Sawa Ike
The Dark Matriarch Darth Shōjō
- Intent: To make a plot device for Atrisia and something that we collaborated on.
- Image Credit: Game Informer: Final Fantasy XV
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
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- City Name: Sarnoi
- Classification: Metropolis
- Location: Atrisia
- Affiliation: Atrisian Commonwealth
- Demographics: 95 Tiantai
- Wealth: High: Forged from enigmas lost to time, Sarnoi's interlocking kazue stones defy erosion and siege alike, their seamless unions a testament to builders whose arts predate even the Dragon Lord's empire. Storehouses groan under the weight of unspoiled harvests amber grains, iridescent fish from the Celestial Sea, and crystalline fruits that gleam like captured stars traded sparingly to the outside world. Vaults cradle relics of unfathomable antiquity: kyber shards humming with dormant fury, aurodium ingots veined with celestial fire, and ebony idols whispering secrets of the Thousand Faceless Gods. In a realm of fleeting fortunes, Sarnoi's riches endure as eternal as its myths, drawing the covetous gaze of empires long crumbled to dust.
- Stability: High: Shrouded in veils of legend and forsaken by the clamor of modern wars, Sarnoi persists as a spectral holdover from Atrisia's primordial dawn. Its solitude is its shield; only the Tiantai, those unyielding custodians of the Old Ways, call it home. Outsiders granted fleeting passage pilgrims or petitioners are ushered through rites of purification and dispatched before the city's silence can fracture. No rebellions stir its golden veins, no plagues taint its polished spires; here, stability is not imposed but inherent, woven into the very stone by hands that answered to elder gods.
- Description: Vast and resplendent in hues of burnished gold, Sarnoi sprawls twin-hearted across the languid embrace of the River Bathi, its mirrored halves linked by an arching bridge of seamless kazue a sister-city to the equally arcane Kunlun, both hewn from the same impossible stone. This metropolis of myth defies its antiquity with infrastructure that mocks the crude epochs it outlasted: labyrinthine sewers that channel subterranean springs without a whisper of decay, aqueducts that drink from mountain hearts to quench eternal gardens, and boulevards paved in interlocking facets so precise they interlock fate itself. The kazue stone, deceptively sumptuous, yields a luster like molten sunlight smooth as river-worn jade to the touch, yet unyielding as the vows of the Tiantai who ward it. Though Sarnoi claims fealty to the Atrisian Commonwealth, it dwells apart, a gilded phantom glimpsed only in fever-dreams or the desperate prayers of the profane, its isolation a deliberate scar upon the world's hurried map.
The Ports: At the sacred confluence where the River Bathi yields to the Celestial Ocean's insatiable maw, Sarnoi's harbors delve into depths untouched by millennia's tide. These quays, unaltered since the era of the Dragon Kings, cradle vessels of wood and wave with equal reverence sleek junks laden with offworld silks brushing against submersible pods from forgotten depths. Starships, deemed profane iron birds, are banished to barren plateaus beyond the encircling mountains, their cargoes borne on pilgrim backs through treacherous passes to the city's yawning gates. Here, the air hums with the salt-kissed chants of Tiantai wardens, who oversee exchanges with eyes like polished obsidian, ensuring no foreign taint lingers upon the golden wharves.
The Ancient Gates: Colossal sentinels of kazue, these western portals bear the weight of creation's own saga murals and bas-reliefs etched in exquisite torment, depicting the world's birthing throes: serpents uncoiling from cosmic voids, faceless gods breathing nebulae into form, and the first Tiantai kneeling before the rift-veiled abyss. Barred by mechanisms older than speech, they yield only to those who endure the Tiger's Mouth: a gauntlet of jagged crags and whispering winds that tests flesh and spirit alike. To cross is to court the divine; to fail is to be cast back into the profane world's indifferent churn.
The Dragon's Pass: The Dragon's Pass: Veiled in the east by a labyrinth of serpentine canyons, riddled with cavernous maws that echo like the lungs of slumbering leviathans, this sole safe vein threads toward the Lost Sea a hidden expanse of ink-black waters where tempests rage eternal. Legends murmur of the Dragon King's Palace, a flotilla of spired isles adrift amid ion-veiled storms, reachable only after seven days and nights of unyielding voyage under skies lacerated by lightning's fury. Few souls pierce its gales; fewer return unchanged, their tongues sealed by oaths to the scaled sovereigns who brood beneath the waves.
