The Helion — Seat of the Concord

The Helion stands upon the central mount at the heart of the rings: a great walled precinct of successive courts and gates, each finer than the last, ascending to the Sun Hall in which the Concord sits. Marble colonnades and carved pediments meet long halls of teak and tortoiseshell; bronze guardians and the carved figures of the voyaging ancestors keep the gates; the inner courts are hung with feather standards and with the long woven genealogies of the rings.

One passes inward through the named gates — the Gate of Tides, the Gate of Sails, the Gate of the Hundred Names — each a threshold of greater quiet than the last, until the Sun Hall opens at the summit, roofed in bronze and floored in a single sweep of figured marble, where the great tide-bell hangs. Here the Concord — the assembly of the rings, the Hundred who speak for the wards of the city — governs, under the ceremonial presidency of the Heliarch, whose office is to keep the calendar, open the festivals, and hold the peace of the gates. Each sitting is opened by the striking of the tide-bell and the reading of a Saying of Master Ouen.

The outer courts are open to visitors on appointed days, when the guard is changed with great ceremony and the genealogies are sung; the inner precinct is the keeping of the Concord alone. The ascent of the mount is made by the grand processional stair, broad enough for a festival to climb abreast, or — for the footsore and the dignified alike — by the gilded elevator that rises within the rock of the mount.