Embrace

"Let me give you some advice son - be right careful where you shit. Noises I keep hearin' from the sewers, who knows what might slither up the pipes to bite you on the arse."

Dwarven father to his son in the market. Supposedly Embrace has some issues with its sewers.

With its population numbering around a few hundred thousand, Embrace is the closest thing the Heartlands get to a city. As with most settlements in the heartlands, Embrace is primarily a farming based culture, though as is typical of farming on Nalan it doesn't take up a huge amount of anyone's time - total of maybe 2 months a year are spent working the fields.
This town always appears to be significantly more populated than it is, since it is one of the few places within the Heartlands where passenger style Airships arrive regularly, capable of taking people in relative comfort (without the need for oxygen gear) to any major settlement in the empire.
Embrace does have a few notable features including a University focussed around the practice of illusion magic, which itself contains one of the largest libraries in the world. On top of this, the town often plays host to carnivals and circuses since the people here are wealthier than anywhere else in the Heartlands.

Defences

The town features an inner wall, though evidently doesn't see much action, even around The Darkening.

Infrastructure

Main roads here are built wider than usual, I imagine to support the travel of Self Pulling Carriages, which also leave these main streets a slightly washed out yellow colour.
Most notable of course are the sky ports - huge wooden structures which dominate the skyline of the town. These ports can support over 20 ships being docked at any given time, and are always something of a hive of activity.

Guilds and Factions

The Embrace University holds quite a bit of sway here from what I can tell, and I heard rumblings that this 'Parliament' I keep hearing about is involved with the underground.

History

Most of the major towns within The Empire have a tendency to cling to the outskirts of its borders rather keeping to the insides, a fact which seems incongruous with other civilisations I have studied. In this respect Embrace is something of an outlier, and I personally beleive the city was simply founded out of convenience - people travelling around the empire needed somewhere more developed to stop and resupply before moving on to other locations.
In the modern day the town serves this purpose in a different way by acting as a hub for air travel around the Empire.

Type

Large town

Population

A few hundred thousand

Location under

Central Dominance

Owning Organization

The Empire