Omphalos

It is not the heart of the City which mattered, nor its brain from which commands radiated outwards, streaking along the paved roadways and brushing by broken marble colonnades - but its navel, the Omphalos, the Umbilicus Urbis, which was the same as the universe’s in miniature, or so the priests claimed, the axis mundi and seat of all its wisdom and from which the voices of the City’s many oracles descended, replete with terror, promise, and cryptic declarations.