The Adamant Champion Theorem of Limitless Accordance was created during the ill-remembered middle chapter of Autochthonian history, when the Octet were ruled by the Elevated Aristocracy. Initially the personal champion and mistress of the powerful Autarch of the Ceoran Dynasty, after his death she became a regent in all but name for his myriad descendants. Eventually she ascended into a palace complex of the Ceoran dynasty and later a capital city which at one point held hegemony over vast swathes of the Octet. When the Dynastic Era came to a catastrophic end, Telarch became a bastion of royalist holdouts from across Autochthonia, detonating the tram lines between herself and the rest of what is now Yugash and drifting into the Far Reaches with a treasure trove of supplies, wealth, weapons, and now lost technology. The royalists believed that theirs would be a temporary exile, that they would eventually be returned to power by sympathetic counter-revolutionaries. They were wrong.
Though fortified and concealed by municipal charms and well provisioned besides, Telarch was never meant to serve as a self-sustaining population center indefinitely, and its leaders were too proud to resort to more utilitarian measures to change that. As the reality of their banishment dawned upon them, the Elevated decided that instead of facing a future that might not belong to them, they would live forever within the past. Collectively, the people of Telarch retreated to their estates, ball rooms, theatres, and thrones. And then, Telarch activated the Perpetual Inertia Dampening Array, and froze them eternally in that moment.
A baroque, spiralling ziggurat of onion-domed towers and triumphal crystal arches, today Telarch is a tomb for the living, a colossal grave marker for a dead era as it was imagined rather than as it truly was. Her Elevated nobles stand in diorama perfection, transfixed in poses and scenarios they believed would best communicate and preserve their dignity. The last Ceoran Autarch still holds court in his throne room, as he has done for years uncounted, his advisors and kin arrayed about him in petrified finery. In the triumphal roads leading to the civic center, royalist battalions, war machines, and Alchemicals stand at perpetual attention, dressed as if they were at a military parade. Royalist servants and commoners lie preserved in more humble stasis niches, or exist as props for the grand pantomimes of their masters. To this backdrop, Telarch adds holographic recreations of events from her own history, replaying endlessly for an audience of none but herself. All throughout, legions of security constructs and walls of hard light stand ready to protect the memorial from any outside disturbances.
Beneath the sterile diamond facade, Telarch is a crumbling edifice. The stasis fields are present only at select locations in her precincts; public monuments, scenic landmarks, the dwellings of the wealthy, and the out of the way stasis niches. The rest of the city suffers the ravages of time just as any other metropolis. Though Telarch awakens key individuals at regular intervals to perform necessary maintenance, they can only do so much before they must return to their slumber, lest they face the long death of aging. As everything that makes her an actual city slowly but surely falls apart, Telarch prioritizes maintaining the main stasis fields over all other repairs, unwilling to let her eternal remembrance end before she does.
What's more, in the years since the War of Ashes, Telarch's nation chamber, a cylinder whose heights shed dim light and whose floor is covered in pristine shallow lakes, has begun drifting back towards the Octet. Her automated defenses and concealment mechanisms gradually degrade, forcing her to rouse royalist soldiers for increasingly extended periods to protect her masters and their hoarded wealth from gremlins, tunnel folk scavengers, or Octet explorers. Long isolated from the Eight Nations, Telarch knows little of the outside world but assumes that its still hostile to the Elevated, while the heavily edited histories of the Octet are similarly ignorant of the royalist city.
The Egress Imperial is the city's primary entrance, a towering gate decorated with holographic depictions of scenes from the Tome of The Great Maker and the rise of the Ceoran dynasty. Intended to awe visitors, it was once decreed that the gates would remain forever open, that the splendor of Telarch would be visible to all. Today the gates are sealed by doors of blackest soulsteel graven with apotropaic glyphs. Flanking the door are two royalist colossi, preserved by stasis fields but roused whenever something unwisely attempts to enter the city through the front entrance.
