Tarolin sits where the Honor River bends through the heart of Avalon, and it is built as a single argument about who decides things. The city is the seat of the Grand Imperial Ecclesiarch, the immortal timemaster Maurolin, and it is also the country's chief pilgrimage site, because the man and the shrine are the same. At its center stands the temple-palace, and at the center of that stands the throne where Maurolin has sat for longer than anyone in the city can remember.
He has not left it in living memory. Maurolin's longevity is a sphere of slowed time held around the throne, and a pilgrim admitted close enough to see him sees a man caught mid-gesture, moving but barely, a hand lifted at dawn that will not finish its arc before dusk. He does not sleep, because sleep would cost him days. A judgment he begins on one visit may not reach its final word until the petitioner has waited out a season. The slowness is the point of him and the limit of him at once. A ruler who takes three days to finish a sentence cannot actually run a country.
So the country is run by the Solum Impervium, the order of high priests quartered in the innermost ring, who receive Maurolin's pronouncements in fragments and stretch them into policy. They decide what he meant. They decide how a vision uttered over the course of a week applies to a harvest that cannot wait, a border incident, a marriage. The Solum Impervium will tell you it merely interprets the Ecclesiarch's sight, and that is true, but interpretation is its own kind of power, and the priests who hold it guard the approaches to the throne as closely as they guard anything. What the order interprets, it governs; Maurolin's slowness has left the running of the whole country in its hands. And not every priest in it still trusts what he is being handed to interpret, though that quiet division stays well inside the inner ring.
The city radiates outward from the temple in concentric rings. The innermost holds the Solum Impervium and the highest priests; each ring beyond it holds lesser officials, then merchants and craftsmen, then the common faithful at the rim. Movement inward requires permission from the authorities of each ring, who consult the Ecclesiarch's standing pronouncements to decide who may pass. A pilgrim might wait years for clearance to the second ring and never see the third.
Tarolin's population approaches 40,000, which makes it the largest city on Ve outside Shyona. Holy seasons swell it well past that, when the faithful arrive to hear the Ecclesiarch's reading of the coming year, delivered in his own slow voice across days while the crowds camp along the Honor River and the Solum Impervium relays the words outward ring by ring.
The throne room of Tarolin, kept in perpetual half-light to spare the Ecclesiarch's slowed eyes. On the dais a figure sits frozen between one motion and the next, robed in layers no servant has changed in decades; the air around him has a faint, syrup-thick stillness that pilgrims describe as walking into deep water. Around the dais stand the Solum Impervium in silence, leaning in by turns to catch a word as it forms.