Frae City is the first free city, and it floats. A great rock hangs in the sky over the lake at the heart of Askamira, held against the heavens by seven giant chains anchored to the lakeshore, and on that rock stands the city the free built when they would no longer be ruled. It was born in the Week of Crimson Rain as the base of the mortal resistance, the ground from which the free made their stand under Cronus against the reign of the gods, and after the Law was forged it became his city: an independent city-state that answers to no kingdom and, more absolutely than anywhere else on Talan, to no master at all.
Frae City is free, but it is not lawless. It keeps a thin body of guidelines and a small Watch to hold them, and what makes it free is not the absence of law but its source: the law belongs to the people who chose it, for to climb the chains and stay is to accept the city's contract as a free person, not because a throne hands it down. No one rules anyone. House, guild, and commoner sit as equals at the Common Table, one voice each and none weighted, and the duties that must be filled go to the Drawn, chosen by lot and short rotation so no one holds power long enough to become a master. You belong by climbing and choosing it, and a soul who climbed yesterday is the equal of one born on the rock.
The Watch is thin by design, because in a city of the free, accountability is everyone's. The community holds you to the contract directly, and where the Watch will not reach, the Unbidden do: the self-appointed who take it on themselves to fight what crime the thin law leaves, thickest on the shore where the bonds are newest. Crime exists in Frae City, and so do those who hunt it unasked. The sanction for breaking the freedom of another comes in two degrees: the Broken Link, a severed chain-link branded into the skin so that doors close and bonds withdraw, and beyond it the literal casting-off, thrown down the chains that let you up, the way in become the way out, never to climb back.
The only chains Frae City permits are the ones it chooses.
Cronus is depicted with a broken chain: freedom from imposed bondage. But the free of Frae City take up chains of their own choosing, the contract, the bonds of mutual defence, the seven cables that hold the rock against the sky. Freedom here is not the absence of every bond; it is the broken chain you pick up and clasp on yourself, by your own hand, as a free person. The Broken Link burned into a bond-breaker is the dark twin of that: the chain you broke on someone else, worn now as your shame.
Frae City outgrew its rock and grew upward: the stone is packed solid and then towers climb off it, height the one prestige a radically equal city still allows, raised by the houses and guilds and the Open Schools and any who can afford to build, the tallest crowned with airship berths along the Rim where craft from every domain dock, so that Frae City is the great airship port of Talan. When even the towers ran out of rock, the city spilled down the chains to the lakeshore, sprawling around the seven anchor-points.
Atop the rock lives the city that arrived: the rooted and established, dense old bonds, Cronus's temple, the Council chambers, the Common Table, policed by the social web of reputation and withdrawal. Below on the shore lives the city that is arriving: the stateless and the newcomers who first make land there, where the climb begins, thinner bonds and more churn and more crime, and the Unbidden realest. Politically no one stands above anyone, yet the rock itself puts some higher than others, and wealth buys altitude and ease. So Frae City lives in tension with its own founding principle, fighting the gravity that pulls every city toward hierarchy, and the chosen bonds of equality hold against that pull the way the seven chains hold the rock against the sky: by choice, and only by choice. It is a gradient of belonging, the arriving below and the rooted above, kept soft on purpose, never a hard wall.
Three ways up, and freedom is in the climb.
The chain-stairs, free and never closed, open to anyone willing to make the long climb up the seven cables. The free way is the hardest, which is the city in one image: freedom costs nothing and asks everything. The youth climb-race it, and scorn those who pay.
A cage-ride up the rock for coin. Ease is what you pay for; you cannot buy rank in Frae City, but you can buy out of the climb.
A berth at the Rim, dear and dignified, the way the established and the far-come arrive. Frae City is built for airships, and the sky above the lake is thick with them.
The Open Schools. Among the towers stand the Open Schools, where anyone may learn anything with no test, no gate, and no access to earn. Frae City is the free knowledge-city, shallower than Thekkavar's bottomless stacks but wholly unbound: where Thekkavar keeps and withholds, Frae City gives it away.
The Council Chambers. At the rock's height stand the chambers where the Council of Thirteen convenes, the rare and awe-struck gathering of all thirteen Grand Gods in person, hosted by Cronus on the ground where the Law was forged. The free govern themselves at the Common Table below; the gods, when something turns the world, meet above. That the city mortals built to resist the gods is now the one neutral ground on which the gods themselves assemble is a paradox Frae City wears with quiet pride.
Worship of Cronus has no liturgy of submission, because submission is the one thing his domain forbids. To live free, to take up only the bonds you choose, to defy an imposed power and to let your neighbour choose as freely as you do, that is the devotion, and the contract the city clasps on itself is its standing prayer. His clergy are the lightest touch of the Thirteen: self-chosen volunteers, no birth-faith and no appointment, no mandatory rite and no required attendance, since the only worship the god of choice will take is the kind freely given. They keep his temple and carry the city's word abroad as its envoys.
His temple holds a standing offer of sanctuary to anyone who asks, and forbids exactly one thing within its walls: the chaining of another person's freedom. Every faith on Talan keeps a presence in Frae City, because Cronus requires it; one of the most diverse cities on the continent, it is so by the will of the god who refuses to let any creed crowd out another. And Cronus, by the rule that binds all Thirteen, governs only his temple. The city he leaves to the free, and walks among them.
The deepest secret in the free city, and the reason the broken-chain man is no metaphor.
Cronus was mortal. He is the only being ever to climb from mortal to Grand God, and he did it here: the man who gathered the free in the Crimson Rain, who fought gods and united the survivors, rose to godhood on the freely-given belief of the people he led, and on the twelve shards the other gods surrendered when the Law was forged, so the Law itself runs through him and he is held together by all twelve. His clergy do not know. His worshippers do not know. Scholars have come close twice and both times the work was quietly buried, and his mortal name is lost to all but the twelve, who have not spoken it in two and a half millennia. (That name is the deepest open thread the free city carries; designing it is GM-tier canon work.)
The broken-chain man at the tavern table is not a god slumming as a mortal; he is a mortal who became a god and never stopped being one of the free. And the mechanism beneath it all: only freely-given belief feeds him. Coerced or inherited worship gives him nothing, which is why the city of pure choice is his seat and his strength, and why he would sooner pin your hand across a table than reign over you from a throne.