Generations ago, Tethemar, along the southern Whispering Coast, was to be the newest prize in the Realm's northwestern satrapies, another foothold on the then prosperous Fajad-Azure trade route. Formerly a modest queendom of five cities and several score towns, the Tethemaran Concern's hinterlands were burned by the Imperial legions until only the capital of Tethemar remained, its people huddled in desperate terror behind its thick basaltic walls. For one year, the city held out under siege, until its walls were manned by the maimed and elderly and its granaries were nearly empty of all save the rats. One by one, the city's leaders perished during the defense, or succumbed to despair and took their own lives, until all that remained of the royal family was the young Queen Sefir, reigning alone over a city of the wounded and starving. Then, on the eve of Calibration, their savior came, beckoned from his prison by the obscure clauses in his ancient oaths of surrender: Ligier, the Green Sun of Hell.
On the first day, he scattered the Realm's legions with beams of killing light. On the second and third he rebuilt Tethemar, grander and more opulent than ever before. On the fourth, he raised the great lighthouse called the Heliopilum high above the city and lit a sorcerous bonfire at its peak. And on the fifth, he charmed his way into Queen Sefir's apartments, and together, they rested. When Calibration ended, he returned at last to the Demon City, leaving the awestruck survivors to wonder at his works. Night has never fallen since in Tethemar, its towering brassy spires bathed in harsh radiance by the inexhaustible viridian fire Ligier raised high above the city as an idol to himself.
On approach to the great port of Tethemar, one first notices the light. Not the golden light of the sun, but the daemon-fire of the Heliopilum, a several thousand cubit high lighthouse that bathes leagues around the city in mad viridian brilliance at all hours. Such is the Heliopilum's might that even winter is banished from Tethemar, the climate becoming at worst autumnal when the rest of the northwest suffers terrible blizzards. As one nears the city, they can see its alien spires and quartzite walls, crowned in brass crenellations and vines of metallic ivy, massive and grandiose enough to rival the splendor of the First Age. Across the walls, reliefs depicting the glory of Ligier and his kin subtly shift to portray events from across Creation's prehistory. The harbor is guarded by a duo of basalt colossi who ward the port from pirates and foreign navies with galleon sized halberds. This is Tethemar, greatest of all mortal cities, where night is vanquished and glory reigns unto forever, or so it is written in Old Realm above the city gates.
Gifted too is Tethemar with riches, for when Ligier rebuilt the city, he rent open deep veins beneath the earth to tap for copper, gold, and orichalcum to glorify his artifice. Only perhaps Uluriu is richer in mineral wealth among the Northwest's city-states, and it is not just gold that the city has to offer. Demon slaves, brought forth by sorcerer-priests, reside here, bound to serve the city's rulers, producing exotic goods that the royal family has a monopoly on. Stranger things too can be found in the Nightless City, metallic plants that grow only in the light of the Heliopilum, grimoires of sorcery and demon lore, and cunningly constructed clockworks and automata created through long study of Ligier's artifice. Such wealth brings traders to the city in great droves, a beacon of affluence in a region otherwise slowly sinking in decline as the Fajadi sea lanes wither. The markets bustle with the sounds of commerce and conversation, while the pleasure district sees brisk trade in delicacies and delights both mundane and alien. The clangor of industry, and of parade music, can be heard from deeper within the city, an unending cacophony of artifice and celebration to honor the city's divine savior.
All of this splendor comes at a cost, for men were not meant to live in a city born of a demon's mind. Far larger than its population demands, Tethemar's layout is built to impress first and be liveable a distant second, monumental displays prioritized over efficient civic planning. The Tethemarans have neither the resources nor knowledge to maintain or renovate many of the wonders Ligier built, none have failed yet but should any falter they would be difficult to restore. The architecture is at times treacherous, hostile to human habitation, and to this day entire districts of the city remain uninhabited for fear of the impossible stairways and predatory palaces that dominate the forbidden streets.
