The Vale of Singing Stars 

Like a gemstone cradled in strata, ringed by jagged, snow-peaked mountains, most of its inhabitants have forgotten the name, simply calling it The Vale , and none know the true extent of the treasures it holds…

Touching the very firmament, and refusing to be outshone by the works of mere mortals, the mountains offer midnight rivers that they send tumbling, shimmering, in serpentine curves through the Vale’s mountains and ever downward to meadows, scattered woods and verdant fields. The streams web-inward, diverging and merging into constellation-forms. 

Where the waters calm, and gather into the wide lakes that surround and permeate the city, they form mirrors that reflect the eternal cosmos above, seeming to capture glittering auroras, glowing moons, blazing comets, and countless, glittering stars.

• The Signarch Basin

Seven riverlords rule over seven streams that irrigate the basin, each forming a constellation. It is said that when a constellation is mirrored in the night skies, that lord's farms will see a bountiful harvest - to the joy of all but his rivals, for this basin represents the agrarian heart of the Vale and its main source of food.

At the valley’s centre stands:

Eklysium, the Forgotten City

The Prefect Court, a starglass-roofed citadel, forms its glowing heart, and alabaster buildings radiate from it like the sun. Great bridges arch high over Eklysium’s many canals, connecting its twelve districts, known as Houses , and their sprawl across the valley, to the lake surrounding it.

The buildings of the inward Houses commonly feature pointed arches, domed towers, intricately carved stonework, and aesthetically-pleasing asymmetrical designs, reflecting the citizen's eclectic ancestry. Many have walled courtyards with colourful mosaic floors, and flowering vines climbing the walls to frame stone-railed balconies. Many canal-side paths and wide-arched bridges have open-sided, covered walkways. The market piazzas are often surrounded by colonnaded porticoes.

The splendour of the architecture diminishes the further one travels from the glass-and-marble central Houses, and closer to the ring of mountains.

The streets of the outward Houses twist like old scars through the city’s soul. Narrow, uneven lanes hemmed in by canals and by stone-and-timber houses that lean toward each other like conspirators, winding around and between the white marble structures domed with verdigrised copper, like bandits seeking to overwhelm a fallen knight. Their upper floors bulge and bow with age, reaching to kiss across the alleys, forming crooked tunnels where starlight fears to tread. Rainwater trickles through cracked cobbles, pooling in hollows below doorsteps and whispering down gutter-channels into the canals. 

On the outskirts wooden beams, once carved with the sigils of the city’s Houses, now serve as perches for ragged laundry lines, and aether-crows. Every street has a dozen names, most changed or distorted by time, and few of them on any map to be trusted. 

Smells of cooked fish, ozone, smoke, and steam mix into a constant, sour fog, clinging to the soul like soot. 

Yet life clings here too - vibrant, desperate, defiant - as if the very city were trying to remember what it once was through the breath of those who will never choose to leave. A realm of lost knowledge, disputed borders, and half-remembered pasts. A fractured sense of identity. Not quite Azyrites but also no longer the refugees their great-grandparents were.

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1st House - Vita

The heart of the city, Vita gleams with gold-tipped spires, alabaster arcades, and cleaner canals - clean enough to reflect the stars. It is the ceremonial and spiritual core, home to high temples, aether-chapels, and the Archspirant. Life, in all its brilliance, begins here. Thought to be the city's first settlement, it's considered sacred ground by some.

• The Celestgate

A towering arch etched with ever-shifting constellations, said to appear only to those at a crossroads in life. Pilgrims and runaways alike are drawn to its silent pull, and those who pass through never walk back the same way.

• The Ivy Colonnade

A white stone wall rings a serene garden-temple. Tended by blindfolded seers, who never speak, but hand out cards that reveal something the recipient didn't know they needed.

• The Temple of Sigmar

Rising from a plinth of pale stone, its great domes and towers silhouetted against the shimmered sky of Azyr. A pair of massive bronze doors, etched with storm-wreathed saints and battle scenes, mark the main entrance - their surfaces greened with time but polished at the handles by generations of faithful hands. Statues line the outer walls, faded by the centuries, their once-vivid pigments softened to dusty blues and ochres. Above it all looms the central dome, vast and sun-kissed, adorned with gold leaf that catches the light and reflects it in long beams across the 1st House at dawn.

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2nd House - Lucrum

Lucrum is all marble banks, floating markets, and opulent counting houses with sealed vault-fanes. Merchants negotiate here beneath domed palazzi strung with sky-lanterns and incense nets. Gondolas laden with coin, relics, and writs of power drift beneath bridges carved with coin-spirits. Patrons dwell here - and so do those who manage their fortunes.

• The Starroot Grove

Beneath the streets an inverted forest grows from the ceiling of a great cave. Its trees glowing with a pale internal light. At its centre a massive, luminous tree with stars in its foliage. Its roots spread far into the stone above. Its light reflected in hundreds of small mirrors hanging from its branches, tied on in rituals with blue ribbons.

