Polaris and the Goddess Glorian

Like the shape of a mighty wheel with four spokes was the plan of the city of Adlaz -- or more like a circle drawn around the angles of a cross, the curved line of the outer boundary passing through the far-flung arms. Built in a long-ago time of perils and wars, Adlaz was a walled city, and its wall was both stout and high, and set with many castellated towers. It was also a very ancient wall, to which its moss-grown, weather-worn gray stones bore witness.

In all of the sweeping circumference of the outer wall, which enclosed some ten square miles of street and square, there were four breaks only, and those were protected by ponderous gates of bronze and guarded well by soldiers of the king. Those breaks were where the rim of the wheel met its four spokes. The wall was the rim. The spokes were four wide roadways, which ran east, west, north and south from the city's center. The hub of the wheel was a park or esplanade, fronted on all sides by magnificent buildings in which the colored rocks hewn from the Maeronican quarries were blended splendidly. In the very center towered the massive structure of the Temple of the Sun, built all of white marble, the tips of its hundred spires capped with solid gold.