Whitewall
From Thirdexalt
Directly north from the Blessed Isle lies Whitewall, one of the largest settlements in the Northlands. Located on rocky taiga, it lies several hundred miles north of the coast of the Inland Sea. This prosperous metropolis of more than 700,000 inhabitants is a trade hub for the region.
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HISTORY
While originally founded in the First Age as a center of religious study, it has become a powerful city-state in its own right. The end of the First Age left Whitewall isolated and without regular support.
Whitewall’s history began shortly after the end of the Primordial War, with a monastery for devotees of the Unconquered Sun. Its monks and nuns farmed to support themselves. They made their labor a form of prayer and planted circular fields as living mandalas to glorify Heaven’s King. A Zenith Caste Lawgiver called Righteous Guide founded and led the monastery. The religious community outgrew four monasteries, the last the size of a town. Righteous Guide proposed to make the fifth monastery an entire city, designed as a gigantic mandala to focus and magnify the prayers of the residents. And so it was done. The new city of Ondar Shambal became one of the greatest wonders of Creation—not for its size (Creation held many larger cities), nor for its splendor (though it was beautiful), nor for the technology of its construction (most of the work was actually done by hand). No, the miracle of Ondar Shambal was that every step of its building was a prayer. The masons who quarried white granite from nearby hills dedicated each strike of their chisels to the Unconquered Sun. The carvers and polishers sang hymns as they worked. Righteous CHAPTER TWO • THE ONCE-HOLY CITY 19 Guide himself hallowed each stone as it was laid. Graven bands of scriptures and sutras ran along the city’s streets, and mosaics of precious stone adorned the walls with images of devotion. The city’s center held a magnificent templemanse to the Unconquered Sun. High, strong walls bounded Ondar Shambal in a perfect circle—not for defense, but to complete the shining city as the image of the sun. The labor took decades, but gods and mortals agreed: Creation held no holier place than Ondar Shambal. The Unconquered Sun himself blessed the city at its dedication. Hundreds of thousands of acolytes lived in Ondar Shambal, and millions of pilgrims visited every year. Many folk— mortals, Exalts and spirits alike—also made pious gifts to Ondar Shambal, to be named in the city’s prayers or just to be part of its holiness. An earth elemental opened a network of caverns beneath the city as extra storage space. A goddess of hot springs created baths for pilgrims. The Bureau of Seasons tempered the region’s weather, while agricultural gods blessed the farmlands. The monasterycity became far richer and more luxurious than anyone expected or intended. Righteous Guide left Ondar Shambal to build a sacred road from the city to the Inland Sea coast as a private devotional labor to fill his old age and retirement from leading the city. In his absence, the Holy City became worldlier. The priests, monks and nuns spent less time praying and working, and more time arguing theology and administering the city’s vast wealth. Feasting replaced fasting. The prayer wheels still turned—spun by pilgrims who paid for the privilege. When Righteous Guide returned 300 years later along the road built by his hands alone, he found his monastic city turned greedy, lazy and impious. The old Zenith Caste spent a full month in rage and despair, whipping himself to the bone in penitential grief as he prayed for guidance and forgiveness. In the end, though, he scourged the worst of the fallen nuns and monks from Ondar Shambal before leaving the city forever. To the Solar Deliberative in Meru, he condemned Ondar Shambal 20 as apostate. Donations and pilgrims ceased at once, and the city was almost abandoned. Still, Ondar Shambal remained a well-constructed city with fertile farmland, so people gradually returned. The new settlers included a young Twilight Caste named Tenrae and her Lunar husband Den’Rahin. They claimed Ondar Shambal as their own, renamed it Whitewall and repopulated it as an ordinary city. The nearby mountains turned out to hold metal ores and several rare minerals, including blue jade, so to farming, the inhabitants added mining and metalwork as occupations. Under the Exalted couple’s leadership, Whitewall attained a comfortable prosperity. Tenrae and Den’Rahin governed with a light but responsible hand. Whitewall folk agreed the pair represented the very models of what a Lawgiver and Steward should be. The Bronze Faction found no malcontents among Whitewall’s Dragon-Blooded, and so, the usurping Sidereals had to murder Tenrae and Den’Rahin personally, in full knowledge that they slew the innocent. The fighting destroyed a third of the city and killed thousands. Afterward, the new Shogunate brutally suppressed Whitewallers who remained loyal to their slain rulers. People who didn’t succumb to mind-affecting Charms or believe propaganda about “newly revealed crimes” learned to stay silent… or they would go to the other city, whose sole occupation was murder. Southeast of Whitewall, the Shogunate built an immense prison camp for the altered humans, artificial life forms and loyalists of the Solar Deliberative. Prisoners from throughout Creation funneled into Camp 17, where they dug mass graves that they themselves would fill. The camp soon became a shadowland haunted by the ghosts of its victims. Whitewall learned to obey the Shogunate, but never to love it—not with Camp 17 next door as proof of the regime’s origin. The Dragon-Blooded did their utmost to hide the city’s past, though, by burning chronicles, filling in carvings and painting over murals and mosaics of the Unconquered Sun. Despite the defacement, remnant holiness made Whitewall one of the last cities to fall to the Great Contagion. When the pestilence came, though, Whitewall suffered a death toll as high as anywhere else. The sanctity of the city’s walls held, too: The invading Fair Folk besieged Whitewall, but never entered. Ironically, the city also saved its enemies, for the Realm Defense Grid spared everything within a mile of the city’s sacred bounds. After the Great Contagion receded, three powerful gods came to the derelict city. They called themselves the Syndics and manifested as figures with flesh of clear ice over silver bones. Behind their shared mask, however, the Syndics were Luranume, God of Luck; Uvanavu, God of Health; and Yo-Ping, God of Peace. (See The Compass of Celestial Directions, Vol. III—Yu-Shan, pp. 142, 152 and 156-157, for descriptions of these gods.) The Syndics rallied the remnant population and invited refugees to settle. They also negotiated peace treaties with the angry ghosts of the long-since-decommissioned Camp 17 (now named Marama’s Fell after its late commandant, Anjei Marama), the surviving lords of the Fair Folk and the nascent Realm. While his empire still stood, they even paid tribute to the sorcerer Bagrash Köl. Through the centuries of the Second Age, Whitewall has stood as a bastion of civilization in the North—but always afraid of the enemies beyond the city walls.