The light of the Heliopilum, baleful as it is protective, has killed or driven off much of the original wildlife, and what flora and fauna grow here now are often twisted, sometimes violent or poisonous. Sleep is difficult, even when resting in a room with no windows, and many residents use sedatives to compensate, or otherwise stay awake until exhaustion forces them into slumber. Addictive too is the brilliance, and longtime residents who leave the Heliopilum's light sometimes experience withdrawal symptoms that leave them feeling stretched thin. And beneath the city, in the mines, slaves mutated by the light labor in chains to rip gold and orichalcum from the earth.
Within the city, the Tethemarans go about in mundane finery, even the lowliest porter wears garb of hellsilk and gold jewelry. Life under the Heliopilum's unceasing illumination has caused their skin to take on a metallic, brassy sheen and turned their hair a coppery auburn. A minority awaken the aptitude for sorcery, and are inducted into the local clergy as sorcerer-priests. Nearly all citizens hold some sort of grandiose noble title, even if they are functionally commoners. Ostentation and celebration are the norm here, and not a week goes by without the royal family sponsoring some sort of civic festival.
Among their own, the citizens of Tethemar are often generous and community minded, bound together by a narrative of shared struggle during the Realm's failed conquest. To the few outsiders granted access to the inner city, Tethemarans live in model communities; neat, orderly neighborhoods populated by civic minded civilians, well behaved children, and sedate elders playing board games out on the verandas. They pretend that there is no conflict between themselves and that they act in perfect concert, a fiction which often fools both outsiders and themselves.
While inwardly close-knit, the outward face of the city is cold and haughty. The citizens cultivate an air of bemused detachment from the outside world, projecting arrogant magnanimity onto their dealings with visitors. They are taught to believe that they are a blessed folk, gifted a perfect city that is proof eternal against the hazards and horrors that plague much of the Northwest. Those from without their walls are seen as akin to unruly children, not worth becoming attached to lest they dilute Tethemar's bounty.
A small number of Tethemarans are not given brassy flesh and copper hair, but are born with demonic features like verdigris horns and ropy, metallic muscle fibers that tear through the skin. These unfortunates are not citizens, but slaves, sequestered away from the surface world in industrial warrens or on a few hinterland plantations regardless of their parentage. Children of slaves who lack their mutations are taken away and raised on the surface by adoptive families. It is their toil, and that of slaves purchased from foreign traders, that drives the city's economy, turning it into a hub of the gold and bronze trade. The conditions are wretched, but their hell-wrought endurance often prolongs the lives of native born slaves beyond the point an ordinary man would have died of overwork. Only the demon servants and sorceries of the royal family keep them from rising up and improving their lot, brutally putting down rebellions with increasing frequency as the enslaved population slowly grows.
Before the city's rebirth, the Tethemarans were Abhari, but now they worship only The Green Sun of Hell. The Cult of The Brightlord, dedicated to Ligier, is the state religion, its rites embedded in nearly every civic function. The sorcerer-priests handle all relations with Creation's spirits, offering transactional worship when necessary while the rest of the citizens worship Ligier alone. Other religions are marginalized and practiced primarily by visitors, with some, particularly Immaculacy and the Shining Way, being banned on pain of death.
The Cult of the Brightlord teaches that the Green Sun of Hell is the only true sun, and that the orb that illuminates the rest of Creation is a false sun, shedding false light over a false world. Consequently, Tethemar is the only real city outside of Malfeas, the model community ruled by a dynasty claiming divine ordination by the herald of the world's makers. In a remnant of Abhari belief, the Tethemarans hold that when they die, the faithful's souls will depart from Creation and dwell forever in a paradise of Ligier's design at the end of time.
The daily experience of the Cult of the Brightlord is defined primarily by scheduling and prescripts. What to wear, what to eat, where to walk, on what days, at what times. Prescripts can range from mandated style of facial hair to what color to paint one's houses each year. Sorcerer-Priests distribute almanacs each year to citizens based on auguries gleaned from the strange machines Ligier left behind in the vaults of the Heliopilum, which they believe to be instruments for communicating with Malfeas. It is commonly held that properly following the prescripts maintains the good fortune of the city.
