The Empyrean

The Empyrean stands at the heart of Vestige, a sacred capital raised out of a pre-Fall luxury resort that was pulled apart, blessed, widened, and put back to work as the largest religious center in the western wastes. Its old towers still rise above the low sprawl of the Holy City, though they no longer stand for privilege. They mark sacred power, command over the city, and remembrance. What was once a monument to wealth is now the seat of the Holy Synod and one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the region.
  It is less a building than a walled quarter. Cloisters and dormitories, guest hostels and administrative halls, reliquary rooms and archive vaults, bathing courts, shrines, and open courtyards thread together around a former festival park that now serves as one of the widest ritual grounds anywhere in the wastes. The old ballrooms belong to the Kings and Queens Court as performance floors and rite-halls. The former spa wings have passed to the Light of Hedon as sanctums, baths, and reflection halls. No single faith owns the whole; the three throne faiths hold the grandest spaces, while lesser shrines and side chapels give nearly every major faith of the region some foothold. The effect is something between a refuge, a parliament, and a living museum of faith.
  That layered dependence is the Empyrean's real defense. Pilgrims come from Stack City, Harbormarch, the overland settlements, and the broken coastlines, because belief runs through every station of wasteland life, and what the complex offers them, welcome and recognition, remembered kinship, theological standing, release from guilt, cannot easily be found elsewhere. A Stack merchant-prince will publicly scorn rule by clergy and privately pay for a shrine to his household's rite. A dockworker may distrust Vestige and still leave offerings there for a parent in the ground. Too many powerful people, rivals included, need the Empyrean to keep standing, and so it does.
  Everything within it answers to the Holy Synod, a congress of religious leaders who argue, vote, and set the city's course while speaking for their faiths. Its heads occupy the Vestigial Thrones, reassigned every four years according to the regional sway of each religion; the process is kept from the public, but each shift hands over command of the city and its devout soldiery. Day to day, the place never empties. Guards and archivists, worshippers and petitioners, cooks and healers and clerks all move through it at once, and the sound of bells, prayer, and labor rarely fully stops.