Verrho Marches

Example

The Verrho Marches are a sprawl of young civilizations founded by the Pioneers on the outermost frontier. Deep in the shadow of the partial Dyson sphere, they cling to its outer surface around the Rupture, the life-sustaining well of stellar energy splitting the inner shell of Calax.

## The Rupture

The inner spheres of Calax lie between the Verrhor Marches and the Sapient Star itself, and yet it is omnipresent. Through the Rupture, the caged sun provides heat and light and solar winds from below, reflected by the outer plates and thrown back at the outer surface. The mighty pull of gravity draws all things in the Verrho Marches to the ground, and an omnipresent reminder to all that their domains are governed by forces entirely greater and intangible to any of their civilizations.

## The Plates of Tuma

Crimson red light throbbing from the tear illuminates the ancient plates and cosmic architecture anchored high above the inner shell. Still in the eternal twilight, they lay dormant for long centuries until the opening of the gates. The pioneers who settled here found derelict machines of the distant past, remnants of civilizations long gone and their scarce survivors clinging to life on the bedrock of the living megastructure. Many of the ancient wonders were lost or still entirely incomprehensible to the valiant explorers. But one stood out above them all and would become a fabled promised land to nearly all new arrivals coming from the gates.

## Realm of Semiramis

The Realm of Semiramis thrives on an anchored plate, its mass overgrowing the megastructure from within. It is the epitome of life, a strange and impossible forest finding its way through the cracks in the Sapient Star's creation and carving out a paradise of its own. It is one and many, trillions of exotic organisms, enchanted creations of biotechnology forming a single greater entity, emergent nature.

Its roots reach as far down as the Atlantean pillars anchoring the plate, and its crowns rise higher and further still, capturing the streams of cosmic winds and energy and igniting their suns for the long night. Around their edges dance constantly the patterns of aurorae Borealis, where vast magnetic fields shield the realm against cosmic radiation.

Only from afar might it appear at first like a twisted approximation of life on the Earth that was. On closer inspection, however, it will reveal itself as the strangest, most alien of all realms under Calax's control.

## The three Rings

A much smaller wonder, yet a monument beyond any civilization thriving now, are the three rings Novum, Tavos, and Niriad, where the wonders of old Earth are truly recreated. On those rings turning around the axis of the Umbilical awaits a wondrous, terrestrial world, seeded by the Sapient Star itself and sculpted in the image of half-remembered visions of home. It is the only known place on Calax where there are oceans and forests and jungles and mountain ranges, alive and thriving with an ecosystem bearing any semblance of Terran nature.

## The Umbilical

Spanning the sky higher still is the silver strand of the Umbilical, alive with thoughts and energies sent through its core by elder beings. It was here that the first settlers made their homes, and their swarms of habitats are still tethered to the silver arch before the firmament.

The Umbilical moves and grows and occasionally takes from those it sustains. Countless tales and legends exist among all nations of the Pioneers of strange occurrences and beings wandering up and down the strand. The oldest of these stories belong to the stellar sailors, and nomads of the wind, who mastered the art of distant travel in the shadow of the strand across the dangerous regions beyond the Verrho Marches.

Skyward Passage and the wastes beyond

On their way from the Gate to the Living Heavens to the lands around the Rupture, the different clans of Pioneers all passed through the Dionysian Wastes, the nigh endless naked surface of the Dyson sphere where unknown dangers in the darkness lie. Little concrete evidence of these intangible dangers exists, but this alone is reason enough for many souls to worry. Suspiciously few records of the time of passage remain and the voidfarers steer clear of the wastelands still.

## The Notochord

Echoes of the cosmic horrors awaiting out there in the dark persist even within the Verrho Marches in the Notochord. It is simultaneously a native and deeply alien structure, an endless fallen pillar of broken pieces loosely strewn across the inner shell. Whatever it once was in the distant past, it fell victim to an unthinkable calamity and was old and broken even by the time the enigmatic Tassalid came and settled this region.

To the ancient empire, the Notochord was an enticing mystery and the ruins of their megacities still loom over the elder ruins. Some of these Tassalid structures still show signs of light and life at times, where there are likely last vestiges of the once-great civilization.

## Verrho Planitia

The scattered remains of their creations reach from the Notochord out to the Verrho Planitia, the sections of the inner shell encompassed by the Marches. These are vast plains, deserts of material as rough as chiseled stone and rutted with ancient craters, deliberate reliefs, and incidental scars. These plains are swept frequently by the solar winds trapped between the Megastructure's different layers, creating intricate patterns of streams and winds for the nomad sailors of the Marches.

The Chandelier Megalopolis

Those spaces in-between are home to some of the most ambitious creations undertaken by the Pioneers. The more adventurous of their kind opted not for the safe havens of the Semiramis promised land, but instead were drawn to an older structure hanging from one of the Tuma Plates like a chandelier. The endlessly complex machinery and architecture of buttress spires, pillars and colonnades were transformed by the settlers into an ever-growing city, reaching from the anchored plate hundreds of kilometers down to the outer surface of the inner sphere. There lie the greatest forges and harbors of the Marches and domains of several influential nations vying for power in the Chandelier Megalopolis.

## Norat's dell

Few settlers were initially driven even further on and into the ancient hole cracking through the primary Tuma plate, where an impact of a nearly impossible cosmic scale had penetrated several of the outer layers. The site, a monument to the raw brutality of the universe, grew to become a home to enclaves and later growing cities, a prominent harbor for those seeking independence, self-proclaimed queens and kings, visionaries and dangerous souls.