Every city is fundamentally the same upon approach: wilderness and pastures give way to grain fields and tended forests, which give way to market gardens and little blots of houses, which give way to walls and narrow streets and buildings reaching skyward for lack of space to sprawl. People need food and fuel, and transportation is expensive; these concentric rings are the inevitable collision of those truths, with only occasional exceptions for fishing fleets or long-distance water-based grain trade.

Cliopher rides into Astandalas the Golden in the back of a vegetable wagon magically sped along the imperial highway from a hundred miles away, and doubts the evidence of his own eyes when he sees the sharp delineation between the city of roses and the gorgeous, wasteful, parks outside its walls. The power to shape an entire region to serve aesthetic whims rather than human needs is earthshaking, and the mindset that would make that trade is beyond his comprehension.

Of course the Empire fell. No society can balance on such a narrow edge forever; one day, the debt comes due.