solarium
Heart of the Sun. Citadel of Law.
At least, that’s how they sell it.
To hear the Synod speak of it, Solarium is the radiant apex of civilization — a marble-walled beacon of peace, civility, and holy order. It claims lineage from the oldest trade routes of the Imperium, with harbors ferrying tribute from every corner of the continent: spice caravans from Sundhara, jade galleons from Suraya, platinum-ribbed zeppelins from Drachenherz.
Its gates are girded by bastions older than memory — citadels etched with sun runes and battle-scorched from a hundred failed sieges.
Markets chime with newly-minted coin. Paved avenues are flanked by manicured cypress trees. Prism towers echo with dulcet sermons. Even the clocktower of the Grand Quadrivium tolls in perfect time with the rising sun.
Solarium is the old empire’s golden face — polished, pristine, eternally uplifted.
But beneath the alabaster sheen burns a neuroses for order so absolute it devours all difference.
They say Solarium never fell when the Sundering split Vergoldetestadt — only rose higher. While the rest of the city drowned in ash and anarchy, the Synod built upward: spires of brass, a faith forged in symmetry, and a doctrine that excised deviation from its script.
They call it The Celestis Sanctum.
But the Pitbound have another word for it:
The arse-end of Ascension.
The sun, after all, is a hungry star.
And Solarium? Everything it feeds on has to come out its golden sphincter sooner or later.
Guess where that sanctified slag ends up?
Down here, with the rest of us.
The Synod
Solarium’s iron spine is the Synod: a chamber of robed Proctors whose reach extends across law, faith, industry, and education. Each one rules their fiefdom with gilded gloves and ironclad faith.
But read the ledgers. The truth bleeds through.
Solarium's elite weren't born with halos. Their sainthood, like their wealth, was scavenged. Most began as ex-Imperium merchant clans, profiteering warlords, and ambitious bookmakers who seized control of surviving trade routes after the Sundering, and rebranded their plunder as Providence.
Raptoraem — Refugium, as they renamed her — was never offered sanctuary. She was the spoils of war; a widow at the mercy of the Fates. And rather than shelter her beneath their mantle, the Synod stripped her bare. They defiled her shrines, taxed her industries, sank drill-rigs into her bones. Then they seized her bleeding hands and cuffed them in gold chains of covenant.
Today's Synod is descended from five families who've cinched the city's brightest commercial veins. They dress their dominion in scarlet — a rare pigment made from crushed cochineal beetles and cinnabar stone. The dye is forbidden to all common folk. Even small strips of fabric risk flogging, fine or exile.
In Solarium, red is divine law. To wear it is to speak the tongue of gods.
And the gods themselves?
Defanged.
Once, Vergoldetestadt's Pantheon was a snarling host of spider-queens, dusk-reapers, and storm-sowers. Now they're but a steriles imulacrum of transcendence. Where the Drowned Star honors the Blessed Five — ancient deities of Flesh, Strength, Shadow, Threshold and Time — Solarium has scrubbed them down and sanctified them as smiling icons fit for tax ledgers. Where once they demanded blood, now they bless tariffs. Where once they spoke from the mouths of oracles, now they beam from stained-glass pulpits above civic halls.
Small wonder Solarium sees no difference between sanctum and sheepfold. To the Synod, they are one and the same.
Five Proctors occupy the seats at the Lumen Chamber:
Proctor Elvira Accipiter — Proctor of Discipline and Rectitude
Proctor Aurea Pallas — Proctor of Commerce and Concord
Proctor Harald Brandt — Proctor of Infrastructure and Strategic Design
Proctor Marie Vogt — Proctor of Scientific Inquiry and Academic Purity
Proctor Hermann Hieronymus — Proctor of Civic Integrity and Border Security
Proctor Roman Caius — Proctor of Intelligence and Foreign Policy
The Keepers
The Keepers are the paramilitary arm of Solarium's will.
Before the Siege, it wasn't uncommon to see them patrolling the straits, overseeing curfews, extracting taxes, suppressing uprisings, and protect Solarian assets from the “degenerate entropy” of breakaway gangs.
Their uniforms are matte-gold with blood-red pauldrons, etched with the Solarian motto "All Shadows Fall." But it is their blacked-out visors that tell the truth: no face, no names, no mercy.
Only the Light.
Once, they were authorized not just to enforce Solarium’s laws — but to erase them when inconvenient. Writless detention. Disappearances. Extrajudicial killings. All took place under the Keepers' watch, and by their hand.
Even now, the memory of massacres on the Hexing Night and Bloody Sunday boil Pitbound blood.
