Places
Settlements, regions, landmarks, ruins, and other places worth knowing.
39 published entriesAurelia, the Unpoor City
Aurelia is one of the great Prosperiticer cities and perhaps the clearest demonstration of what a society looks like when material wealth is ordinary. Its public buildings use materials other nations reserve for palaces. Farmers travel roads better maintained than royal avenues elsewhere. Ordinary h
Bastion Argent
Bastion Argent is a fortress, military academy, logistics center, and strategic school famous for producing Prosperiticer officers. Its training culture treats waste as a form of incompetence. Students are taught that bravery is useful, but arranging a battle so bravery becomes unnecessary is prefer
Corian
Built in the center of An'kor after the Demian warning, Corian is the youngest great nation and the political heart of the surviving world. It was created specifically because no old capital could be trusted to represent everyone. Every people contributed something to its construction, which means i
Dieselbeard's First Foundry
Preserved deep within the Thundering Heights is the workshop traditionally identified as the place where Dieselbeard refined the first successful batch of Diesel and built the earliest engines that used it. Historians argue about how much of the current site is original. Diesel Dwarves argue that hi
Drill City Nine
Drill City Nine was built around a machine so large that the settlement eventually took its name from the drill rather than the other way around. When the shield withdrew, evacuation orders came too late to save most of the industrial equipment. Long-range observers occasionally report lights, vibra
Lyrassa, City of Glass Tides
Lyrassa is one of the greatest surviving Aquarian cities, built vertically around a deep ocean trench. Crystal towers descend toward darkness while living coral districts rise toward warmer water. Entrances exist in every direction because Aquarians have little reason to respect the surface world's
Morcant, the Returning City
Morcant was lost during the expansion of Xanaras after a defense that killed large numbers of Zompire soldiers. What happened eleven weeks later is poorly documented because by then the city was outside the shield. Stories claim that some of the dead returned among the ruins only to be killed again
Relay Prime
Relay Prime is the largest surviving hub of the Technobeast network. Communication towers, buried cables, data centers, workshops, power systems, drone docks, and transmission arrays fill the settlement. To a Technobeast, it is infrastructure. To many visitors, it looks as though an entire city was
Sanctuary Reef
Sanctuary Reef is an Aquarian settlement built around the idea that preservation applies to people as well as books and ecosystems. Demians fleeing persecution, discarded Mutamons, political refugees, wounded travelers, endangered scholars, and people who simply have nowhere else to go can sometimes
Severance Station
Severance Station was once a major network exchange connecting several regions now swallowed by Xanaras. During the retreat, technicians attempted to preserve its data cores while physically cutting the station off from the surviving network. Some systems may still contain enormous archives from bef
The Archive of Many Copies
Founded after the destruction of the old Aquarian repositories, the Archive of Many Copies is less a single library than a philosophy turned into architecture. Every important record stored there is copied into multiple media and sent to other settlements whenever possible. Technobeast storage, magi
The Black Vein Basin
Once the richest industrial mining region outside the Thundering Heights, the Black Vein Basin supplied enough raw material to feed refineries across several nations. Its loss was one of the moments Diesel Dwarves understood that Xanaras threatened not only territory but the physical substance their
The Blue Vaults of Namaris
Before Xanaras, Namaris was one of the largest historical repositories in the Aquarian world. The Blue Vaults supposedly contained copies of treaties, extinct languages, magical theories, genealogies, maps, and histories reaching farther back than most surviving surface archives. Namaris was lost as
The Briar Wards
The Briar Wards began centuries ago as one of the overcrowded districts where unwanted Demian families were pushed together. Over generations the slum became a permanent community, then a city district, and finally a place Demians defend with fierce pride even after legal restrictions around them we
The Chapel of the Final Hunger
One of the better-known names associated with Zompire Xanaras worship is the Chapel of the Final Hunger, although it is unclear whether the 'chapel' is one permanent place or a title reused by several death cult cells. Meetings are rumored to occur near the shieldline, where cultists can watch terri
The Core
Far beneath Corian sits the enormous sphere of concentrated energy that generates the shield protecting what remains of An'kor. Diesel Dwarf shafts and foundations surround it. Technobeast systems monitor it. Aquarian magic, Genevolver science, Demian-called natural forces, and Prosperiticer guardia
The Corian Deepworks
Beneath Corian stretches the enormous network of shafts, support structures, maintenance tunnels, pumps, lifts, machine rooms, emergency chambers, and access ways excavated by Diesel Dwarves during construction of the Core. Some Deepworks tunnels are now effectively underground neighborhoods. Others
The Eleven Bells
The Eleven Bells is a Zompire city whose institutions are built around the certainty that death creates an absence rather than an ending. Eleven great bells are used to mark resurrection periods, legal waiting times, military return dates, and the expected reappearance of important citizens. Inherit
The Field of Eleven Graves
Centuries before Xanaras, two Zompire armies fought repeatedly over the same stretch of land. Soldiers killed in one battle returned eleven weeks later and often rejoined a war that had never properly ended. Graves accumulated in layers until nobody could agree which burial belonged to which death.
