The only city Quaddis sports is called Xicarph—if indeed it can even truly be called a city. Xicarph, situated at Quaddis’ northern artic pole, is a sprawling vision of grandiose palaces, marble plazas, fecund gardens, and echoing amphitheatres—all bathed in a balmy heat contained beneath a sealed dome of brass and armour crystal that keeps the killing cold of the polar ice flats from disturbing the city’s inhabitants.

The Hub: Hanging from the apex of the containment dome is the Hub, a blister of crystal and brass that houses the offices of the Colonial Regent and the Office of Colonisation. More importantly, it also houses the docking control centre that controls orbital traffic and the city’s more than adequate aerial defences, guiding the landing of craft on Ashtear Starport, located on the exterior of the city’s dome.

A. The Grand Estate of Gabriel Chase Haarlock: The palace of the Colonial Regent. Built by the first Regent. Now it sits silent and empty, except for the Fetival of Tattered Fates and the Grand Ball leading up to the Revel of Darkness. Artificial rivers flow through acres of primal forest and jungle dotted with follies and monuments ranging from artfully ruined basilica to cruel towers jutting from stone crags. At the estate’s
centre lies the manse, a great tiered building said to extend down into the bedrock of Quaddis just as it towers above Xicarph. The manse is also said to house the famous Gabriel Chase Collection, which scholars from across the sector regularly (and often fruitlessly) petition to be able to view. The sum of generations of acquisition within and without the bounds of Imperial space, the collection spans works of art, literature, and artefacts, as well as a vast collection of preserved specimens anthropological, xenological, and biological. At the heart of the manse can be found the Theatre of Clocks, a chamber in which a million separate mechanisms are said to faultlessly keep the time of a million worlds across the Imperium, and at its centre sits Chase's legendary Steel Clock, a device keyed in some way to the Grand Conjunction, counting down to the Revel of Shadows.

B. The Ashtear Starport: Quaddis only spaceport. Passengers disembarking pass through Xicarph’s halls of greeting and descend to the city via mag-rail cars that glide down the inside of the dome, giving mismatched vistas of Xicarph and the ice planes stretching out all around, while cargo and less prominent travellers are ferried through the lightless tunnels of the undercity.

C. The Collapsed Palaces: Slums. This is where Haxtes and the later Jeg/Parsifal surfaced. Pointedly ignored by the rest of the city, the Collapsed Palaces is the only place the poor and outcast can go, and thousands eke out ramshackle lives in the upper reaches of the collapsed area, forgotten and unaided. Life here in the shadow of Xicarph’s opulence is bitter and uncertain, and the depths of the rent swallow up without a trace many who venture there.

D. The High Steps of the Pleasure Gardens: Stepped public gardens that form a raised arc that curves around one flank of the cityscape where the most extravagant and strange wonders can be found. Rising at their highest point to almost a third of the dome’s height, the High Steps are a mass of artfully weathered stone, tiled staircases, and shaded promenades—all surrounded by the most wonderful exotic plants and flowers. Tended and protected by silent servitors of verdigris-coated brass while strange birds murmur in branches of trees native to planets half a galaxy away, the gardens are ever alive with the heady, almost narcotic scent of flowers and sap. Though for half its orbital cycle Xicarph enjoys almost perpetual sunlight, for some time the polar region has almost no light. During this time, solar lamps burn on the inside of the dome so that the gardens might survive.

E. The Akasen Follies: Seated at the southern tip of the High Steps, amid an artful arrangement of marble domes, pavilions, and courtyards is the area known as the Akasen Follies. They are the domain of rare pleasures, both subtle and visceral, some purchased only at a cost that would beggar a feudal king. Fabled in half-true tales across the sector both licentious and often sinister, the Akasen-trained companions and courtesans are among the most respected and sought after in the Segmentum.

F. The Promenade of Arenas: This raucous district houses the bulk of the city’s public stadia—a mixture of fighting arenas, bestiaries, xenological exhibits, and bloodsport pits—along with their attendant gambling houses, bars, feast halls, and all manner of other entertainments. Like much in Xicarph, even these bloody locales have been constructed in a high style, with the sands of battle surrounded by high tiers of steps and towering marble walls draped in red samite, crowned with ornate statuary depicting the heroes of the Imperium.

G. The Gilden Houses: the publicly open Gilden Houses—a profusion of markets, emporia, and galleries where some of the most highly valued and exotic goods known to man can be found for sale.

H. The Refutation: This somewhat forlorn district houses many of Xicarph’s adepts and their works, built around a series of amphitheatres and decrepit privately sponsored colleges which in recent centuries have been left largely abandoned by the whims of fashion and fate. This area also houses the drab grey ziggurat of the Adminitratum and several cathedral-like data-vaults given over to the storage of Quaddis’ planetary archives.

I. The Eternal Show of Shadows: There are numerous play houses and theatres in Xicarph, all hoping to draw the favour of visitors and the patronage of the nobility, but no other has the reputation of the Eternal Show of Shadows, a venue of such status that other playhouses appealing to the elite of Quaddis have clustered around it to form a distinct district.

J. The Valley Gardens of Sul: Named for one of Quaddis’ more pious nobles of centuries past who founded them, the Valley Gardens are quiet and shadowed places given over largely to sprawling cemetery complexes, mausoleums, and monuments to wars and saints long forgotten.

K. The Guild Enclave: The Guild Enclave is an arrangement of private villas and compounds where most of the prominent commercial enterprises and organisations from across the sector (and indeed beyond) maintain representation. Their presence is maintained both for the prestige it brings them and to avoid the potential disadvantage their absence might create, as much as for any actual business they might conduct.