Kolmos, Where Sky Marries Sea
Most cities are built by one people, for one way of living. Kolmos is built by three. Where the rain-heavy rainforest spills down into a deep, sheltered inlet on the eastern coast, humans, harpies, and mermaids share a single harbor in near-equal measure — the shorebound, the airborne, and the tidal, bargaining their way into one improbable polity. It is a place that translates between worlds which rarely share a table, and it grows rich doing it. Three queens, the Kolmic boast runs, half prayer and half threat, one harbor, and no surprises.
A City in Three Tiers
Kolmos climbs from the water into the trees. The mouth of the inlet is pinched between two forested cliffs, one of them carved into the Chainhold — a fortress whose winches can raise a great defensive chain across the harbor in hours, so that in wartime ships enter on Kolmic terms or do not enter at all. Beyond the docks sprawls the human Middle City of workshops, ropewalks, dye-houses, and perfumeries, where raw inputs and ocean rarities are turned into luxury goods. And above the streets the city becomes a lattice of rope bridges and platforms slung between colossal living trees — the Canopy City, where harpies rule the skyline with lookout roosts, signal-lines, and sky-markets that raise and lower goods on pulleys. In Kolmos, they say, even the streets provide shade.
The Tower of the Triarchs
At the heart of it all stands the Tower of the Triarchs — less a building than a civic spine. Its base is submerged beneath the harbor; a grand spiraling promenade winds upward past open galleries, and at every level corridors branch away toward the canopy bridges. It is a vertical plaza deliberately made so that seafolk, shorefolk, and skyfolk may meet without any one domain commanding the approach.
Beneath it lies the Tide Court, a web of flooded stone galleries where the mermaids hold council by phosphorescent light and weighted bells, and human envoys must learn breath-hold etiquette and the patience of the deep.
Three Queens, One Law
Kolmos is ruled by the Triune Queens — one monarch each from humans, harpies, and mermaids — whose legitimacy rests on constant bargaining and mutual recognition. The human crown is elective in name and decided in practice by quiet coalition; once enthroned, the human queen rules for life, but always hemmed in by the other two, who balance against any single people's dominance. The sovereign is always a woman, less by law than by stabilizing custom, for the sky-folk and sea-folk struggle to treat men as full political actors; martial command is kept deliberately separate in the hands of a Prince Marshal. Three voices, reads the carving at the Tower's midlevel. One law. No silence.
The Open Aesthetic
Because harpies and mermaids wear no conventional clothing, human custom in Kolmos grew up around them, and the city is famously unburdened by modesty. Here adornment is civic language: perfume-oils and shell-lattices, dyed skin and lacquered bangles, ornament prized far above mere cloth. Femininity is an ambient reality, celebrated and displayed — the city's perfumers and dyers set fashions across the whole continent, and the body itself is treated as the primary canvas. It is no accident that Kolmos sells beauty, the easterners say, like other cities sell bricks.
What the Sea Gives
The true wealth of Kolmos is the surface-to-sea trade no rival can match, for its mermaids are citizens and not hired go-betweens — able to broker oceanic rarities through long submerged negotiations, night exchanges, and sealed baskets raised from the deep. To this it adds a second trade in security itself: harpy courier-pairs and scouts, patient mermaid raiders, and siege-engineers famed for turning rainforest into a maze of kill-lanes and traps. If you cannot afford Kolmic engineering, foreign captains joke, then hire a Kolmic engineer. Stand with the spear, the drillmasters teach; speak with the sling; shout to the sky.