A citadel of fluted towers and stained glass at the very pinnacle of the city's superstructure, The Forum Autarchic was the palace of the Ceoran dynasty, a nerve center that at one point held vast swathes of the Octet in its thrall. The throne room at its heart preserves not only the last examples of the Ceoran lineage but the exiled scions of allied Elevated dynasties, fled to Telarch with their own retinues and treasuries. The Forum also contains government offices, residential quarters, and archives, as well as examples of the bizarre exercises in decadence that were common among the Elevated in their final decades: feasts of the sacred clay used to mold the flesh of Alchemicals, art galleries of servants surgically altered or augmented to meet abstract aesthetics, the brains of savants preserved Neural Familiar Casings to eternally serve as advisors, and Subjectivity Projection Cradles from which elderly Elevated remotely piloted soul-gouged proxies.
The Verdure was once famed across the Octet, a set of domed pleasure gardens housing some of the final samples of lost Creation's flora. While not covered by the stasis array, the environmental systems in the domes have malfunctioned and filled them with a variety of extreme climates. Instead of withering, the plant life has by some miracle metastasized, the sealed gardens turning into impromptu terrariums. Other life from the Reaches has colonized the domes and filled out niches in desperate, violent ecosystems, each unique in its own way. Fearful of letting some of the last known plants in the city die, Telarch has done little more than block off the Verdure, letting only water and energy enter the district.
A several story brutalist cylinder made stark against the city's otherwise byzantine aesthetics, The Spire of Concern was where the ruling dynasty stored their most dreaded artifact weapons and experimental prototypes. When the Dynastic Era collapsed, the fleeing Elevated added their own doomsday devices to its vaults. Over the years, Telarch has obsessively cataloged every item several times over as an exercise to stave off less productive forms of madness. Any who manage to make it into the armory-spire would find that she has turned it into something of a museum, her musings and annotations on its contents playing endlessly over the audio systems, somewhere between guided tour and stream of consciousness.
Blunt, practical, and modest, the Soulsteel caste engineer Architect of Imperative Outcomes, is everything Telarch is not. His pragmatic genius is exactly why Telarch regularly awakens him to perform maintenance on her failing systems, and of the city's few waking residents he is one of the most aware of just how much time has passed since the Dynastic Era's end. When the decision was made to activate the stasis fields, Architect withheld his own objections out of love for his masters. Now, after centuries of intermittent awakenings tending to a slowly decaying mausoleum-city, he increasingly views the entire exercise as a lost cause and his masters as irreal parodies of themselves.
The Autuarch's heir presumptive, Ceoran Idone was raised from birth to inherit a throne that would never be hers. When the stasis fields went up, the young woman chose to spend her last waking moments alone on a balcony overlooking her favorite vista of the cityscape. A few days ago, the stasis field preserving her sputtered out. Telarch has advised her to remain inside her residence until the field can be repaired, but Idone retains a spark of youthful rebelliousness that her tutors could not erase, and has been making surreptitious expeditions into the city, more out of curiosity than anything else.
A fanatical old soldier, General Ardellan was one of the leaders of the royalist holdouts and part of the faction that proposed activating the stasis fields. For years uncounted he sat upon war-rodent steed in his parade livery, sword raised in defiance of time and reality. Now Telarch rouses him from his slumber to oversee patrols and direct refortification efforts with increasing frequency. The old man views the outside world as fallen to degeneracy, his proud civilization destroyed by grasping usurpers, inventing lurid stories of how he imagines the modern day to be. Ardellan has begun preemptive offensives against tunnel folk bands detected near the city, believing that in the absence of the Elevated, the entire Octet has collapsed and that the tunnel folk are all that's left of humanity outside Telarch.
A Nuradi eleemosyne on pilgrimage by foot, Ormea stumbled across the outskirts of Telarch by chance after taking a wrong turn in the Reaches. By stroke of luck the mendicant managed to avoid the security measures and find a way into the city's more neglected precincts. While possessed of neither a plutarch's eye for sums or a sodalt's technical aptitude, Ormea recognizes a big pile of resources when she sees it, a big, potentially lifesaving pile of resources that Nurad desperately needs. The treasure trove could also be her tomb however, the mendicant's supplies are running low and she has no idea how to get back to Nurad.
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
