This is only the first section of the first chapter -- I favour longer chapters -- but there was a natural pause after this point and a longer post seemed excessive.
This story will have a lot of experimental ideas, including historical sci-fi and magical realism (if magical realism can occur in a cold, northerly setting). It is my hope to run the first few chapters of this by you lovely folks as they get written. I have a grammarian to send it to, but I'm really not sure about things like effectiveness and coherency in the eyes of those likely saner and more grounded than I. Although this first section if probably the most normal of them all.
(working title borrowed, with admiration, from the fanwork by Telanu that partially inspired this setting. Real titling will be my own, but that's impossible until I can visualize the final destination of plot.)
**
The place was northern in the most quintessential way. The light was angled low and blue over the craggy and wrinkled earth that undulated in hills and dips and slants that fell away altogether in a sharp rocky face and a narrow strip of grey sand before the great, rumbling Jobruchen Sea. The winds came in off the sea, old and sharp and curling and bringing in with them strange, wild memories of the Iceplace to settle in against the ears of the townfolk as they went about their day and eased into the quiet spaces of their dreams at night.
Shornporta was a sprawling, narrow city tucked against a rise in the land, petering away into little houses perched atop the flat places of the highlands. It was a grey, slightly shabby sort of place that always seemed to be a few year past its last coat of paint. The wind and the rains and the snows that came down from the Jobruchen seemed always to bleach away colours when they blew too long. It was a neat city, tidy and meandering and seeping seemingly into the rock. The streets were narrow, under centuries of buildings that had grown up, ornate and noble and leaning towards each other over the heads of the well bundled passers by.
Tessie Fanquist was not a child of Shornporta. She grew up in a stately townhouse among the wide, bustling, modern capital city. Tessie was the daughter of the Honerable Stephen and Florence Fanquist of 14 Framling Street, Traver’s Court. She did not care much for this new city. She did not much like the way it seemed to sneak up on them after a long, long ride along a road that wound across the highland and then submerged itself between shallow ridges which did not precisely make a proper valley but which narrowed the view to the curving road ahead and the scrubby hillsides that flanked their progress. Then there had been another dip and a sharp turn to the right and then they were trundling along a nerve-wracking little lane with a scruffy, rocky incline rising up so close outside Tessie’s window that she might have plucked a bouquet of weeds from among the tough grass, had she wished, and the low, dark sea just beyond the drop-off on the other side. Shornporta had appeared, finally, in front of them then, silvery and austere.
She was glad, as they drove, that her mother was asleep beside her, head leaning against the window, hands folded neatly inside of her large creamy muff. Florence did not have a head for heights, although she would not admit it. Rather than quailing before her phobias she would go taught and terse and start making dark little jokes that were not natural to her until Tessie was the one tight lipped, heart pounding and dizzy with all of her mother’s diverted anxiety. Tessie, despite herself, couldn’t help feeling some obscure excitement at the passing cliff-edge and the huge expanse of water next to them. She was aware of it, almost like a pressure against her, a difference in the sound and texture of the air and the glossy, roiling surface of the water commanded her attention.
She had a strange sensation of being closed into a box, with the cliffside and the city looming up beside them and in front of them and the sea tilting up to meet the low slanting lid of steel wool clouds. The sea was like the mirrored side of one of those illusion boxes where you seem to be looking into an open diorama but when the coin is dropped into the slot it does not fall past the scenery. Tessie felt perhaps that she was that coin, slipping out of sight into invisibility with a muffled clatter. Shornporta was nothing more than a place to be tucked away for an indeterminate period, at a time when people like her family were better off for swallowing their pride and slipping out of sight with as little noise made as possible.
She supposed that she should feel restless, that she should feel a yearning to get away and gain independence like any good emancipated woman would, although she was not quite yet a woman or emancipated. But although the strange grey city held no charm for her, did not present a welcoming prospect, there was some small way in which she was glad of the definition, the hint of an enclosing space. The home where she grew up was sold and the college where she’d been enrolled was closed, perhaps permanently. The plotted course of her life had been rubbed away without ceremony, and the trailing line of her past also seemed dangerously close to also being expunged. The future had yawned, open and unimaginable, but now she had a glimpse of what at least the immediate present might look like.
The road dipped further so that they came upon the city nearly from below, and wound up through close, steep streets. It was late and the twilight was nearly vanished by the time they were in the city proper, the surroundings diffuse and ill-lit by a smattering of gas street lights. The car jolted slightly over an uneven join in the road and her mother woke, bleary and not yet quite lucid, but trying to appear immediately awake and alert as she always did after an unplanned nap. She commented on how quickly the darkness had fallen, how quickly the city had sprung up around them.
The house her family had taken was at the top of the city, or close to it, nestled into the one of the higher terraces of the residential district. Despite everything there was still money enough for comfort of a grade they were used to. The house would be fine enough to satisfy Florence’s taste and pride although they would find it narrow and dark compared with their old home. It was one of a row of houses although it stood separately, not sharing walls, and with little grassy allyways between. The car drove slowly along the row, and stopped midway down, at the front gate of a tall, greyish house which would have looked blue in the daylight.
Florence tapped the partition of the front seat with a dull wrap with her gloved knuckles and the driver slid it open. “ Have we arrived, Agnew?”
“Yes, ma’am, here we are, arrived at last.”
He got out and opened Florence’s door and circled slowly around, stiff from the long drive, and opened Tessie’s, letting in droughts of cold, damp and salty air that made Tessie breathe deeper and sit up straighter as though she too had just awoken from a nap.
They made their sluggish, road-stunned way in while Agnew looked after the bags. They paused in the foyer, adjusting to the warmer but still damp air and the nearly modern glow of the gas-lighted hallway. They were briefly dumbstruck by the sight of a familiar piece of furniture in foreign surroundings before depositing their hats and gloves and muffs on the hall table. Their arrival had been expected, the arrival of the staff perfectly timed so that house would be warmed and dusted and the beds aired before the arrival of the new tenants. The length of their journey after Agnew picked them up from the station had been estimated by the cook so that the Fanquists might sit down to dinner as soon they changed from their traveling clothes. After their initial pause in the hallway they were slotted neatly into the clockwork of the house, welcomed by the housekeeper, shuffled out of their coats by the parlour maid, their things sent upstairs by Agnew and squirreled away into lavender scented armoirs by the chamber maid while Florence and Tessie stood in their respective rooms trying to see and understand their new surroundings while they were performing the prescribed tasks of changing, dressing their hair, bolstering themselves to the prospect of consuming their dinners.
Tessie shivered for a while, barefoot in her slip, trying to decide what to put on, fighting the way her muscles wanted to tense with the cold and the newness and the damp. She gave in to temptation and got in bed with her heavy silver hairbrush, meaning to fix her hair but instead she slid down between the covers on her stomach, clutching the hairbrush to her chest, the blond bristles prickling her skin. She bit down hard on the corner of her pillow case until her teeth stopped wanting to chatter and her breathing slowed. The sheets were her own, but the bed frame was not, and the walls loomed at her, dark and strange. She did not fall asleep and did not want to. When the dinner bell sounded, she rose and dressed.
**
Well then, I shall beginning. 
I know that some descriptive sentences sound good long, but this doesn't. Chop it down into smaller sentences, 