Cities and Key Locations

Falmathian settlements cluster around volcanic water sources, mines, ancient lairs, coastal harbors, and the protection of powerful dragons. Their architecture can be astonishingly refined, but every city bears marks of the faction that controls it.

Oxyhold, the Chained City

Oxyhold is a floating city of silver, gold, dark volcanic stone, and brilliant mosaic. It occupies a chain of islands suspended above the greatest crater in Falmathion. Immense chains descend through the clouds into Wittnausen below, giving the city its most famous title.

Only about 20,000 people reside within Oxyhold proper. Its apparent perfection is deliberate: broad ceremonial ways, hanging gardens, heated water, arcane light, spotless plazas, and aerial traffic create the image of a draconic utopia. The labor, mines, warehouses, and crowded housing that sustain the capital remain largely below.

The Coil of Twelve

The Council's central complex contains twelve audience chambers arranged around a circular debating hall. Each chamber is built to the scale and taste of its Dragon Lord. The central floor is a mosaic of twelve colored paths that approach one another but never meet.

The building includes diplomatic galleries, petition halls, flight balconies, and reinforced chambers designed to survive a disagreement between dragons. Council sessions are open in principle and nearly incomprehensible in practice, with debates conducted across Falmathian, Draconic, telepathy, gesture, and magical projection.

The Grand Library of Oxyhold

The Grand Library preserves draconic memories, mortal manuscripts, magical genealogies, spell research, maps, and fragments recovered from the Titan Citadel. Some records are etched into metal or crystal because paper could not survive their intended lifespan.

The library's restricted vaults contain dangerous research, disputed histories, and testimony capable of challenging council legitimacy. Three separate factions maintain catalogs, and no catalog admits that the others are complete.

The College of Sorcerers

The College receives magically gifted students from throughout Falmathion. Its towers include open-air casting platforms, reinforced practice chambers, elemental laboratories, dormitories, and observation decks aligned with Oxyhold's movement.

Some students arrive in chains or under magical compulsion. The Council describes this as protective education. Families who lose a child to compulsory training use less generous language.

The Twelvefold Exchange

The Union's great money market occupies a terraced hall where Crowns, Facets, Talons, foreign currency, raw metal, and spell contracts are valued continuously. Colored lamps announce changing exchange rates. Fortunes vanish when three lamps change at once.

The Baths of Sythara

This enormous public complex is known for heated pools, steam halls, medical bathing, exercise courts, and political gossip. Beneath it lies the forbidden fighting ring called the Unadorned Circle, where combatants enter without armor, weapons, titles, or clothing.

Wittnausen, the Anchor-City

Wittnausen spreads around the crater beneath Oxyhold. It contains the capital's groundside markets, chain stations, warehouses, foundries, lift platforms, military depots, and much of the bureaucracy that outsiders mistakenly attribute to the floating city.

The city is louder, dirtier, larger, and more honest than Oxyhold. Miners emerge beside foreign dignitaries. Broken Citadel stone is sold beside fresh fruit. Every chain vibrates with distant movement from above.

The Great Crater Works

Mines descend beneath Wittnausen into volcanic ore, ancient ruins, dragon-part deposits, and the buried body of the original Citadel. Several levels are controlled by rival charters whose boundaries make little sense underground. Discovering a new chamber can trigger a legal dispute, a gold rush, or a council intervention.

The Cinder Vault

South of Oxyhold stands an active volcano converted into a prison for dragons whose crimes are too serious for even the Council to ignore. Cells are cut into magically cooled rock within the caldera. Heat, anti-flight wards, chain golems, and the mountain's unstable passages make escape difficult.

The Cinder Vault holds disgraced heirs, oathbreakers, dragons who attacked Oxyhold, and prisoners whose public trials would expose dangerous secrets. Mortal prisoners are rarely sent there; those who are seldom return.

The Farwing Exchange

Northwest of the capital, the Farwing Exchange provides a controlled place for foreign trade. Merchants from hostile or suspicious nations can sell goods without entering Falmathion's interior. Warehouses, neutral shrines, fortified guest compounds, and inspection platforms surround a broad landing field.

Frostfälltian and Halforian goods still enter the Union through Farwing despite political hostility. Smugglers prize the surrounding jungle paths.

The Saffron Coast

Warm coves, reef fisheries, fruit terraces, and temple ports line the Saffron Coast. Its communities provide much of the Union's fish, salt, and maritime trade. Brass and Bronze interests compete for influence here, while sea-dwelling monsters test every promise of draconic protection.

The Verdant Crucible

This immense jungle basin grows the most magically altered plants in Falmathion. Alchemists visit under armed escort to collect luminous fruit, responsive vines, medicinal flowers, and predators changed by generations of ambient magic.

Local communities consider the deepest forest sacred to Nazzurath. Chromatic hunters consider it an excellent place for sport. The disagreement has never been peacefully resolved.

The Glass Marches

Successive eruptions and dragon battles fused this eastern plateau into miles of black and colored glass. Armies can move quickly across its hard surface, but the Marches magnify heat, reflect illusions, and conceal razor-edged fissures.

Firecast keeps rise along its borders. Many now support the campaign against Balthimore.

The Excavation of the Forgotten Bones

The contested site lies within territory seized from Balthimore. A colossal draconic skeleton rests beneath layers of earth and ancient construction, still radiating celestial power. Falmathian forces have surrounded it with temples, research pavilions, fortifications, and censorship.

The public is told that Grandal's return to history is imminent. The war continues while priests and scholars argue over what the bones actually prove.