• The Stilllight Passage

A hidden canal where the water reflects not faces, but fates. Ferrymen here ask no coin, only a memory you can’t afford to lose. 

• The Shardfall Stronghouse

A fortified manor built on a bridge over a canal. The white-washed walls and dark terracotta tiles are a stark contrast to the colourful crystal shards that jut from the roof. The owner says they used to resonate with the sounds between the stars, but she was not yet born when they last sang.

• Nebularch Court

Surrounded by drifting celestite orbs, that shift position to align with one of the signs and sigils of the Firmament, the astrological signs used in Azyrite divination and spellcraft.

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3rd House - Fratres

A bustling warren of social clubs, learned societies, and guild halls. Here, alliances are forged, old rivalries simmer, and trade networks run as deep as the canals. The architecture is warmer, more intimate - arched walkways, communal towers, and paired statuary.

• The Aether Knot

An area of higher ground, the streets around it slow steeply up to a flat market plaza surrounded by tall buildings with no windows on the lower three floors, where a tangled vortex of light and shadow swirls, and celestite orbs drift in erratic orbits.

• Starseer Aerie

Tower-home of the judges, prophets and scribes. Mirror-masks reflect the stars and constellations around them as the residents drift through memories of futures that will never happen. Dreams of souls unable to dream. Written in a language of stars.

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4th House - Genitor

A district of lineage and legacy, filled with ancestral halls, mausoleum gardens, and honoured bloodlines clinging to faded nobility. The buildings lean stern, draped in crests and stained glass. Elder councils debate tradition while servants polish the bones of old houses. Here, you find the cradle of old wealth - and the rust beneath it.

• Echohall Junction

A haunting crossroads, where travellers hear the words of their own future selves. Contradiction and echoes of loss shiver through starlit mists.

• Cradle of Iron Wings

An aether-dock for broken skyvessels. Patched up and given purpose again. But the smith-priests that mend them weld more than metals; they mend fates for those willing to be reshaped.

• The Oathless Eye

A weathered white stone watchtower at the edge of the city where forlorn lost souls, and those who’ve broken promises, gather.

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5th House - Nati

Colourful, cacophonous, and teeming with life. Canals are shallower and crisscrossed by bridges adorned with flags and banners. Street performers, playwrights, and student mages fill its busy lanes. Mirth masks danger, as illicit spell-ink workshops hide beneath the playhouses. Hope lives here - but grows wild.

• The Veiled Basilica

A massive, silent cathedral with no clergy and no sermons.

• The Sunforged Hearth

A hidden courtyard filled with flowers that bloom only at dawn. Elders tell stories they haven’t before and know-not how they imagine them.

• Starworn Causeway

A shattered, ancient roadway winds between muraled walls, its stones flecked with fragments of quartz and fallen stars; the worn flagstones were apparently cut from much older buildings. Travelers say walking its length feels like treading through the ruins of forgotten heavens.

• The Archive of Swords

A war-library turned fortress, where weaponized prophecy is catalogued like military blueprints. Each blade kept within is etched with tiny script and bound to a future act of violence.

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6th House – Valetudo

Intended to be a place of grand healing temples and divine laboratories, Valetudo mixes scholars, surgeons, charlatans, and apothecaries. The streets reek of herbs, tinctures, and chemical rot. Masked alchemists and plague-chasers flit between infirmaries, while gondolas drift beneath bridges hung with charm-chimes and fever prayers.

• Vesper’s Workshop

An alchemical den hidden in a lantern lit alley. Its keeper claims to blend fate and flesh, offering “reinventions” to those who can afford the price - or the risk.

• Splint

Home to back-alley bone-setters, chirurgeons, and amateur alchemists whose cures are questionable.

• Brass End

The seat of a minor guild of metallurgy. A tangle of broken forges and brass-mongers who craft everything from teapots to talismans that hum when liars speak nearby.

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7th House - Uxor

When the foreman of the very first work-party to start building the city centuries ago, put down their hammer at the end of the first day of work, that place became uniquely cherished by the generations of craftspeople, artisans and builders who followed them. A hundred years later a tavern was built on the spot: The Foreman’s Rest.

The area around the inn became the de-facto “home territory” of the workers of the city, and it remains so for those who still build to this day. Bonds of union are made here - some sacred, some cynical. The architecture is plain and practical, built by skilled hands for their own use.

• The Ninefold Niche

An impossibly narrow tavern layered with nine tiny mezzanines. A sliver of a building, wedged between two broader stone structures like a spine between shoulder blades. Its façade is narrow as a breath, barely wide enough for a single crooked door and a row of leaded windows stacked vertically, each slightly smaller than the one below. The exterior is stitched together from mismatched stone and lacquered wood, painted in dusky blues and antique bronze trim that has long since tarnished green. 

• Whimbrel Gate

A spiral alley over-topped by leaning houses with asymmetrical walls. Card-readers, Palm-seers, and astrologers-for-hire rub shoulders with hedge-wizards selling scrap-paper covered with hand-written cantrips.

