City Proscribed
The City Proscribed is an enigmatic complex about 1080 meters across at its widest point, surrounded by an impenetrable fleshy wall. Little is known of its origin or purpose, and protective enchantments make it difficult or impossible to investigate or explore. Nevertheless, there are those who try to do so, hoping to find some magical wonders within that make it worth the peril; to date, no one is known to have entered the City and returned, and even attempting to observe the city from a distance carries dangers. There is, however, one way that some have discovered to tap the City's power without entering it, giving rise to a little-understood arcanum called muralism that apparently draws on some numen within or associated with the City.
The City Proscribed lies within the borders of the Free Republic of Avelax, in the province of High Nerekesh, and the Republic claims it as part of its territory. However, the leaders of the Republic have no more command of the City or knowledge of its mysteries than anyone else. The Republic may control the city's surroundings, but only in name does it control the City itself.
The Wall of Souls
The only part of the City Proscribed that is readily visible from ground level nearby is the Wall of Souls, a strange barrier more than fifteen meters high and probably a few meters thick—although from a greater distance a few of the city's tallest towers can be seen rising behind the Wall. The Wall of Souls appears to be composed of assorted living body parts, mostly human but with some more exotic folks represented, including some otherwise unknown. All kinds of body parts are represented in the Wall—heads, limbs, torsos, and smaller parts like ears and fingers separate from their corresponding appendages—but they are joined together in anatomically unlikely ways into one writhing, fleshy mass. The Wall is constantly in motion, the body parts moving relative to each other and often somehow separating and rejoining with no wounds or apparent injury, and the whole slowly rotating clockwise, completing one full circuit in about sixteen hours. Nothing can be seen through the Wall; even if there are gaps in any given layer of body parts, there are enough layers behind it to block line of sight—although the Wall is a continuous mass and any division into discrete layers is somewhat arbitrary.
Piercing the Wall
Flesh and bone may seem to make for an easily breachable barrier, but the Wall of Souls has proven to be anything but. While the corporal parts that make up the wall are as vulnerable to flame or blade as any other flesh, any breaks in the wall are repaired almost immediately as surrounding parts of the wall contract to close any gaps while apparently the wall regenerates the mass elsewhere. In principle, it seems natural to suppose that there is a limit to how quickly the wall can repair itself, and that sufficient damage to the wall done sufficiently quickly will create an opening big enough to move through before it heals. In practice, if there is such a limit, no one has managed to exceed it, and no one has created such an opening.
The Wall's height, however, is finite, and the City has no ceiling, so another obvious method of getting past the wall present itself: if one cannot go through the wall, one should at least be able to go over it... either by flight, by projectiles, or even by climbing. Those who have tried such tactics, however, have found that the Wall is not the City's only defense. Although some people have entered the city this way, none have returned, and their fates are unknown. Popular belief has it that these interlopers become a part of the Wall of Souls—and some have it that the entire Wall is made up of those who found a way to enter the city and who too late learned the high price for their intrusion. This, however, is an unproven rumor. While there have been accounts of people recognizing acquaintances among the faces in the Wall, they are always second- or third-hand and may be nothing more than tall tales. Records do indicate that the height of the Wall has gradually increased over time, which has been cited as evidence for this idea, but this phenomenon admits of course of other explanations.
Magical attempts to view the interior of the City have at best had no effect at all, and at worst yielded nonsensical images that drive the viewers mad. Even most nonmagical attempts to peer inside the City have failed in strange ways. Notoriously, in the year 955 a group of soldiers and military engineers from the Third Battalion of the Free Army mounted an enormous mirror on a tall scaffold just outside the City, angled so that observers on the other side of the City could see in the mirror the reflection of the City's interior. What instead happened is that once the mirror was in position, the area from which the City's interior would have been visible in the reflection was enveloped in a strange blue-green glow, and anyone who was within the glowing region, or who entered it after it formed, disappeared. The glow faded once the mirror was removed, but those who had vanished in it did not reappear.
There is only one way anyone has managed to get a look into the City, and that is by flying far above it. Flying too close is not safe; those who have passed over the city within a few dozen meters of the top of the Wall of Souls have all descended into the City, and whether some urge overtook them and they did so voluntarily or some force physically drew them in, either way they were never heard from again. But those who have flown above the City at a greater distance and looked down at it have fared far better, and it is mostly from their accounts that anything about the City's interior is known. Even these accounts, however, have been spotty and contradictory; apparently even if the City does not entirely disallow inspection from above, it has ways of making it unreliable. Communication by any means normal or magical between someone over the city and someone elsewhere is untrustworthy and difficult, leading at best to the comprehension of a few scattered words but rendering impossible the relay of complete sentences. And invariably after leaving the area over the City, the viewers retain little but vague and muddled memories of what they have seen. Still, while the accounts by those who have looked down on the City from above have been confused and contradictory, comparison of many such accounts has turned up a few recurrent elements and consistently reported features.
Contents
Despite the difficulty of peering within the city and of describing one's observations, enough has been pieced together from the recurring features in such descriptions to give reasonable confidence in the existence and position of some prominent contents of the City. Exact and accurate maps of the City do not exist, but rough and partial maps do; some significant structures have been identified, and at least their approximate locations are known. All these features have been given distinctive names they are known by among those who study or are interested in the City Proscribed, although what the City's original inhabitants called them is of course unknown.
