Aurora - City in the trees

"I was looking down on a forest. It wasn’t tropical but the air was quite hot and humid, so we must’ve been near the tropics. Most of the trees were about eighty meters tall and each trunk was at least three meters thick at the base. The most extraordinary thing however, was not the size of the trees, but what was on them; the most beautiful, miraculous tree houses. A city of tree houses built 50 meters from the ground. Unlike normal tree houses built onto trees, the trees seemed to be wrapping their thick branches around the structures, holding them up. Connecting all the tree houses in sight were planked walkways suspended on branches reaching out through the air, zip wires, what seemed to be slides and around many trunks were spiraling staircases leading somewhere or other. Each tree had no more than one house nestled amongst its branches, and I noticed some were much higher than others. Each sloping roof was covered in a hundreds of small mirrors, nearly coating it. Out of the maybe 30 trees in sight, two trees, with the highest tree houses, seemed to have half the leaves not be actual leaves but… mirrors. With little glints of sunlight, the tree was so majestic it was breathtaking. Even through the rain I could just see little windows imbedded in some trunks or particularly thick branches. The rain didn’t seem to be affecting common autumn life. Children ran about on walkways, not at all bothered by their soaked tunics and hair, screaming and giggling. One man was zip lining down a row in between trees with a stack of brightly colored packages and a display on his backpack with lots of bits and bobs too small to see. On one of the nearest trees, on a platform there was an adult and two teens standing very still with the water not hitting them but moving around them in a sort of webbed bubble. The whole community was buzzing with life and the trees seemed to be moving their branches like dancing as their leaves rustled in the wind. The mirror leaves trees sounded like chorus of distant wind chimes chattering just audible above the rustling and fizzing. I wanted to have 5 more pairs of eyes to take in everything; every activity, every movement of every tree, every daily life so strange and wonderful and yet, I realized, so common."

Defences

Sky swarma

Infrastructure

Light-wood treehouse held up by broad tree houses. Walkways and paths are know as the rustling roads. There are deviling courses and hollows which are special hollow trees that can be used to get to and from the ground. The plumbing uses carefully addled streams which have been changed to transform anything to pure water with detailed soot ways. There is the an area with a maze of tunnels that don't fit in the space and are never the same the result of Syra worms. and a waterfall which falls up inside a cave.

Alternative Name(s)

Aurora. The city in the leaves. The Canopy

Type

Capital

Included Locations