Golden cities on the highest summits, directly under the Hole, built around the lenses that make the only steel in the world.
The Zenith live closest to the fire and furthest from everything else. They grow nothing, burn little and travel rarely, and every other people in the world sends them something: ore, charcoal, lime, food, water, oil. What they send back is the one thing nobody else can make: steel that lasts.
White felt coats with high collars and gold piping, fitted trousers and dark riding boots. Sun-Shard everywhere a fastening can be metal: buttons, clasps, buckles, bands of polished scale at collar and shoulder. Rank carries a slim straight duelling sword in a crimson scabbard, the only red they wear.
Nothing they wear will rust in their lifetime. That is the point.
An order of scholars the Crown tolerates because it needs them: keepers of the forging tables, the lens geometries, the dimming records and the calendar. They go unarmed, hung with instruments; a student wears a small round lens on a chain. Their findings sit on the Quiet Shelf, books never banned, merely never copied.
Keeper of the oldest forge, and a Measurer's student with a small round lens on a chain. The best-read person in the sky, and the finest duellist on the Crown, who has only ever sparred. Composed, curious, and trusting in a way no one here can afford.
"I wonder how rain feels."
Sera's father, head of the house with the oldest array and the deepest vault. He held a port in the Seventh Dimming, and remembers it.