Luminias
It is said that in all the Four Kingdoms, there are no songs more heartbreaking than the Alfar 's laments for Luminias, the lost city of Light. To this day the Dawn Elves raise their crystal towers and halls in memory and image of the First City.
The spires of Luminias were woven from clouds and spun from trees, shaped from gemstones and sculpted from light and song. In a time when wishes and thoughts could shape reality, the City of Light was a place where countless minds combined their joy and passion to make a single sanctuary of beauty. Those immortals who saw its wonders and still live cannot find the words to share it with mortals. There can be nothing like it in this world of Four Kingdoms.
Here, in the First City, the First Minds loved, and fought, and created, and mourned.
Demographics
In the time before the Four Kingdoms, sentient life was difficult to classify. Minds could shape themselves from anything, to resemble anything. They were known collectively as The First Minds, and are, roughly, the proto-forms of the Fey and Elves.
Government
The Fist Minds gathered around those of their kindred who showed the most wisdom, passion, expression or power. There was no formal government of Luminias, but there certainly were leaders.
Defences
Luminias needed no walls. When it was assailed by the Infernals and their Fiends, the people of the city raised barriers of song, wrath, and grief.
Infrastructure
Towers that rose into the clouds, gems and nets of pure light. Luminias was a city of wonders.
History
When the Long Night ended and the Dawn World began, it was filled with dreams and stories from the World Before. Light permeated all creation, raw energy and matter, and it lived as surely as the minds that awakened within it. Those minds congregated, seeking joy in companionship, and together they explored the tales and emotions left over from the previous reality.
Many of these minds gathered in one place and shared their ideas and dreams with each other. They shaped the elements into reflections of the leftover memories, but added their own ideas. They saw visions of towers and palaces, and grew them from living flowers. They dreamed of cathedrals and monuments, and shaped new ones from light and gemstones. One would raise a tower and another would cover it with tangible melodies. They iterated and played and created beauty together, and their joy drew others to them. Their home came to be called Luminias, the City of Light.
Time flowed different before the First Day. Untold ages passed as the First Minds expanded their city, pared it back down. They feuded amongst themselves for the sheer joy of conflict, weaving poems and war dances when two minds disagreed on how to create or decorate something. Afterwards they feasted together, delighting in the drama and passion of it all.
Then, a new mind came to them--Barash, the Hunter. They spent countless aeons flowing through the world of Dawn, following memories of great battles and terrible beasts. From their imaginings, monsters and leviathans wove themselves out of the Dawn for them to challenge. They came to the towers of Luminias draped in pelts and covered in bones, and the First Minds flocked about them, for this was a new game, sensations they'd yet to savor. Barash shared their tales with the people of the city and was celebrated and elevated among them. Many reclothed themselves as hunters or warriors, filling the city with the sound of drums and war cries. Just as they took joy in peace and creation, so they delighted in the thrill of danger.
But Loetne, wise and fierce, took the bones from Barash's back and the pelts from their chest and put them back together in new shapes. As Barash invoked the memory of mighty hunters, Loetne found strands of stories loose in the primordial dawn of great beasts, ferocious and untamed, and from those memories and the roar of their own soul Loetne brought forth monsters unconquerable and beautiful. The monsters of Loetne's imagination turned the hunt on Barash, challenged the hunters of Luminias, tested them and pushed them beyond the glories of their trophies.
Barash, the Hunter, led the First Minds away from Luminias into the wildlands of Loetne's heart, where Behemoths prowled and great scaled leviathans flashed in colors undreamt by mortals. Through forests of song and rocky highlands of heartbeats the hunters followed Barash. One by one the massive monsters overwhelmed the hunters, and they knew what it meant to be hunted before they flowed shapelessly back to Luminias, to form new shapes for themselves. In the end, only Barash remained, in the fiery core. Loetne became a towering servant of liquid hot metal that crashed down around Barash, who set themself ablaze to match Loetne's heat. Loetne became a bolt of thunder that echoed within the fiery chamber, and Barash let the thunder echo in their chest and roar in their ears. Loetne became a mountain of ice that fell from above atop Barash, and Barash let the weight press down upon them, a comfort instead of a burden.
In Barash, Loetne found one who was not only a hunter, one who did not simply endure the ferocity of Loetne's heart, but immersed themselves in it, embraced the fire and the frost and the thunder of Loetne's essence. They found each other, and the joy of their battles and struggles echoed across the Dawn.
From that moment, Barash did not simply hunt the monsters of Barash' own memory, but eagerly pursued the beasts of Loetne's heart, who pursued Barash in return, and so they pursued each other until the end of their days.
The Incursion
But the Light of Luminias could not last forever...
RUINED SETTLEMENT
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