Annan was from the Northern Frontier, and the Vice Dean was from Siltovis. Neither knew as much about the place as a local.
As a guest of the Ancestor, Annan was treated to a respectful account of the Lower Hive from Stablehand.
Long before the Elf Calendar, the lands beyond World Island were uninhabited expanses of purgatory, swamps, Wildness, and danger. The Golden Families left Wilhelm, but the Montreal family's chosen path of expansion into the north was far from smooth. They suffered terrible losses and considered retreating to World Island several times. This was no invention; it was recorded plainly in the Imperial Chronicle.
The Golden Families who headed south fared no better. That was the territory of the Rat Tide and vampires.
But the Golden Families had left Wilhelm to claim new lands for humanity. So Adel I, an ancestor of the Montreal family, built a fortress on Montreal Mountain to hold back the Demon Tide and Greenskins overrunning the north.
That fortress was the forerunner of the Imperial Capital.
As people settled there and multiplied, other families left the increasingly depleted Wilhelm and joined them. The mountain, seemingly formed from a meteorite that had fallen from the Void in ancient times, gradually became a gathering place for humanity.
Once the fortress became a city-state, it faced a problem common to every city-state: Living waste.
Breeze City and Betar City had established ways to deal with waste. Deepwinter, which lasted half the year, also kept excrement from becoming quite so foul and polluting. But that did not work here. Montreal Mountain was only a little farther north.
Siltovis did not begin to freeze until December. Montreal Mountain entered its freezing season slightly earlier, in mid-November.
Back then, the Montreal family had little experience governing a city-state. They generally