The Tower of Anvillon | Notes About the Setting

 From outside the city it appears impossibly thin, a needle of dark iron driven from the heavens into the earth, but as one approaches the tower's base it is comparable to a vast, structural pillar that serves to hold up the sky itself. Like many of the world's wonders, this icon predates the civilisation that now inhabits the land surrounding it and many of its mysteries have been lost tothe chaos of the past. Yet so grand a structure is not without uses of its own: Anvillon is a factory-city and as such has an everpresent need to take in materials and export the products. The rail networks that stretch from the outskirts of this city fulfil this purpose for the largest, outerlying regions, but for the elite and the venerable, who have established themselves close to the city's heart, there is the sky port.
 The lower section of the tower is devoted to supporting the port's function, with warehouses, shipping elevators and maintainance depots, none of which lack for scale, to ensure that the flow of goods never ceases. The port itself begins further up, a comparatively short distance below the cloud layer in comparison to the height of the tower itself. Here, a variety of trade and passenger vessels travel in and out at a steady pace - the esoteric means by which the flying machines move means that resupply and refuel is an activity that cannot be rushed, as after all, there are few places where one might find the cryo-locked fuel mass for a kinetic impeller or the aether cell needed to re-inflate a gravity sail. Were a transport to become stranded in the wastes between the iron empires scattered throughout the east, it would mean its certain loss. Even if recovered, or broken down for its parts, the skills required to restore any such technological marvel are kept under monopoly by the empires' respective leaders.
 The remainder of the tower, hidden behind the shroud of cloud cover, is reserved for the ruling company-clans which form the council responsible for the governance of Anvillon. The facilities are routinely modified to suit the shifting hierarchy of newly ascendant clans and family branches, but have included offices, archives, workshops and personal and creation laboratories to serve the processes of research that serve to first determine and then uphold a clan's reputation.