Kameyama: The Eternal Seal, this mountain-vaulted gateway forever shuttered by the Tiantai's arcane wards yawns as a threshold to realms beyond mortal ken: the Netherworld's churning forges, the Force's labyrinthine planes, and the Mountains of Madness where reason frays like mist. Guarded by rituals that bind elder spirits to stone, it repels all but the most sanctified, its depths a nexus of rifts maintained with blood and bone. To gaze upon Kameyama is to feel the pull of oblivion; to seek its unlocking invites the Old Gods' inscrutable judgment.
SECURITY
High
- Impenetrable Kazue Stone Ramparts: Walls of interlocking goldstone rise like the spines of primordial wyrms, seamless and self-repairing, defying siege engines and seismic wrath alike.
- Geographic Bastion: Enfolded by jagged mountains on three flanks and the Celestial Ocean's devouring expanse on the fourth, Sarnoi's approaches are natural labyrinths passes that swallow armies whole, harbors that betray intruders to riptides haunted by spectral guardians.
- Tiantai Vigil: The Order's decentralized sentinels, veiled in earth-toned robes and Force-tempered resolve, enforce isolation without mercy or malice. Their rudimentary arts shields of will, bindings of forgotten tongues turn aggression to ash, while their "cruel bargains" ensnare the ambitious before blades are drawn.
Sarnoi at the edge of the known world once upon a time, ancient even to the eldest histories of Atrisia. THe Tiantai who live within the city do not claim to be the first civilization started up along the banks of the river Bathi and the Celestial ocean. With its source of fresh water, fish in different colors, crabs and game coming to drink. They also do not claim to know where the city originally came from or who built it just that it was given to the Tiantai, the true believers of the old ones as a gift. To protect the devout, deep behind its curtain walls and the bridge to what is considered a sister of the city the equally ancient Kunlun.
BOth cities share things in common such as the golden stone used to make it, smooth, interlocking and highly polished. It makes the city look like it is made of gold from the mountains or from space. Buried deep behind its curtain walls, taking massive pains it is expansive going into the mountains. There is room for Jar'kai, XIanlong, Kansai to be side by side and still have room within for the isle of ants... but despite all of its space it holds no more people then that of a village. Less then one hundred, less then even the Tiantai across the planet as only the most devout are even permitted to see the city.
Away from the city the pathways snakes through the ancient golden mountains, into the hidden sea, secluded and expansive where it is legendary with the Dragon Kings Palace. Said to float in the middle of the ocean and taking seven days and seven nights by boat. ABove the sea is storm clouds almost every day of the year. Ion storms, fierce winds and hurricanes that can't be described unless you see them. Even fewer have found the hidden sea. The people of Sarnoi though, the Tiantai are often different, considered the most devout they hold congress it is said with the old ones, in caves and the tunnels below the city.
Where ruins are built upon ruins and their influence has been rumored to call for twice the geneocide of the touched "force users" on atrisia. One in every hundred homes is occupied and there are no children in Sarnoi, the Tiantai do not allow them, those who are coming to them seeking knowledge must go through the mountain pass to the city, through the tigers mouth and the fields of wheat, barley, rice and other food they grow.
Fruit trees are often traded and for ships approaching from the ocean the port of the city is always opened but the trading bazarrs are closed, what the Tiantai lack in silks, exotic spices they make up for with crops, gemstones, crystals and aurodium... oh it is in abundance here. Those who come have one final thing though twenty four days of reflection and meditation at the golden gates. Traders, visitors, those seeking power, knowledge, those who want to prey to their gods. The old ones, the ancient ones, Wapoe, Wutzek, the fallen star and the white raven, the death gods, elemental spirits.
Anything that can happen, anyone refusing to do their rules will find hostile reception. THey won't be attacked, they will not be harmed beyond refusal of services, refusal of guests to food, water and shelter. THose who do are welcomed to ask a boon, ask for what they want but there is a price. The ancient blood price that must be paid, those who seek the knowledge of the Old Ones, the knowledge of the Tiantai, the power they can grant or are believed to be able to grant. Lose that which could be most precious to them.
THeir names written down, their debt carved into their flesh as a marker... a beacon it is said in some legends bringing the old gods to them should they try and back out of offering their pound of flesh. Their child, their first borne heir belongs to the old ones but with no children in the city they are taken somewhere else.. somewhere legend speaks is more ancient deep with the old gods. The work that they have all been working on. The plague, the netherworld and other events coming to the city but the Tiantai have endured with lower and lower numbers every year at times.
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