Kela
The Northern Polar Land
Kela is the vast northern polar frontier, a land of frozen plains, polar shelves, and geothermal vents, and it is one of only two landmasses joined to the Uncharted by land, the only one whose approach will not simply kill you for trying. Most of its seven hundred million people came from somewhere else, because the frontier draws outcasts, fugitives, ex-warlords, and engineers, and the overwhelming majority of them are men, giving Kela the most extreme male skew anywhere on the planet. The best maritime and marine hunting guilds on the planet operate from Kela, producing sailors and hunters who work the polar waters and ice shelves in conditions that would kill anyone without the training these guilds provide.
Autonomous colonies established in the Era of Late Conquest still serve as refuges from imperial oversight. The Kela Maritime Guild builds the planet's finest underwater and subsurface technology, Ioe Jerhit founded mercenary companies here to escort settlers and hunt fugitives, and Energy Wars contracts on Kela are aimed at the one thing the continent is really for: pushing into the Uncharted and finding new sources of energy.
Kela is a hard place and its people want the supply lines a distant capital could bring, so over half the population supports centralization reform, more than almost anywhere else on the planet. It is a continent of outcasts and the self-reliant, though, and the same isolation that makes them want help is what has kept help away.
The difficulties here are a matter of geography that no government, centralized or not, has ever solved. Kelan resilience turns the deadly cold into home, and the prevailing conviction is a plain one: skill and grit outlast size, and the frost belongs to whoever refuses to leave it.
New Aurenthe imperial capital of the north
New Auren once was the imperial capital, carrying the martyred emperor's name, and it was the first city reached crossing north out of Ngorrhal into Kela. In the modern era it is a mega-hub and one of the continent's anchors, a massive population and connectivity center that still depends entirely on Ngorrhal's relays to function. Heavy imperial stone and cold-tech over snow and iron, far more than the gateway town it might have stayed.
Kaelera's Portthe failure that works
Kaelera's Port was the first and only infrastructure undertaking of Varethis'Kaelera Gevurah, sister of Auren and Daer, instated before her assassination and meant to connect Geba and Kela and break the continent's isolation. As the connective society she envisioned, it was a complete failure. As transport infrastructure, it succeeded enormously: it is far easier now to reach Kela from the capital, and the port became the manufacturing center where clients place enormous orders for ships, airships, and vehicles, all built here and shipped out. A murdered woman's failed dream, quietly running as the production engine of the planet.