The Gem of the South, and the Frozen Furnace beneath the Pale Hilltops
In the Frozen South, there are yet fragments of a metropolis of tall temples, that once touched a clear blue arctic sky, which glistened on snowy hilltops like a brilliant green gem on a lily-white horizon. This city was and is the Emerald of the South, whose lush beauty has decades-faded away, but nonetheless holds as a modern bonfire of desperate survival after The Undoing. One of the oldest and most sacred human-built settlements of Atma’Zae is now merely carved out on the ridge of a slowly melting and cracked glacier. Now drooping off a peak over the Southern Sea, this still-bustling settlement once housed wisemen and oracles who foresaw the undoing of man by his own designs. In these, the Days of Ash, the pillars that once were the pride of the snow have been twisted and cracked away by permanently high arctic winds and toxified sleet.
Once known as Esmer, this settlement was the home of philosophers and religious theocrats. It is the foundational source of the Realm’s only autotheist national divinity, The Order of the Mirror, whose adherents worshipped their own reflection thinking themselves as Gods. Precious gems, predominantly emeralds, but also alexandrite, diamonds and sapphires were mined in the nearby snowcapped mountains to focus magical illusions into distilled magick, a type of magic far more potent and destructive than mere parlor tricks and sleight of hand. The green and lush gardens of Esmer grew rife with arctic moss, tundra roses and diamond leaf willows which stunned weary, cold travellers from afar; distinctly jade among a field of all-white.
Esmer-Alda has since been retitled for modern times, forever changed and pitted-out inside the edge of the Pale Hilltops of the South. After the Nemesis, the survivors of the Undoing were forced to burrow deep its hilltop and build a massive furnace in the coal-rich mantle beneath the now-abandoned rock crystal towers. An estimated 20,000 prisoner-slaves man the burners, the control valves, and the combustion chamber deep beneath this once holy site. The upper city is no longer habitable as acidic blizzards, and sub-zero temperatures permeate under a thick sulphur-dioxide sky. Soon, there will likely be no more Esmer-Alda, as it dithers over the Southern Sea ready to bend and break into the waters below at any moment.
Lore Entry # 3 (click here for art)