Much of the cult is a tool of the royal family, its theology crafted to perpetuate their rule as much as it is to glorify Ligier, if not more-so. If Ligier knows this, he has yet to comment or act upon it, as far as the priests know. All sorcerer-priests are subordinate to the royal household, treating the demon-blooded monarch as Ligier's Chosen. Royal scions wait eagerly for the day when Ligier returns to them and blesses them with renewed divinity, devoting much of their time to studying ways to beckon the Third Circle Demon to Creation, or extend their lives and youthfulness for when the summonings finally succeed. At first they turned to endogamy to preserve the potency of their demon-blood, but now employ neomah to create children from donors within the clan.
For all its claims of splendor, perfection, and prosperity, Tethemar is, bluntly, a rump state. The Tethemaran Concern is a blasted, depopulated wasteland, the skeletal husks of its other cities left to the animals and ghosts. Fields lie fallow, overtaken by shadowlands, or blighted by the Heliopilum's light. The countryside population, those that Tethemar could not, or would not take, mostly bled away to other Northwestern polities or became nomads. Different monarchs have held different policies towards the hinterlands. Earlier ones followed failed, or half-hearted, attempts at reclamation, their efforts frustrated by population shortages and the geomantic side-effects of the Heliopilum. Today most Tethemarans superstitiously ignore the hinterlands, save for the heavily fortified plantations that toil endlessly to stave off famine for the city.
Wealth still exists in the gutted ruins of the old Concern. The trinkets and treasures of old nobles, left behind when they fled to Tethemar, lie in old estates and holdfasts, of particular value to those Tethemaran gentry who claim descent from the old satellite city nobles. These treasures are sometimes sought by brave Tethemaran youths, down-on their luck nomads, and enterprising foreigners. Scavengers must contend with the hazards of crumbling buildings, bandits, hostile undead, fair folk raiders, unbound demons, and the strange sorcerous phenomena that exist at the edge of the Heliopilum's light.
At fifteen years of age, Sefirion Norivar is the Divine Queen of Tethemar, Vessel of the Blood of The First Sun, Regent of Hell Upon Earth, and a coddled puppet monarch for the senior priesthood of the Cult of The Brightlord and her older relatives. The demon-blood is particularly potent within Norivar, granting her strength beyond her years, a faint aura of viridian light that surrounds her at all times, and the ability to breath poisonous green fire when angered. Sequestered from public life, the young queen is largely ignorant of the world outside the city, the intricacies of statesmanship, or that her aunts and uncles view her as a figurehead.
Archprelate Dzmarios Sorviran is a sorcerer-priest of high rank within the Cult of the Brightlord. Inducted for his sorcerous aptitude, he is an apathetic theologian and unenthusiastic demon binder. His true passion is artifice, both metallurgy and mechanics, taking inspiration from Ligier's handiwork for his own endeavors. Many of the clockworks of the city, from the elaborate timepieces that rival Varangian clocks to the brass war constructs that put down slave revolts, are either designed by him or improved upon by his tinkering. Indifferent to politics, and indeed to mundane life, his high rank is largely ceremonial and he tends to keep to his large, increasingly hazardous workshop, toiling away at various prototype mechanisms both sorcerous and mundane.
Whatever the truth of his birth family, Doz has been a slave as long as he can remember. Condemned to the mines for the row of leaden scutes along his spine and his brass horns, he grew up among other slaves, ripping wealth from the earth for the sake of a city that did not want him. Educated haphazardly by a convicted Ulurian merchant, he's risen to something of a headman in the mineshafts beneath Tethemar. Deeming rebellion unlikely to succeed, he settled on another means of emancipation, tunnelling out. Concealing his resentment beneath a corrupt strongman veneer, he hides the true extent of his influence from the overseers, as well as the escape tunnel his most loyal followers are on the verge of completing.
A tomescu of great age and skill, Iogal was summoned and bound decades ago by sorcerer-priests to man the city walls, fending off raiders. Ostensibly a battle-slave of the city's militia, in practice it is one of the lynchpins of Tethemar's military, one of the few genuine veterans in a force composed mostly of ceremonial units and near mindless automata. Like all tomescu, Iogal experiences horrifying premonitions of its own death every dawn and dusk, its twilight screams of terror used as a timekeeping by the barracks. Regarded as somewhere between mascot and senior officer by the rank and file, Iogal's binding, linked to an obscure star conjunction that occurs once every fifty years, has begun to approach its end, and militia officers and sorcerer-priests alike fear the loss of its institutional knowledge.