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8th House - Mors

A sombre place where the waters run deep and slow. Mausoleums rise like palaces and bone barges drift in eerie procession. Death cults, undertakers, and (possibly necromantic) notaries ply their trade beneath funereal awnings. Lanterns glow in shades of violet and blue. Ghosts are acknowledged here, and sometimes even consulted.

• Hollow Bells Crown

A high, storm-wracked spire of tombs. Bells ring in the wind, tolling dire truths. The ghosts of wisdom - or madness - whisper to trespassers.

• Quiet Nothing

An unnervingly still courtyard surrounded by blanked windows. It's the domain of bookbinders, archivists, paper-thinners, and those who deal in erased names.

• Raglimb Steeps

An avenue lined with statues carved to honor celestial saints generations ago, many fallen, all worn down and cracked. The remaining statues serve as support joists for housing, bazaars, and lookout roosts for pickpockets.

• Crookhandle

A bent and broken bridge market, suspended over a wide stretch of canal. Known for its relic-hawkers by day, and secret duels held at dusk.

• Archivium Nebulis

A floating library that follows the cycles of the Moons of Hysh. The catalogue of books and scrolls within, changing with each season.

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9th House - Iter

Planned as the transit heart of the city. Huge docks, and caravan-staging islands make Iter seem like a place of movement - journeys beginnings and ends. Its skyline is a tangle of cables, sails, and smoke-towers. But the docks are unused and the caravans never set off.

• Grey Slough Canal

The Grey Slough winds like a sluggish artery through the heart of the 9th House, its murky waters thick with silt, secrets, and forgotten offerings. Centuries ago, it shimmered with star-reflecting clarity, but now it churns in shades of tarnished brass and bruised violet, muddied by the grind of constant use.

Flat-bottomed skiffs and crooked-bow ferries jostle for space, their gondoliers shouting in gutter-tongue, poles striking the stone banks with hollow clacks. Barges groan under cargoes of expertly carved stone, glass trinkets, ancient relics, and barrels of brined eel meat, while smaller boats dart between them, ferrying passengers cloaked in dust.

• Tollbar’s Run

A bustling wagon lane on the canalside filled with porters, rat-catchers, and shouting market-hagglers, rotting docks and leaning warehouses form a serrated skyline of old grandeur - arched loading ramps, broken gargoyle spouts, and faded sigils of Houses.

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10th House - Regnum

Now faded, Regnum once housed the city’s rulers. Its cracked statues and moss-covered plinths hint at former glory. Bureaucrats and archivists still operate here, clinging to relevance. Towering ruins now serve as roosts for intrigue and rebellion as well as celestial avians. Power lives here in memory - and maybe ambition.

• Varnish Run

Fire and time have left this temple blackened and broken, home now to soot-stained painters and prophets who claim to still see the stars through the ash. 

• Murn’s Pok

A cramped alley where illegal charms and fake fortunes are sold from shadowy stalls.

• Gloamsend

A warren of narrow streets, sinkholes, crumbling towers and rotting timber houses. An attempt at mining was made a century or more ago, but no veins of celestial ores were found. A mysterious outbreak of an illness the miners called voidblight caused mining to be halted and the mines were sealed. Now the area is home to black-market markets, and less salubrious establishments.

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11th House - Benefacta

A district of chance, charity, and whispered debts. Beggar-lords, blessing-houses, and minor saints populate its narrow arcades. The poor survive on gifts, bargains, and patronage. Shrines glow in every alley, and every third person is beholden to someone else. It is the softest of the poorer Houses - until it is not.

• The Runeslack

Leaking, moss-choked canal running between, under, and through tenement buildings. The air reeks of damp wood, boiled tar, and the rich, fungal stink of the city. By night, skyglass-lanterns bob from cords strung between boat rails and waterside stalls, casting oily rainbows across the canal’s surface and reflecting a crooked, glinting mockery of the firmament above.

• The Shatterack

A tumbledown ruin used as a junk market and squatter's den, echoing with warped music from broken pipe-organs.

• Pith Bend

Named for the strange, pale sap that leaks from the city walls here, collected by resin-harvesters and traded to candle-wrights and oath-binders alike.

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12th House - Carcer

Once a sacred isolation ward for refugees suspected of carrying contagions, now it is a half-flooded sprawl of crumbling asylums, sunken prisons, and dream-fogged streets. Illness of the mind, soul, and spirit are left to rot here. Rumours speak of vanished relatives, drowned towers, and gates that do not open..

• The Slopery

A stacked maze of steep, winding lanes between crooked boarding houses and soup-cellars. Full of washerwomen, potboys, and musicians with silver tongues and missing teeth.

• Tinmuck Fold

A half-submerged neighbourhood where small boat makers, fish-hagglers, and slop-boat dwellers live atop layers of debris and still claim “it’s drier than last winter.”

• The Turnspire

A large cylindrical tower that rotates with the seasons and tides. Its celestial mechanism always aligned with one star.