The Dolmabahce New Palace Construction Site is a place of no small moment within the Empire, a grand palace even now rising, and meant to house gatherings of state. It is bound closely to Abd-ul Mejid, whose summons to meetings there bespeak its weight in the tangled politics of the hour. As the building goes forward it remains a focus for counsels that may yet shape the governance of the Empire, the more so amidst the ongoing Kavalan's Rebellion.
The site shows a structure but half-finished — a pavilion lately completed opening upon a spacious roofed courtyard, aglow with lantern light in the early evening. The open spaces are striking in their design, intended for the assembly of high officials and figures of influence, yet they bear the marks of building still. It was in that courtyard that the newly crowned Padisha and his wife, the Sultan, were lately present at a meeting of consequence. Aziz, a spectacled official allied with Osman Hamdi Bey, presented a party of three visitors, named as valuable assets cultivated by Osman. In a moment steeped in secrecy, the Sultan brought forth a silver box holding a ribbon-tied scroll, contrived to erase all memory of the meeting from the mind of an assassin sent ahead of Kavalan Pasha's looked-for visit. Afterward the trio examined the scroll, and came to the alarming knowledge of its potent power to alter memory.
Recent doings at the site have laid bare both the intricacies of its construction and the political intrigue that runs beneath, and pressed home its office as a centre for clandestine work touching the coming confrontation with Kavalan Pasha and the other factions. The air about the place grows thick with tension as the hidden motives and designs of those concerned wax ever more intricate.