The Skyward Cities - Aethermoor

The Skyward Cities is the collective term for the inhabited floating islands of Aethermoor — the fragments of the old continent that were flung skyward during The Sundering and have remained aloft ever since, suspended by the wild magic that now saturates the rock itself.

There are hundreds of islands. Perhaps a dozen are large enough to be called cities. The rest range from small towns to single farms to uninhabited wilderness fragments drifting alone in the cloud-banks.

How They Stay Aloft

The honest answer is: no one is entirely sure.

The islands are saturated with residual magic from The Sundering, and this magic creates a persistent anti-gravitational effect that The Veilwardens call aetheric buoyancy. The problem is that this effect has been measurably weakening for three centuries.

Islands don't fall suddenly — they drift lower over generations. Some small islands have already descended far enough to be lost in the permanent cloud layer above The Deadlands; what happens to them after that is not known. Whether the major islands are still centuries from any critical threshold or whether the rate of descent is accelerating is the subject of genuine and urgent scholarly dispute.

The Iron Compact officially takes the position that the islands are stable. The Veilwardens officially take the position that The Iron Compact is lying.

Major Islands

Vel Mora — The Iron City

The largest and most powerful island, seat of The Iron Compact. Vel Mora is a dense, vertical city built over and around the ruins of an old Irenian provincial capital. Its sky-docks are the largest in Aethermoor, capable of handling hundreds of sky-ships simultaneously.

Population: approximately 200,000. Known for its bronze-and-glass architecture, its perpetual industrial haze, and its extremely efficient tax collection.

The Iron Compact has built extensive aetheric anchoring engines across Vel Mora — machines that, they claim, stabilize its altitude independent of natural buoyancy. The Veilwardens argue these engines are actually accelerating the underlying Weave degradation by drawing on the island's aetheric reserves. The Iron Compact has banned Veilwarden research access to the engines.

The Spire Platform — The Veilwarden Seat

A smaller island dominated almost entirely by The Spire of Echoes and the Veilwarden Collegium built around its base. Population is small — a few thousand scholars, wardens, and support staff — but influence is disproportionate.

The Spire Platform is one of the highest-altitude inhabited islands, and notably has not descended measurably in recorded history. The Veilwardens take this as confirmation of their approach; critics note they haven't allowed independent altitude surveys.

The Scatter — Driftborn Territory

Not a single island but a loose cluster of thirty or forty medium-sized islands in the eastern cloud-banks, connected by sky-bridges and the anchor-lines of Driftborn sky-ships. No formal government; The Driftborn clans manage the Scatter through a rotating council called the Sky Moot, which meets twice yearly and has authority mainly over trade routes and the right of way on anchor-lines.

Ashfen — The Ashen Court's Hidden Isle

Location officially unknown, though broadly believed to be somewhere in the southern cloud-bank. The Ashen Court is very protective of its home base.

Daily Life

Life in the Skyward Cities is shaped by a single constraint that underlies everything: there is no ground, and ground-things are precious.

Water comes from cloud-harvesting — enormous mesh nets and collection channels stretched across the upper faces of islands. Major islands have elaborate civic water systems; smaller islands live and die by the weather.

Food is grown in terraced gardens on island surfaces, supplemented by wind-farms (for grain), hunting of sky-fauna (enormous flying creatures native to the high altitudes), and trade. The Iron Compact controls most inter-island food trade.

Travel between islands is by sky-ship — wind and magic-propelled vessels ranging from single-person kites to the massive bulk-carriers of The Iron Compact trading fleet. The Driftborn crews most of the smaller vessels; the Compact controls the large ones.

Construction is extremely conservative. Every stone and beam of lumber used in a building is stone and beam that is no longer available for sky-ship construction. The islands have only what they had when they rose; very little new raw material is accessible.

The Sky-Bridge Compacts

The inter-island sky-bridges — permanent structures of rope, timber, and aetheric cable connecting adjacent islands — are governed by a complex web of treaties called the Sky-Bridge Compacts. These were established with Empress Sylara Voss's assistance in the early Floating Age and are still honored even by factions that reject each other in every other way.

Destroying a sky-bridge is considered one of the most serious crimes in Aethermoor. Even during the worst inter-faction conflicts, the bridges have been preserved.

The Iron Compact has been quietly buying bridge-rights for decades. Currently controls direct access to sixty-three percent of all bridges connected to Vel Mora.

The Sundering — what created the islands
The Deadlands — what lies below
The Breach — the scar above it all
The Iron Compact — the dominant political power
The Veilwardens — the scholars who worry about what holds everything up
The Driftborn — the culture built entirely around moving between islands
The Spire of Echoes — the most anomalous structure in the skyward world