City Plan: Tessmere#

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 32:129 is the Free Oreth Coast States almanac, Part 1, line 129), and nothing here overrides canon. The Atlas puts the city's marker about 250 km inland (see What the plan does not settle). This plan follows the text: a harbour on a drowned river mouth.

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 city: the harbour, the districts and the Duskwood.
• About 2½ times: main streets 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 city at a glance#

The harbour, the walls and the gate#

• The harbour is a drowned river mouth that runs some 18 km inland from the sea. In the plan it is 1.5 km wide at the mouth and narrows to half a kilometre at its head, where the river comes down out of the ranges (proposal).
• The Old Wall (proposal name; canon walls). "Tessmere's walls hold." in the Burning of the Beaches, in the 1390s (32:90), and Tessmere's defenders "Held the walls" (32:234). The plan draws the walled old city on the harbour's south shore, the wall 8.3 km round.
• The Open Gate (proposal as a real gate). The flag's open gate is "the gate that is never shut to a runaway" (32:51). The plan makes it the landward gate of the Old Wall, where the Refuge Road comes down from the coast ranges. The Refuge Office, which "Registers runaways as free" (33:257), and a Refuge House (32:286) stand just inside it.
• The Greywall. The canon's Greywall is "The fortified line facing Coastwatch" (33:109), which the Atlas puts 181 km north-west. It is not on this sheet.

The districts#

Where the city builds upward (proposal)#

"Sometimes big cities build upwards instead of sprawling outwards", as Briana put it on 19 September 2026, naming New York, Chicago and Tokyo. Tessmere is "Proud, crowded" (33:38), and it builds upward:

• The Station towers stand round Tessmere Station in the New Town, about 300 of them.
• The Harbour towers, about 70, stand on the quays east of the Old Wall.
• What stays low. Nothing tall stands inside the Old Wall.

On the plan the towers show as dark footprints in blocks built almost to the street.

Getting around#

• The Shore Line (canon), "from Northgate to Aldport along the coast: the one railway" (33:164). It crosses the harbour upstream of the Old Wall and stops at Tessmere Station (proposal).
• The roads (proposal):
  • the Northgate road runs north along the coast to Northgate, Tessmere's border town;
  • the Kelsby road runs south to Kelsby;
  • the Refuge Road comes down from the coast ranges to the Open Gate.
• The Ria Bridge and the Quay (proposal) cross and line the harbour.
• Air. "Tessmere and Stellan airports; flights to Aletheia, Saltline and Castaly" (33:166). The plan puts Tessmere Airport on the plateau to the south-west (proposal place).

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 Tessmere the rules take this form:

• The leaders' streets sit together. The First Consuls fill the Old City round the Senate, by their whole names, with no titles: "No honorifics, no ranks." (33:219)
• The New Town is numbered, First Street to Thirtieth Street.
• The old lanes of the hills keep their founders' names. They are the coast's own family names, many shared with the Imperium (32:188): Dunstan's Lane, Lind's Lane, Doral's Lane.
• The old villages keep their own streets: Chapel Lane, Lamp Lane, Boat Lane, Net End. The villages are Stonybrook, Brackenby, Thornleigh, Longacre and Fernly (proposals).
• Estates were built on the fields that sold, each with a theme:
  • flowers (Lavender Way, Daisy Court);
  • trees (Cedar Close, Walnut Close);
  • birds (Swallow Road, Linnet Way);
  • stones (Topaz Road, Quartz Way);
  • herbs (Angelica Way);
  • Kethra's native life (Tidehound Way, Shaleback Court).
• Fields whose owners never sold are still farmed, among the estates.
• Every street longer than 80 m has a name: 4,220 of 4,366. A name is used once in the city. 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", "-combe", "Salt-", "Grey-" and "Hollow-".
• First Consuls of the Varro and Brennan families have no streets, because the canon's near-identical groups crowd them. Ilse Varro, in office, has none either.

What the plan does not settle#

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

• Settled, 19 September 2026 (the harbour repair). The Atlas's city marker was about 250 km from the coast. A ria (a drowned river valley, matching the text) is now cut into the coast up to the city, about 256 km long; the marker itself moved the last 22 km onto its new bank. Its satellite institutions moved with it to the new shore.
• What the Greywall is. The flag's "grey wall with an open gate" (32:51) and the novel The Greywall (33:205) could be the city's own wall. But the Greywall is also "The fortified line facing Coastwatch" (33:109), far to the north-west. Settled: the plan calls the city's wall the Old Wall and leaves the Greywall where the Atlas has it.
• "The unwalled." The Imperium calls the coast "the unwalled" (32:36), yet Tessmere is "The walled republic." (33:38). Settled: the plan reads the Imperial name as a sneer, not a description.

Guidance for AI actors#

• Call people by their names: "A Shore person calls a stranger by name." (32:266) "Do not wear a rank-collar, even as a joke." (33:222)
• "A lamp in the window means 'you may knock here'." (33:221) On Lamp Night, 3 Fall, there is "A lamp in every window." (33:186)
• The Burning, 18 Blaze, is kept with "Beach fires, and silence." (33:187) Charter Day is 12 Bloom (33:184).
• A Tessmerian gives an address by district: "the Old City, Jana Holt Street"; "the New Town, Fifth Street".
• The 42nd Games are Tessmere's, in 2316 (45:200).
• What is canon, and what is only the plan: the drowned river mouth, the walls, the flag's open gate, the Duskwood, and the institutions marked canon are canon. The Old Wall's line, the Open Gate as a real gate, the districts, the streets and their names, and the exact positions are the plan's proposals.

Sources#

The almanac, approved 19 September 2026:

• Chapter IV (05);
• the Free Oreth Coast States (32–33) and their Register (34);
• the Free Banner Guild (50), Homeguard Command (48) and the Homeworld Assembly (45);
• the Atlas's places at Tessmere.

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