Tūr Cadas and the Etter Caps

It is a city of spiders. The architecture is as much their work as that of Tūr Cadas' long perished founder kings. Perhaps more so now.

Imagine, conical towers, bricks and mortar, strung with hardened web, calcified after centuries, the webbing darker at the lower levels, the same colour as the dirt of life, meat; the used energy of squalor.

The Crawl Watch, thousands of domesticated, spiders herded by the Etter Caps, magicians trained in the ways of the Great Silk Spiders of Tūr Cadas, called the Silk Masons. The magics they wield have wrought terrible changes.

The higher one's perspective rises, the more the colours of the buildings lighten; here the Silk Masons are still spinning new wonders, delicate manses of the stupendously rich. Witch Elves (who have chosen to live here in large numbers) tend gardens of Yew, bark etched with screaming ancestors, branches thick with the cloud stuff of diaphanous silk.

Two immense cocoons, casts their  shadows across the city.  From a bridge, one can see their movement, the heart of the city, its power, its greatest resource, the home of its inscrutable creators. The surfaces are alive with the migrations of millions of arachna-forms.

Tūr Cadas, the Ghost Moon, the Greater and Lesser Suns

The greatest brothels in the whole of Macmóhrda  . The fantasies of all, are catered. Cultivated venoms, distillations of grieving, modelled for recreational use, still devastating...heavy use will change you over time. Is this whence came the Etter Caps? The alien, changed natives have more in common with the mighty Silk Masons, colossal industry made manifest, webs of delicate arabesque, art and purpose.

Each summer, a migration of Giant Horse Flies blacks out the sky. The spiders feast. These days are called the Buzz Kill.

What price is paid to maintain the City of Bound Whispers? Anything can be bought here, but there are no livestock.

Each morning, the people wake. They will always be lightly brushed with spider silk. Money Spiders maintain obscure functions.

It is considered both a luxurious and a cursed place. Lords, merchant princes, magi, high priests; visit here, but never stay. It is too alien for men, in the end. The natives look like men. But act like men? No, they do not do that.

Each night, the higher silks are illuminate--- tripped out dead moon glow, awash with delirium in lieu of mortal fog. 1000 strong choirs sing dirges in the language of spiders. The spiders never cease working.

Down below, the strange masses, lost to the venoms.

Also human flesh is a thing. But only if you are bad. Or too old. Or too sick Or for some other reason, some arachnid taboo broken, heedless, unknowing. The Crawl Watch carries you away. In the saloons of Low Cadas, 'Special Loin' is served daily. It is a staple. There are no graveyards.

The Witch Elves partake never. "Look how they ape the Masons", they say "they will never be like them!" And they laugh.

Black Triangles over Macmóhrda

Macmóhrda is a grey-green island in the middle of a cold grey-green sea. It's people are tactiturn and strange. For centuries, they were ruled by druids from the deep and tangled forests. When the Church of Metronon arrived on the Island, they proclaimed it a bastion for the Torquemadan Empire. But then the Black Triangles arrived and all  contact was lost with the Island.

At the same time, cataclysm sruck across the world as the Moon fell from the sky, breaking into pieces across the land and devastating wherever and upon whatever it fell. Were these two events connected? Nobody knows. Not for sure.

When what remained of the Torquemadan Empire returned (to lay their hands upon the copious silver of the Island...needed to combat ever increasing numbers of Were-Beasts), they found a weird peace. 12 motionless Black Triangles in the sky and a populace that seemed to ignore them.

They say the old druids are back in the woods and that they have come from the Black Triangles. The Old Druids whisper from the wood dark, but only to children. Sometimes they take the Children away.

Some of the Children they kidnap, return and do strange things like turn into giant, mega brained prawns. Prawn 'things' (not the kind they sell in Iceland to poor mothers).

These mutations are then taken removed to creches maintained by virgins. From here, they occasionally confess to their carers, how to create items of magic-rechnology never before witnessed.

The Church of Metronon is horrified. There is so much to burn here. But the natives are more than happy to attend Church. The people of the wood said it was ok. It won't make a difference.