Veile

A shard of rigor and severity matched only by its capacity for corruption and decadence, yet also renown for its serenity and grace. It's landscape is decorated by a crystalline inland sea, rolling hills, lazy vineyards and seaside villas, and gentle breezes bathed in an eternal twilight.

The civilized portion of Veile is established upon the black-sand shores and crater-wall cliffs that ring a huge inland sea. Its seven lagoons and the great wide River Keres, which runs from the sea’s estuary through the lowlands and off the shard’s edge, each host a city-state that commands the lagoon as its territory, including fishing fleets and whatever portion of the navy docks or drops anchor there. The city-states themselves each have their own character: from encrusted and decadent, to military and reinforced, to meticulously integrated with the natural landscape out of reverence for those forms that will outlast us all.

Beyond the farmlands and vineyards and hillocks, the green fields and golden wheat give way to broken earth and mist- covered bogs. Beyond that, the outland mountain wall that protects all of Veile. Invading forces that thought to brave the ice-sheathed mountains were either turned back by furious conditions or never heard from again. Nonetheless, sufficiently mad or brave Aurumel will occasionally venture into the mountains or into their labyrinthine caverns with old temple complexes from the first settlements. Hidden truths of the past and long unseen heirlooms do still remain in those painted vaults. But for each thing worth taking, there are presences unbidden and foul that, even if slain or outrun, would lay such a curse upon one’s reason and rightness that the soul would bear it for all one’s remaining days. It is for this reason that I will dream of these unhallowed places from the comfortable distance of Aurumel civilization, and no examples of it are so absolute as the seven cities and Gylynos, the Glass Citadel.

Each of the seven cities claims a lagoon, with which it shares a name. Although not all seven are entirely reliant on the resources of their lagoons and the commerce that surrounds them, many of them are. And so all but the most negligent of aristocrats and citizens show respect to the generous waters.

The seven cities of Veile are:
 * Kylix (the City of Silent Water)
 * Polem
 * Teyloy
 * Sydor
 * Ogemos
 * Lyko
 * The Dome (Lagoon Orethe)