Bell Haven was an old city filled with people who had no idea what time meant. Dozens of bell towers scattered across the city, some old enough to escape any memory of their purpose, some built within the year, and some entirely ageless, their origins a mystery.

The oldest of them didn't ring anymore. A series of bells placed around the city, considered too antique to waste on a silly thing like pealing. The younger ones usually had a purpose, though it was becoming increasingly unpopular to have bells announcing the arrival of the dawn. People had magic for that, personalised devices to wake them as needed, if the sunlight didn't wake them enough on its own. Universal wake-up calls were out of fashion, and in the way of folks who wanted to sleep in, or who worked later into the night or early in the morning.

Bell Haven had forgotten time. It was a city beyond it. Every hour of every day was in fact, noon. Every hour of every day was midnight. Every moment in time in that city, another part of it lived in another moment. Another person was doing the same thing, but twelve hours later. The shops still closed, but as they did, a night crowd opened up their own stalls. When the sun rose, they would go to sleep, pulling the drapes over their windows to keep out the light.

Bell Haven was the people. It was an older man who, unprompted, would decide to insert into an unrelated conversation, a comment about the youth of the latest generation being too carefree and lazy and having the world handed to them on a silver platter, or a mention of how a joke about an alligator in a vest being an investigator was apparently offensive, and the problem with humour nowadays was that everyone got offended too easily, and how he missed the good old days when nobody's feelings ever got hurt. He'd go on and on about it, and when he eventually died, his son would repeat his words unknowingly, and his grandson after that.

Bell Haven was the boy who never learned his lesson, and night after night, would sneak into the orphanage from his hiding spot on the shingles where two roughshod buildings met. He wanted the candied apples, because candied apples were very good, and the muck he got from the kitchens was very and extremely not good. And besides, the candied apples never seemed to get touched. They were practically reserved for him. The bowl was placed near the chimney, not too close and not too far. He could linger in the orphanage for a few seconds before finally sneaking an apple, which somehow always seemed to be the last one left, and was always left uncovered and in the open.

Bell Haven was a girl, barely ten years old, excited for this new chapter in her ever-evolving life, where she had finally reached the double digit numbers. This was a saga for her, you see. A never-ending adventure where the adults were perpetually adults and gross and icky and old, and she was never going to age for even a moment. Of course, she looked forward to ageing up, because adults got to do whatever they wanted and eat absolutely anything, and stay up past dark to see the night markets. But she didn't. Age didn't happen. Time didn't happen. Not to her.

Not like the couple who would get married all too soon and decide to go out and buy a small farm for themselves. Bell Haven was a city-state, isolated in its own way, but with some hefty expanse of farmland and pastures on its outskirts, which technically fell inside the city's border, only outside of its walls. But this couple, rather than farm, would plant shrubs and pretty grasses and trees, and carved bird feeders and benches for the property, and just like that, there would be a little less food in the world.

But that was alright, because underneath that air of relaxed retirement, Bell Haven was a human city of work and labour, and food could be imported for cheap from Durn and Espara and Eckshire.

Every city had work and labour, but Bell Haven was especially known for it, labelled with terrifying words like 'unions', 'welfare', and 'democracy'. It was one of the only provinces to have instituted democracy, and had in fact done so since the city first popped up from the ground, forever and a half ago.

It would never work, of course. Democracy would fail. It must have been true, because proponents of more traditional systems kept insisting so, incessantly reminding the city and its inhabitants of their inevitably and perpetually impending failure. Democracy was a flawed notion, and irredeemably so. Better to let someone rule who had trained their entire lives for it, learned all the rules of governance, than have the same thing happen anyway when career politicians got into the mix.

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Besides, a proper aristocracy or theocracy would be better, carrying with it safeguards against unpleasantries and that longing lust for wealth and power that seemed to perpetually follow around those who had neither. Better to be governed by an aristocracy who didn't care about them one way or another, and had little motive to exploit them more than they already were, than to be governed by someone who very much cared, down to the very fibres that made up their bones.

Because the odds were, a democracy would sooner appoint a raving lunatic, ever passionate about torturing the underserviced, than someone with a heart and soul.

And yet, despite that endless reminder that still continues even today, that their government would eventually fall and the prime minister would soon be replaced, any day now, by a deranged anarchist promoting chaos in the streets, the people continued to live their lives.

It was a broad city, and those lives lived all throughout it. The poorest, or those who needed the extra space, or even the wealthy who didn't quite need to work in the heart of the place, lived on the outskirts, hours away from the heart of the city by foot. And where that beating heart of the city lay, the same sorts of people lived. The rich, who wanted appealing places and didn't really need to be there except because they wanted to be. The workers, who needed to be close to their work for practical reasons. And the poorest, who spent seventy five per cent of their income just to stay alive. Cheaper rent didn't exist. Not for them. It wasn't just the owner of their accommodations forcing twenty cabins that straddled the definition between a home and a shack, it was the work. The work existed, but not for them. It existed for those with the education to afford it.

And it was easy to tell them to afford it. For most people, them included, society was built to use and abuse them. They weren't wealthy nor Kindred. Society was built for the wealthy, and safeguarded by the Kindred. The ones who became mercenaries, or most of us, were the champions of the system, a system that expanded its borders far beyond Bell Haven. A system that transcended democracy. Or rather, a system that democracy was never quite able to make go away. A system of war, where Kindred were warriors.

The only Kindred it didn't help were the delusional ones.

It's why Bell Haven was a working city. The work was always there. The reason for it was always there. The people who did it, again, were always there. So the city remained. In a word, it unionised.

Businesses left and right were taken aback by the new trend of workers' rights. Votes to strike happened all at once, across the city. No union worker would take on a job from an employer who had laid off another union worker. Alone, the threat meant nothing. When the entire city stood behind the promise, it became an oath and a mandate in all but name. An injury to one is an injury to all.

That revolutionary ardour plastered its message on every wall, window, and business door. Everyone heard it, whether they liked it or not. Every voice spoke it with brio, for those who couldn't read. And the message carried that weight: what were any of them, if even a single one couldn't read?

Down would come education, to greet everyone no matter their wealth. Down would come food and water, so that no one would starve. Down would come the voice of the people, because they were going to be heard, well and proper. It wouldn't be democracy that would silence them, not at all. The government tried for a moment to mandate permits for their protests and their posters, so posters covered every government office three times over, and protesters gathered outside every night for a month until the permit mandates were repealed.

The government caved, until offered enough coin to ignore the posters and the protests, and go and do the whole lot anyway.

So in turn, they made the employers bleed. But it wasn't blood that came from the veins of the rich. It was gold. Their avidity had the streets filled with liquid gold that nobody seemed to be able to scoop up quite well enough. It dowsed the city in a golden tint, alluring visitors. "Come here," said the invite, "if we speak together, we have a voice loud enough for even them to hear."

And the city grew. And as it did, the rich grew fatter and fatter and fatter, until their bloat overshadowed Bell Haven again. It was a circular thing, and the same story repeated itself every eighty to ninety years or so, just long enough for the warning signs to be forgotten and the new generation, freshly in charge of the city, took the helm.

Bell Haven was the city that forgot time. It forgot its lessons. Its challenges. Its rules. It stood beyond all that nonsense, and was itself older and larger than most of it too. If any city besides Senvia could have been the capital, it was Bell Haven.

And so the capital, in all but name, Bell Haven became.