Auxientia: See her towering cliffs rising from the world like colossal pillars. See her airships, soaring overhead like leviathans of the distant ocean. See her electric lights and her boundless channels and canals. See the steamworks and engines of incredible power, chasing light throughout the city.
Beyond the old Bāhira walls, look upon the great green meadows, the Valley of the Heart, ringed by mountains. Behold the cloudy islands of the cerulean sea of the air where the sky folk coast on sails of white, once the sole domain of the great winged wyverns that still soar among the peaks.
See her streets, filthy with humanity. See the coal black soot, the hazy skies, the smoke rising from the chimneys of her factories. See her orphaned youth and her crying, desperate street rats. See the shadowy alleys beneath the city, beneath the factory walls and the old and broken towers of the Bāhira people. See the deep places overshadowed by factories, wires, pedways, and thoroughfares—the places where light never reaches.
Smell the newsprint and the paper, smell the coal and smoke and soot upon the air. Smell the electricity burning through the bright lights of the city of progress and industry.
The city is what you make it.
Welcome to Auxientia
The city of Auxientia was founded two centuries ago when an exile named Auxientius traveled from a far distant land and led his people to a valley within a ring of mountains, known to its native inhabitants as the Valley of the Heart.
The new land within the mountain valley was abundant with natural resources. Streams from melting mountain snows coursed through the valley, feeding the lush vegetation and abundant fauna, including the terrifying wyverns that ruled the skies. The valley was also rich with lumenstone, a unique mineral with conductive qualities unknown to Auxientius’s people.
A people called the Bāhira lived in the valley among a series of hillside settlements, ruled from a single city, Mutu, built on the shores of a lake. The two peoples negotiated settlement rights in the valley but disagreements led to war, and Auxientius, an experienced general, won. Auxientius and the exiles broke down the walls of Mutu and conquered the valley.
In the aftermath of the conquest, a new city was built on the ruins of the old, and it was called the Bright City. Civil war among the exiles saw the end of this city too, when the Bāhira burned it to the ground. In the ashes of the war, the land and the new city were called Auxientia and its people—including the mountain-dwelling Bāhira—became the Auxientians.
Over the next two centuries, the Auxientians struggled and thrived. War, natural disasters, factional struggles, and threats from outside the valley threatened to snuff the light of civilization, but Auxientia survived.