay entirely after only short decades. A long, single arc across the Bay's shore, East Anchorage bears more of the tea trade than any sister city and exports widely, famed for its own teahouses in addition. Lively, filled with opportunity and fortunes to be made, few others can claim such a legacy in either Continental politics or merchant diaspora.
Beacon Hill - Sturdy and sedate, winds break over the city's steep ridgeline and blow a fresh, fortifying salt air through every alley, making both a health retreat of the calm under storms and unparalelled skills in the drying and curing of meats, fish and windblown kelp from the outer coast. Famed for this produce, Beacon Hill prospers where a less industrious people could manage only a lighthouse funded by taxation of a city it serves.
