City Plan: Eldhaven#

Kethra Almanac • City plans • Approved 19 September 2026 • drafted 19 September 2026

Status: approved. Briana approved the city plans on 19 September 2026 (City Plans and Map Styles Approval). Where this page calls something a proposal, read it as approved. The points under What the plan does not settle are being settled on her instruction of the same day.

Status before approval: This street plan is new material, so it waits for Briana's approval (Almanac Approval Decision). That covers every street, its name, and every district and building not marked canon below. What it takes from the approved almanac is cited to file and line (for example 26:130 is the Southern Holds almanac, Part 1, line 130), and nothing here overrides canon. The Atlas spreads its markers for the town's institutions 42–114 km from the town so they can be read at world scale. This plan puts them in the town.

Using the plan. Drag to move, and zoom with the mouse wheel, the + and − buttons, or a pinch. Names come in as you zoom, each set lettered to read at the same size on screen:

• Whole town: the Hedge, the river, the districts and the old Holds.
• About 2½ times: the dray-roads and the great buildings.
• About 6 times: the longer streets and the smaller places.
• About 12 times: the name of nearly every street.

The ⤢ button fills the screen. North is up, and the scale bar bottom left is always true.

The town at a glance#

A Hold grown into a town#

Chapter III lays out every Hold the same way (04:70–75): "The Hold-house at the centre: the Moot hall, granary and ember shelter", family houses round it, "Seeded fields in a ring", then the Hedge, "a cleared, burnt and patrolled boundary strip, 200–500 m wide" (04:72), and the Wild beyond. The plan draws Eldhaven as that pattern grown large (proposal):

• The Old Hold is the first Hold. The Compact House stands at its centre in its fire-ring: "a cleared fire-ring of 60 m around every Hold-house" (04:138). Beside it is the Old Moot Hall, the first Hold's own Hold-house (proposal).
• The old Holds round about are Wellholm, Draymoot, Seedholt, Coldspring, Riftby and Wolfring (proposals). The town has grown out and taken them in, and each keeps its Hold-house in its fire-ring.
• The seeded fields fill the ring between the town and the Hedge. Some Holds sold their fields for houses and some never did, so estates and fields lie side by side (see How the streets are named).
• The Hedge runs round the whole town, cleared and burnt. The plan makes it 350 m wide; the canon allows 200–500 m (04:72). The dray-roads cross it at the Hedge posts.
• The Wild lies beyond it: emberscrub, native growth that no one eats.
• The Fire Ring (proposal) is a wide avenue round the old town, 36 km long, a fire line of the kind the Guild's work-frames clear (51:301).

Getting around#

• The Rift Railway (canon) runs through the town: "The Rift Railway, AL 1890s, runs 3,200 km through the Eldvang rift and is the frontier's spine." (04:111) It is "the frontier's one railway" (27:190). Eldhaven Station and the dray yards are proposals.
• The dray-roads (canon: "Holds are linked by dray-roads and by the rift railway", 04:75). The plan names four for where they go (proposal):
  • the Stavholm road, north up the rift toward the railway's northern end;
  • the Ember Crossing road, south toward the railway's southern depot;
  • the Highland road, east toward the Highland Reach;
  • the Charterlands road, west over the river toward the Crown Charterlands "just west of the rift" (26:122).
• Air. It is nine hours by air from Aletheia to Eldhaven, at Cr 640 (27:192). No airport is named in the canon. The plan proposes Eldhaven Airfield inside the Hedge to the north-east.
• Water. Only the Rift river crosses the sheet. The Holds reach the sea through Oathwater Quay and the coastal Holds' quays (27:193), far to the north.

Landmarks#

Canon places are marked canon. Their position on the plan is a proposal unless the text gives it.

How the streets are named (proposal)#

These rules, as Briana set out on 19 September 2026, hold for every city plan:

• streets are often numbered;
• famous people, leaders above all, get streets, and those streets sit together;
• an estate takes a theme, such as flowers;
• many streets keep the name of whoever first laid the road;
• some streets simply stop at a field whose owner never sold, and the suburbs have their cul-de-sacs.