The duties of Keepers are as follows:
Suppress dissent, especially from gangs, pagan cults, or independence militias
Enforce Solarium’s codes of conduct and commerce
Administer public punishments
Guard trade convoys, weapon caches, and the Solarian envoys
Silence illegal broadcasts or graffiti tagged with "anti-light" messages
Break the stubborn will of a city that refuses to kneel.
To the Pitbound, they were not peacekeepers. They were symbols of political predation.
But that was before.
Now that Raptoraem is free, the Keepers do not set foot in the city. Their old barracks are gutted. Their banners, defaced. And though the Synod still issues threats from across the water - broadcasts of amnesty backsliding back into the old language of brute force - the Pitbound do not answer.
In his last radio broadcast — cut through with static, unmistakable in timbre — the Black Maw has made it plain:
Any Keeper who sets foot in the city again will not be escorted out.
They will be fed to the Pit. One limb at a time.
The Heliometer
“Measure Your Best Hours.”
Unveiled during the annual Festival of Radiance, the Heliometer stands as a symbol of Solarium’s mastery over time, order, and civic discipline. Installed atop the Synod's Grand Quadrivium, this solar-linked disc is marketed as the divine union of ancient Imperium engineering and modern Solarian ergonomics — a device to align citizen rhythms with the Sun itself.
Commissioned by Proctors Harald Brandt, Marie Vogt, and Aurea Pallas, it was presented as a “gift of equilibrium” to the state:
A timekeeper for military posts and administrative hubs
A focus aid for laborers and scholars
A public promise that every second would now serve its highest function
“Efficiency Without Strain.”
The Heliometer achieves this by synchronizing task cycles with the solar arc, adjusting scheduled workflows according to circadian-optimal intervals. Integrated Heliometer subunits within each workstation subtly modulate the user’s time perception — stretching high-focus intervals, compressing downtime, and eliminating cognitive friction between sequential tasks.
Users report reduced decision fatigue, fewer performance drop-offs, and a sustained sense of “flow” during long operational windows. The effect is strongest in dense deployments: factories, command posts, and bureaucratic hubs where hundreds operate on a unified signal loop.
The Heliometer’s original designer, Nikolai Kopernik, was not credited.
Nikolai Kopernik
Nikolai, a Pitborn engineer, had earned a Synod-sponsored scholarship to Solarium at fifteen. His thesis on celestial synchronization won him state acclaim… and state surveillance. Observers noted his use of non-canon energy mapping and his private interest in veilcraft topologies. His academic track record was spotless. His source materials, less so.
Rumors persist that the Heliometer’s internal resonance matrix is lined with Blackstar crystal, a rare veil-reactive compound smuggled from the Root tier of Raptoraem, laundered through Vertex Consortium fronts.
Officially, the Heliometer is a miracle.
Unofficially, it’s a leash that ticks.
Behind the Glow
Six years before the Heliometer’s public debut, Nikolai was present at the Vesper Gate, alongside Proctor Harald Brandt and statesman Leopold Lang. The latter two were conducting a closed-session summit to negotiate expanded food quotas for the Pitbound in exchange for deeper Umbra mining rights.
The blast was sudden — non-thermal, non-ballistic, and entirely localized. Nikolai’s later journal notes describe a temporal lurch, followed by a moment of refracted perception:
Visual echoing across planar surfaces
Environmental desynchronization (e.g. shadows detaching briefly from physical anchors)
Audio stacking: voices repeating before they were spoken
Nikolai survived, though severely injured. Brandt barely escaped unscathed. Lang was left behind — and executed by Mordiger in the resulting chaos.
To Nikolai, it wasn’t an explosion. It was a thread within a web — a spontaneous entanglement triggered by either Blackstar overexposure or hidden Veilcraft magic. The data gathered that day formed the theoretical basis for his earliest Heliometer schematics.
He would later call it the Kiss of Spiderweaver:
A moment where time didn’t break, but split into threads.
Enter Umbra
Publicly, Umbra remains banned across Solarium.
Privately, it flows through the hands of Proctor Aurea Pallas, funneled via Vertex Consortium shell companies, laundered in bonded warehouses, and sanctioned under “resource stabilization protocols.”
Raptoraem’s Root tier remains the richest known source of Blackstar-veined Umbra — and though Solarium cannot reclaim the city outright, it has not severed its reach.
Recent intel suggests Aurea Pallas has opened discreet backchannel contact with Erik Mordiger, the Black Maw, offering concessions in exchange for stable, high-purity supply.
Whether for negotiation, leverage, or something darker remains unknown.
But what is known:
The Heliometer runs.
The Looms keep spinning.
And time, once borrowed, must always be paid back.