Medeon
Medeon is grimy, gorgeous, and completely unapologetic about being both. It's a former Greek immigrant shipbuilding city on the Taskequan River that peaked about seventy years ago and has been stubbornly refusing to die ever since.
The skyline is all shades of gray and rust — abandoned factories, empty lots, chemical plants belching steam into a charcoal sky, chain-link fences around loading docks where nobody's loading anything anymore. Sidewalks crack and buckle. Hallways smell like cigarettes and something sour you don't want to identify. Winter here has teeth. But the bones are extraordinary.
The Lyceum Public Library rises like a dignified elder surrounded by ambitious glass-and-steel grandchildren, its limestone weathered to soot-edged gray, hand-carved ceiling medallions commissioned by the city's founder — a Greek robber baron who made his fortune in shipbuilding and wanted to rival the great libraries of Athens. Corinthian columns, mosaic floors, friezes of Greek mythology.
A faded mural of Mount Olympus overlooks a vacant lot where kids play in broken concrete and weeds. The city's Greek heritage is everywhere, in architecture nobody maintains and pride nobody funds.
And then there's the hidden Medeon — the forgotten cemetery buried behind a defunct paper mill and a rusted water treatment plant, headstones drunk-angled and half-swallowed by dead grass, a massive elm knocking graves askew like chess pieces on an abandoned board, completely silent except for the hum of machinery from surrounding plants. The city literally built around it and forgot.
It's the kind of place that keeps secrets not on purpose, but because nobody's paying enough attention to notice them. Neighborhoods shift block by block. One minute you're passing a vintage clothing store and a yoga studio with tasteful window displays; the next it's a laundromat with a buzzing neon sign and a corner store with bars on the windows.
There's a dive bar called the Anchor on Porter Street you don't walk past alone at night. There's a gentrified shopping district that screams seventy-dollar sage bundles. There's a converted canning factory where artists and librarians and freight dispatchers live in rent-controlled apartments with enormous factory windows that let in amazing light.
The Beacon of Light Ministry operates out of a repurposed movie theater with thick curtains hiding the interior. The subway smells like stale coffee and exhaust, and someone's set up camp by the ticket machines.
Medeon is the kind of city where people land when they're starting over — because there's a job that'll hire a résumé heavier on retail than credentials, because rent-controlled apartments still exist if you know the right person, because it's far enough from wherever you came from. It's a place with character, as Darby diplomatically texts a friend. And it isn't entirely a lie.
