Editing Fading Sea (section)

== Galgeleth, the City of Wheels ==
The boundary of the Fading Sea is Galgeleth, the City of Wheels. The giant wheels it's named for are the key to exploring the Fading Sea; each is wrapped with dozens to hundreds of miles of very thin, very strong rope. For a princely sum, brave adventurers may rent the use of a Wheel, to tie the end of the rope to their ship, and sail the Fading Sea - confident in the knowledge that they could follow the rope back to shore. Hopefully, by then, they'd have collected enough riches from their journey to pay for the pleasure. If not, they could always try hunting down a Sea Serpent - dangerous beings, whose sinews are the substance of the ropes of Galgeleth.

=== The Wheels ===
==== Old Five-Thousand Miler ====
Over the edge of the port looms the vast shadow of Old Five-Thousand Miler, greatest and moist ancient of the wheels. Such is its age that, if anyone, only the Master of the Wheels, Second Prince of Galgeleth, knows who (or, some say, what) built it, and when. As its name implies, five-thousand miles of glistening, black, unbreakable cord are tightly wound around its central axle, which towers far higher than any building in the city, its surrounding mechanisms so large that they make up an entire district by themselves. In the centuries since the wheel last turned, an entire shanty-town housing Galgeleth's least and foulest has sprouted all over its bulk like barnacles - a slum hanging off the cliff of the artificial mountain. 

Some wonder if anyone in the world can even afford the cost attaching their ship to the wheel. Legend has it that it was last employed for a sum that could now buy empires, to tether to shore an expedition headed by an angel who believed they could return to heaven if they crossed the Fading Sea (the cord was ultimately pulled back to Galgeleth, shipless - perhaps they found it?). 

The city would hold its breath if it would be rented again. Its bustle would come to a quiet. Every single one of the city's giants would be needed to strain their sinews to the breaking point, every reserve giant awakened from their slumber, every priest of the great Leviathan to make sacrifices, to have a hope at turning the monstrosity (incidentally, breaking off the town built on top of it like a lion shaking dry their mane). It would be a festival and a spectacle like not seen in ages.

==== The Pinhole Spoke ====
The hundreds of lighthouses on Galgeleth's shores all pale in comparison to the greatest of them, the Pinhole Spoke atop Old Five-Thousand Miler. The Pinhole part comes from the fact that the light source is covered by a plate of steel, with pinholes of a regular spacing pierced through it - the caretakers claim it's so that the light doesn't damage the eyes.
But to the city's mystics, it is known as Pinhole because it's the only place in the City that pierces the veil of reality, and you can see hidden truths and hidden worlds from the light cover's pinholes - a different world for each of the 18844 holes. Just don't stare too long at the light.

=== The Merchant-Princes of Galgeleth ===
==== The Sea-Lost ====
The Sea-Lost, often addressed by title rather than name because of certain issues, maybe used to be (it's difficult) Fayza Haykal, the heir of a great merchant family whose father had not been able to produce any sons to carry on his legacy. When her father met his end before his time, Haykal did not want to stay an unfortunate accident, so she decided to captain her own ship and take to sea, bringing back goods from neighboring islands - not an especially risky endeavor relative to the standards of the Fading Sea, but a modest mercantile job.

One night at sea, though, her ship didn't come home before the Tide-wind blew, as she was pursuing the last of the money to pay her father's old debt to a Merchant-King. 
The one who came home claimed to be the daughter of the same family, and could recount a childhood in the same house, knowing all her father's secrets - but she was unmistakably a different woman, of a different tribe and build and personality. She came carrying treasures enough to almost double the Merchant-Prince's wealth, though, and paid it all to him instead of keeping it - and in exchange for this, she rose to Merchant-Princess when a position next opened.

She hasn't went to sea for next to twenty years, perhaps having learned from past mistakes. But as of late, she's getting strange, speaking of the Shore of Pearls where a goddess spun her hair from seaweed and replaced her eyes with pearls, and some swear they've seen her drip seawater.
She's gathering crew for a personally-led expedition to this place, and is planning to once again turn the Old Five-Thousand-Miler - and it's setting the city aquiver.

==== High Inquisitor Augustin IX ====
Augustin IX is a man of strong principles, equipped with even stronger arms to support those principles. He is the High Inquisitor of Galgeleth, and it is his duty and (intense) pleasure to maintain peace within the City of Wheels and punish wrongdoing with an iron hand.

He rose to fame at the age of 27, when he hunted down the ringmaster of a dreaded band of thieves known as the Black Daggers and subjected him to summary execution; a string of subsequent successes such as the hanging and Fading of the mass-murderer Garriot Nightingale, the imprisonment of the conman known widely as Silver-Tounged Larken and the rooting out of corruption within the Inquisition, uplifted him to the position of High Inquisitor.

Today he administrates the Inquisition, the lawkeepers and guardsmen of Galgeleth, judges the occasional case appealed as far as his office, and oversees the punishment of the most notorious criminals.

=== Other Notes ===
==== The Rotten Library ====
The Mad Universities began as a project to catalogue the Islands and to find out whether different expeditions stumble to them again.

For a century their students and loreseekers toiled and assembled a Grand Library of notes, maps and books. Then it was time for the Revelation: they began their grand work. Yet it turned out that different seekers had different opinions of the Island dilemma. The most conclusive answer they agreed on was "It seems possible??"

In the end, the University split into several rival schools and the Library suffered greatly as no school could agree on how to divide it. In the end, seawater got into it and a feverish Library War was fought about its contents between the Mad Universities and raiders.

The Rotten Library still exists, its dark halls and dungeons periodically flooded. But people say that it still contains secrets undiscovered...