The Golden Arch
Lore
The Golden Arch seats thirty-four thousand five hundred, and the assessment team reports that it does not empty early under any circumstance the team was able to produce. The ice is of the givre form. Under the Resolve designation, the Kestrels gain a stacking bonus for every period they finish behind—the larger the deficit, the larger the correction. One of Europe's oldest cities plays Hockay the way it does everything, which the assessment team declined to elaborate on, on the grounds that elaboration was unnecessary. The Arch has never fallen. The crowd has never left early. Le Council keeps the two facts in the same drawer and has stopped filing them separately.
The Building
A single gilded arch, wide enough to span the whole of The Almighty Ice, carries the roof on one span and nothing else carries anything—the 34,500 seats hang from it in two great tiers with no interior column in the building. The material is not gold and the facilities office has said so in writing on four occasions, each time in response to the same question. Beneath, the concourse is vaulted brick, older than the arch, older than the manifestation, with alcoves at intervals that hold nothing and are lit anyway. The upper tier is reached by a stair that turns four times. Supporters climb it in full voice. The third period at The Golden Arch is measurably louder than the first, and Le Council's acoustics office has confirmed that the difference does not correlate with the score.