In Eldhaven the rules take this form:

• The leaders' streets sit together. The Speakers of the Compact ring the Compact House. Frontier names follow the Gift-line: "a given name and the line of the founding Gift-mother" (26:215). A street takes the given name alone: Nell Street, Birk Lane.
• The lanes keep their founders' given names, as a frontier family would say them: Corra's Lane, Runa's Lane, Yara's Lane.
• The old Holds keep their own streets: Moot Street, Granary Street, Wind-tower Street, Cistern End.
• Estates were built on the fields that sold, each with a theme:
  • the moons (Hedge Moon Road, Green Moon Drive);
  • the Gift-lines (Adaeze Road, Nkemdi Drive);
  • herbs (Fennel Drive, Yarrow Close);
  • birds (Curlew Drive, Finch Court);
  • the harvest (Buckwheat Road, Honey Road);
  • Kethra's native life (Gloamwing Road, Emberscrub Road);
  • frontier words (Hedge Court, Peace Court).
• Fields whose Holds never sold are still sown, with the estates on every side.
• No "Stair". No street in Eldhaven is called a Stair. The frontier calls the north "the Stair" (26:45), and a Stair would read as northern.
• No numbered district. Eldhaven has none; its planned streets are named for the dray and the railway.
• Every street longer than 80 m has a name: 4,335 of 4,540. In the old town each name is used once. The estates may repeat a name found far off, never within 6 km or in the same locality.

The names avoid everything the naming rules and the canon forbid:

• Nothing is taken from Earth's places or history (05:266).
• No new name uses the crowded families: "-gate", "-mere", "Salt-", "Grey-" and "Hollow-".
• The Brenna line has no street, because the canon's Brannock group crowds it.

What the plan does not settle#

These are open for Briana; the plan follows the text in each case:

• Settled, 19-20 September 2026. Chapter III said "AL 2090s" (04:111) for the Rift Railway; the Holds almanac's own timeline gives "1890s" twice, independently, with more detail (26:100, 26:203). Chapter III now reads 1890s too, matching the Holds' own record of a railway they built and are still repaying charter debt on.
• How far it runs. "From Stavholm to Ember Crossing" (27:190) names the line's two best-known stops, not a claim that it stops there — the Atlas's drawn line runs on to Lowgard, 3,200 km in all, matching Chapter III (04:111) exactly. No contradiction; settled as read.
• Settled. Eldhaven is called a "town" in prose everywhere (04:63; 26:75, "the largest frontier town") — describing its character and scale, not denying that it seats the Holds Compact. The one place that named a formal type, the Atlas Gazetteer (09:451), said "City"; that now reads "Capital", matching the Atlas's own marker and the Southern Holds' own "Seat" (26:75).
• How Eldhaven governs itself. The Guild's banners are chartered "3 at Eldhaven, by the Hold's Moot" (50:70), which implies Eldhaven has a Hold's Moot of its own. Settled: the plan's inference stands; the canon does not describe the Moot itself further.
• Hulls inland. The Guild lists 4 hulls at Eldhaven (51:113), about 1,900 km from the sea. Settled: read as a Guild registration, not physical ships at the town — Eldhaven, deep in the Eldvang interior, is where the hulls' ownership and dues are recorded, not where they float.

Guidance for AI actors#

• Speech is Southspeech: "Slower, with open vowels. Frontier names for everything (Kethra, Sól, Surtr)." (05:23) "Say Kethra, Sól, Surtr. Saying Selenne marks you as from the Stair." (27:258) "Dates are given in moons." (26:278)
• "Doors are unlocked within the Hold, and barred against the Wild" (27:256). A family's Gift-line mark is painted on its door (04:147).
• In the red summer the town works at night and sleeps in the cool-cellars (26:145). "Blackouts during ember storms are routine" (04:104). "Hedge signal fires still carry an ember warning faster than any network." (27:201)
• The Compact sits at the Thaw Moon and the Ash Moon (27:34). The play Charter is "performed at every Thaw Moot" (27:241). In AL 2314 a new Speaker is chosen at the Thaw Moon, and "The Wolfsmonth is due" (26:110).
• The Eldhaven Ember is "Distrusted on the Stair" (09:250) and banned in the Imperium (14:215).
• An Eldhaven address names the district or the old Hold: "the Old Hold, Nell Street"; "Seedholt, Cellar Lane".
• What is canon, and what is only the plan: the rift, the terraces above the flash floods, the Hold pattern, the Hedge and the Wild, the Rift Railway and the institutions marked canon are canon. The districts, the old Holds' names, the streets and their names, the Fire Ring and the exact positions are the plan's proposals.

Sources#

The almanac, approved 19 September 2026:

• the Introduction (01), Chapter III (04) with the figure of a Hold, and Chapter IV (05);
• the Southern Holds (26–27) and their Register (28);
• the Free Banner Guild (50–51) and Homeguard Command (48);
• the Atlas's places at Eldhaven.

The plan is built by _build/make_cityplans.js from _build/city_specs/eldhaven.js, which lists every canon line it keeps.