GEOGRAPHY
The land surrounding Whitewall is rich and fertile, but heavy winters sweep down from the mountains. From late fall until late spring, blizzards make travel to Whitewall almost impossible. The winter’s long nights breed fear, paranoia and suspicion. Every few years, some fool or madman lets in a fae or undead intruder, and the city guard must hunt it down in the city’s narrow streets. On occasion, the Syndics are even forced to hire Exalted monster-hunters.
THE PEOPLE OF WHITEWALL
MAKING A LIVING
SOCIETY
Three powerful beings of ice and silver, the Syndics, took control and hammered out a treaty of nonaggression with the local fae and the dead of the nearby shadowland. They still rule the city with a grip of frozen steel.
FEAR
DISREPUTABLE FOLK
LEGAL SYSTEM
Justice in Whitewall is harsh, and penalties range from heavy fines to indentured servitude to mutilation. Individuals convicted of capital crimes (murder, treason, consorting with the fae or undead) are put outside the walls to face whatever calamity comes to them. They are given no supplies and are dressed in clothing to mark their status as convicts, so that no caravan will give them aid. In many ways, a death sentence would be kinder.
FOREIGN RELATIONS
While Whitewall is a nominal ally of the Realm, the city has never paid it tribute thanks to a combination of factors: the Syndics’ puissance, the city’s isolation, and its usefulness as a trade partner and jade producer.
Southwest of Whitewall, scattered along the mountain peaks, are the tiny but independent silverholds, a collection of forts, mining camps and goat-herding villages that barely survive from year to year but have done so for centuries. Some of them are said to leave sacrifices for airborne demons or to make candles that have the power to summon and control spirits.
Whitewall plays a riskier game of diplomacy than Gethamane. While the city’s fabled walls protect it from many threats, Whitewall cannot simply shut out the world. It depends upon both the power of the Syndics and the lifeline of the Traveler’s Road. Should that lifeline be disrupted, the consequences would be disastrous. The power of the Syndics seems unlikely to wane soon, but they have never fought against the Realm. The Empress knew the true identities of the Syndics and knew better than to test their power. The Dynasts who currently squabble over her throne remain ignorant. Some feel that a bold strike, such as taking over a long-independent but prosperous city, could bring them sufficient prestige to seize the throne.
FOREIGNERS
A number of other city-states of varying size lie around Whitewall, spokes to its central hub. While traders can journey to them directly, Whitewall serves as a convenient staging post and base, and many caravans would rather plot their trek via Whitewall and take the extra days that such a journey requires, rather than risk the Fair Folk and the walking dead on lesser roads and across the snow.
SECRETS OF WHITEWALL
By the conditions of the Syndics’ treaty, the road to Whitewall is inviolate, and no walking dead, ghost or fae may enter the city without permission from someone inside the walls.
The road itself dates from the First Age and is built of virtually indestructible white stone. Ancient enchantments on the road keep it clear of ice and snow in all but the worst weather.
Anyone—living, dead or fae—may use the road, and none may harm any other on the road. For the living, the penalty for breaking the peace of the road is death, and stone pillars fl ank the road every 40 yards to mark it and to serve as gibbets for the bodies of those who violate the peace. By the terms of the treaty, the Syndics must set two dozen living people outside the walls each year as sacrifi ces. In the past, these have ranged from notorious criminals (such as Mideh of the Snake Fist or the Hundred-Knife Jackal) to reformers or revolutionaries (such as the Snow Peacock, whose body was never found, but whose screams were heard for 10 nights without pause).
The city of Whitewall is a crowded place that breeds suspicion. Its buildings are constructed of heavy white stone, plain on the outside but decorated inside with bright colors, rich tapestries and vivid rugs. While the city’s inhabitants will trust and befriend a stranger once they are sure of her intentions, they will be grim and taciturn until then, watching for signs of betrayal and stratagems. Just as nobody is invited inside the city without proof of humanity, no one is ever invited into a house casually. Any such invitation is a clear sign that the host considers the guest a long-term friend and ally.
