The Ivory Towers
At the northern extent of the drifting islands, unanchored to any foundation, the towers of the Lumina shine in radiant defiance of the void — reachable only by flight or by magic, and painfully bright to look at.
The Land
Inside, manicured courtyards and sealed micro-ecosystems preserve flora, fauna and fragile relics rescued from lands that have already gone, untouched by the monochrome drain below. The towers are as much vault as city.
Lumenhal is the seat of the Observatory, and holds the Deep Lens: nine ground lenses stacked over a still pool sixty feet across, aligned once a generation, capable of resolving things in the sky no other people know are there. It is used four nights a year and guarded the other three hundred and sixty-one.
The Lumina
Bright, regal and physically solid where other Wisps are not, their skin alabaster or pale gold and their hair lit with warm ambient sunlight. They dress in layered monastic silks of saffron, lotus pink and gold, accented with brass torcs and ceremonial crowns.
Theirs is a path of active physical preservation through radiant discipline: planar architecture and ward-craft studied in the towers, sanctuary cloisters maintained, end-stage specimens lifted out of World's End and set into living light-stasis. They can manifest barriers of solid luminescence that repel the Void and scorch the Hunger, emit solar frequencies that slow decay, and freeze biological entropy outright.
They respect the recording rites of the Memoria and dismiss their cousins' stoicism as passive surrender, which is a difficult sentence to hear said politely.
Encounters
Roll d100. Sealed, guarded, and mostly indoors. What gets in is either invited or very determined. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–10 | 1d4 Lumina wardens, radiant, courteous, and not opening the gate | — |
| 11–18 | 2d6 preserved specimens in living light-stasis, awake, aware, and able to speak | — |
| 19–25 | a courier who cannot reach the towers, circling, out of lift and out of time | — |
| 26–32 | 1d6 starwort blooms opening by constellation in a sealed courtyard, on schedule | — |
| 33–38 | 2d4 silk spiders in a tower loft, weaving ceremonial silks, unpaid | ½ |
| 39–44 | 1d4 fireflies, greater, drifting between towers on a swarm night | ½ |
| 45–50 | 1d3 jumping spiders on the outer stonework, a very long way up | 1 |
| 51–56 | 1d2 rescued butterflies from a land already gone, the last of their kind, loose | 1 |
| 57–62 | 1d4 moths at the tower light, and the ward-crews trying to shoo them off | 2 |
| 63–68 | ward failure on an outer cloister, and a micro-ecosystem beginning to grey | — |
| 69–74 | 1d2 house centipedes in the vaults, arriving from a ceiling | 3 |
| 75–80 | 1d3 Memoria who have come to sing a specimen's final song, uninvited | — |
| 81–85 | 1d2 Hunger-corrupted crawlers on the tower's underside, eating the memory of the stone | 8 |
| 86–90 | 1 bat between the towers, for which the fall is not a consideration | 10 |
| 91–93 | 1d2 preservation subjects that have woken up wrong and are asking for the Lumina by name | 12 |
| 94–96 | 1 greater Hunger-form that has reached the cloisters and is unmaking them | 16 |
| 97–98 | 1 barn owl over the drift, silent, hearing you through the stone | 19 |
| 99 | 1 magpie at a vault window with a relic it should not be able to hold | 17 |
| 00 | a void-breach in an outer tower, and the Lumina are already conceding it | 24 |