The First Cage
The ruins traditionally identified as Professor Alvas's original laboratory became a Technobeast historical site long before Xanaras. The place where uplifted animals were created, employed, confined, learned to modify one another, and eventually revolted was preserved with uncomfortable care. The F
The Garden of Failed Saints
Despite the name, this was never a religious site. It was a remote Genevolver research estate where generations of experimental subjects were kept after being judged too valuable to kill and too unstable to release. The name was supposedly coined by a visiting scholar who thought rows of altered bod
The Gilded Reach
The Gilded Reach was a broad region of Prosperiticer estates, workshops, vineyards, private collections, country palaces, and fortified roads. When Xanaras advanced, enormous amounts of wealth were simply abandoned because wagons, vaults, and treasure were less valuable than evacuation time. From a
The Green Moot
The Green Moot is a broad living sanctuary where Demian naturalists, priests, elders, healers, and representatives from different communities gather. It is one of the places associated with the old Demian tradition of calling upon the forces of nature, the same broad tradition that contributed to th
The Helix Courts
The Helix Courts are the largest surviving concentration of Genevolver universities, surgical institutes, laboratories, specimen houses, and research families. To visitors, the district looks equal parts academic city and place where several laws of nature have been formally asked to leave. Genevolv
The Hollow Refuge
The Hollow Refuge is a hidden settlement founded by escaped and discarded Mutamons in a network of old quarries and natural caverns. Its exact location is deliberately kept vague in public records because too many Genevolvers still consider individual residents stolen property. Life there is difficu
The Houses of Open Doors
Scattered through surviving Demian territory are old communal houses built for children and adults rejected by their families because of visible hybrid traits. Some are now formal institutions. Others are simply large homes maintained by extended families who remember what abandonment did to earlier
The Impact Scar
The object that carried the first known manifestation of Xanaras struck An'kor here. Whatever landscape existed before the impact is gone. The region is now a vast wound of alien matter, altered geology, and structures so large that explorers argue over whether they are organs, terrain, or both. No
The Northeastern Fracture
Along the northeastern shieldline, rumors persist of a weakness large enough for some Feeders to cross into protected territory. The stories disagree on its size, location, cause, and whether the weakness is permanent. What matters is that enough credible sightings exist for military patrols to take
The Old Warrens of Keth
Keth was one of the earliest known places where abandoned Demians formed a stable community large enough to survive without hiding individual families among human settlements. Much of the later Demian identity was shaped by stories of the Warrens, though the surviving accounts disagree on whether th
The Open Circuit
The Open Circuit is a vast public archive and technical institution built around the principle that useful knowledge should not be trapped in one laboratory. Designs, historical records, medical procedures, engineering manuals, maps, and research are copied and distributed from here whenever law, se
The Pelagor Observatory
Pelagor was built in deep water to study magical currents, astronomical phenomena, tides, and changes in the world that surface observatories could not measure. Some Aquarians believe its instruments recorded unusual activity before the Demian prophecy of Xanaras, although nobody remembers enough of
The Red Conservatory
The Red Conservatory specializes in the cultivation, preservation, and study of living tissue. Its halls contain organs kept alive outside bodies, experimental plants, preserved mutations, bloodlines maintained for research, and biological samples from nearly every people in An'kor. The Conservatory
The Shieldline
The shield has no single border wall. Its edge cuts across mountains, ruins, fields, coastlines, tunnels, rivers, and open sea. In some places it is visible as a distortion of light or magic. In others, people know where it stands because the world on one side is inhabited and the world on the other
The Silent Menagerie
Long before Demians existed as a people, the Silent Menagerie was a vast complex where wealthy humans kept, bred, displayed, worked, and fought animals. Later Demian histories remember it as one of many places representing the grotesque relationship between possession, status, cruelty, and the anima
The Thundering Heights
The Thundering Heights are the ancestral mountains of the Diesel Dwarves and remain one of the loudest inhabited regions in An'kor. Entire peaks have been hollowed into mines, refineries, workshops, lifts, ventilation shafts, rail tunnels, engine halls, and settlements stacked through layers of ston
The Treasury Without Ledger
Beneath an old Prosperiticer estate lies a vault complex whose contents predate the oldest reliable records of where Prosperiticer wealth came from. Coins, raw metals, gems, sealed containers, art objects, and materials of uncertain origin have been catalogued repeatedly, but no surviving document e
The White Theatre
The White Theatre was once one of the most prestigious surgical laboratories in Genevolver history. Several procedures still used in modern medicine were first demonstrated there before audiences of students and patrons. It is equally infamous because many demonstrations involved unwilling subjects.
Valesse, the Empty Palace City
Valesse was built as a city of courts, diplomacy, artistic patronage, and elite residences. It contained archives of noble correspondence, military treaties, private collections, and objects acquired from nearly every people in An'kor. The city fell quickly during the contraction of the shield and w
Veyr Manor
The old estate associated with Sevrin Veyr and Mara still exists, although centuries of rebuilding, violence, abandonment, occupation, and renovation have made it difficult to know which parts belong to the original structure. The cellars where Mara was imprisoned are preserved with far less agreeme