Aries: An ancient capital city, built like a dam into the breast of a great river. Aqueducts that act as streets and irrigation channels, quenching the gardens and sweeping refuse downstream. The force of spring storms harnessed to turn colossal mill wheels.
Taurus: A wandering empire, now lost to time. An empire known only by the milestones they left behind, carefully drilled with holes to produce musical tones when the wind is right. Distant whistling guiding travelers along the highways of the ancient world.
Gemini: An abandoned empire. Arid stone cities carved into the faces of cliffs or the peaks of mountains, completely inaccessible on foot. Massive cages and trapping pits, built for impossibly large prey. To this day, it is unclear what they were meant to hold.
Cancer: An empire known only by the tombs they left behind. Unmarked stone sepulchers constructed at the bottoms of lakes. Whatever the business of these people was, it was profitable. Corpses ritually stuffed with salt and silver coins. Curiously, all female.
Leo: The newest face of an empire as old as time itself. The imperial library is said to be so vast and deep that it has never been completely mapped. The tides of history have swept through this citadel a thousand times over, and the librarians have learned to protect it. Endless secret basements and dungeons of ironclad tomes in long dead languages.
Virgo: An empire of pine needles and winter wind. Fortresses hewn from mountains, built like towering stone planters house garden priestesses that tend to the groves of sacred trees. An empire that did not conquer the old growth, but became a part of it.
Libra: An empire of many colors. Disparate, fractured peoples finding a home where the rivers meet. Exiled kings and rebel queens immortalized in imperial palace, sculpted from natural stone mined in their domains.
Scorpio: The empire of the valley. Cruel, twisted arrowheads like corkscrews hewn from black glass. War saws studded with flesh-rending teeth. A legacy of fear and pain and blood and brutal conquest now utterly forgotten under a millennium of sod. An apple orchard grows there now.
Ophiuchus: The capital over an empire of steppes and fields. Low carved orchestra pits and grazing fields sheltered from the rain by a living canopy. A massive, unoccupied throne, far too big for any human. A meeting place for the wandering herds. The oldest dungeons now a vault for seeds.
Sagittarius: An empire only found in words. An empire that weaves its way through the annals of history, referenced as a powerful but secretive place. Great kings and queens of the past write of paying tribute to its leaders. Its location is entirely unknown, not even ruins have surfaced.
Capricorn: An empire of snow and granite. Inhospitable permafrost and fossilized woodlands, nothing could live in this barren tundra. Beneath it is another story altogether. Subterranean greenhouses nurse what fragile seeds were harvested in spring, apiaries of pale bees, born never seeing the sunlight.
Aquarius: An empire of the stars. Great winding temples mirror the vault of the sky. Entire cities planned to cast shadows in such a way to function as a vast clock. Holy sites patrolled by unspeakable sentinels, constructed by the followers of a vindictive god.
Pisces: A furtive empire. An empire built by those who had no place to call home and sought to get as close as they could. A gentle place among salted fields that only grow war machines.