The largest known feature of the City is a circular area that has come to be called the Great Plaza. Either inlaid or tiled with some stonelike material, the Plaza is empty of buildings, though some accounts claim there is a fountain at the center. Northeast of the Great Plaza is a similar but smaller feature called the Second Plaza. Other nonedificial features of the City include a large pit at the edge of the City called the Balewell and a rectangular body of water or some other liquid called the Lacus. A network of roads runs throughout the city, most of the largest roads radiating from the two plazas, though the roads have no names in common use; many accounts also describe canals that run through the city and connect to the Lacus.
The tallest buildings in the city are a cluster of three towers called the Needles. Other prominent structures include the Palace, the Warehouses, and the Pyramid, all of which resemble more or less what their names suggest, though their real purposes can only be guessed at: the Palace is an ornate building by the side of the Great Plaza; the Warehouses are a collection of boxy buildings by the side of the Lacus; and the Pyramid bears the shape it is named after. The Palace and the Pyramid are the largest buildings in the city in terms of the area they cover; the Needles are far taller, but the Palace and the Pyramid have larger footprints. (Accounts are not precise enough to determine which of the two is larger.) Another oft-reported feature of the City is the Inconstant Tower—while accounts of the City are consistent in reporting something at its location, the descriptions of what is there vary widely, leading to the assumption that this feature changes over time. Finally, the Lattice is a delicate-looking structure near the Lacus that seems to be a complex assemblage of beams and shafts.
The layout of the City is sometimes said to resemble a human skull, with the Great and Second Plazas as its eye sockets, the Lacus as its mouth, and the Warehouses as teeth. However, the resemblance is vague enough that it's at least as likely to be pareidolia as an intentional design.
No one has reported seeing anything moving in the city, so it's generally assumed to be long abandoned, its original inhabitants, whoever they were, having either died out or emigrated. If this is true, of course, it implies that the City's formidable defenses are automated and rely on some source of energy or numen that is either inexhaustible or at least large enough to not have yet been exhausted. Some have suggested that perhaps the City has invisible inhabitants, or that the same effects that muzz memories of the City's interior efface memories of its inhabitants entirely, that observers have seen people moving within, but do not remember seeing them. While either of these possibilities, and others, may be true, there is no obvious way to prove or disprove them, and most scholars agree that the City being deserted is the simplest explanation of the observations.
History
The City Proscribed may date to before the Avelachian Pall, and its origins are unascertained. Naturally, there is no shortage of theories. Some say it is the last vestige of an antelodical empire, others that it is an alien city translocated to its current location from some other world or plane, or that it was created by a god or gods either to test the inhabitants of Avelax or for some more subtle purpose. A more fanciful suggestion is that it is a city from Avelax's future, somehow brought back in time. There is no hard evidence for any of these theories, and no obvious way to be sure which if any is true.
After the Pall, the first record of the City Proscribed is from the Kenever, the people who populated central Avelax before the spread of the Free Republic. A Kenever chieftain, Noek Nener, laid claim to the city but was unable to penetrate its secrets, and many of his subjects were lost in attempts to do so. On Noek's death, his successor and neighboring chiefs came together to interdict any approach to the city; they disagreed whether it was a place of holiness, of evil, or of something else entirely, but agreed that it was best left alone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this prohibition does not seem to have been entirely successful; at least one covert cult, the New Citizens, apparently worshipped the city in some form, and claimed to gain power from their devotion—it's possible that they had hit upon what is now called muralism.
When the Free Republic of Avelax claimed the area around the City Proscribed, it naturally did not honor the Kenever's interdiction. Freeman agents investigated the city, but with no more success than Noek, despite the onirarchs' greater magical power. Suspecting that the Kenever who had previously lived in the area might know something useful, Freeman onirarchs interrogated Kenever captives, but learned little of interest to them—though this did give rise to the current name of the City Proscribed, which with its somewhat unnatural word order in fact comes from a clumsy word-for-word translation of the Kenever name for the place, "Ven Aioni". In any case, the Free Republic never officially gave up on investigating the City Proscribed, and still claims it as its own, but seldom now makes any active effort to look into it—though from time to time as some new tactic occurs to an onirarch they may make another attempt, never so far with any notable success.
Muralism
While the City Proscribed remains an enigma, some have nevertheless found a way to draw power from it even without comprehension of its source. This form of magic is commonly called muralism, and somewhat less commonly proscriptionism. The former name comes from the common belief that it is specifically the Wall of Souls that is the source of power that muralism draws from, though there is no hard evidence that this is actually the case, and it could just as well be that the numen is supplied from some interior structure. Whatever the precise fount, something in the City provides numen that mages can draw on to work magical effects.
Although it has relatively few practitioners and has not been studied as thoroughly as other arcana, those celemologists who have looked into it believe it to be a complete arcanum, capable in principle of producing any effect achievable in any other arcanum. Aside from the difficulty in learning it, the biggest drawback of muralism is that its potency declines significantly with distance from the City Proscribed. It is at its most powerful in the immediate vicinity of the city, and serviceably strong anywhere on mainland Avelax, but on other continents becomes too weak to have useful effect. There may be ways to circumvent this limitation, and certainly some muralists have been trying to do that, but so far none have succeeded—or at least none who have succeeded have publicized their success.