Ofu-Laubu: the City Born in the Sky and Fed on Tin

Ofu-Laubu is one of the few surviving monarchies, ruled by a god-queen too holy for common mortals to meet directly. Also distinct among Lashunta cities, its founding myths do not focus on Shotalashu jungle-steeds, but the flying Thakasa skylizard mounts. Whereas the cities of the Yaro Valley and elsewhere revere Tess the First Queen (or local variation thereof) and Shotaviras the first Shotalashu she tamed, in Lauba Legend, Ammutheth (‘Heaven’s Daughter’) descended from Burning-Mother’s Azure Palace, tamed the First Thakasa, and founded the city, bringing the blessings of civilization and protection the megafauna Qoelu and other threats. She received tribute in silver, copper, and tin from the clans wandering the Shemez Desert and Voliahu Rainforest, and also invited the Elves to help build a shining new city.
Aside from the legend, however, Ofu-Laubu’s recorded history began with the Elves’ arrival in the Second Millennium after Earthfall and the Retreat to Sovyrian, where their chroniclers tell a different tale. They describe a complex society of Lashunta clans focused on tin mining from the mesa’s roots and surrounding hills, the center of a trade network stretching southward over the Shemez and Retaea, over Lake Arasene, and down both the Yaro and Hisyho Rivers: the lynchpin of Lashunta Bronze Age civilization. The mesa they named Laubu was not only home to wild Thakasa nesting on the cliffs, but was also holy to all clans, the center of a religion focusing on the Sky and the Thakasa, whom they worshiped as angelic beings - and bore many of the trappings of common Lashunta beast-cults.
At the religion’s head stood a caste of warrior-priests and judges elevated by having bonded, tamed and ridden a Thakasa. Applicants to this caste must prove themselves worthy by first climbing to the mesa’s top (nearly a mile high, or a kilometer and a half), and then presenting themselves to the Thakasa, who might accept them as a rider or eat them, depending on their mood. This sacerdotal caste dwelled upon the mesa’s top for slightly less than half a year until their cisterns dried up. Then they would disperse on Thakasa-back out to their native clans until they returned with the monsoon rains. The Elves also noted the shifting alliances and feuds among these clans, in which the Thakasa-rider priests, although they strove to stand above and arbitrate, could not completely withhold themselves, as witnessed in the tradition of aerial duels for settling disputes, when Thakasa-riders of different clans would try to tear their foes from saddle and send them hurtling from the sky.
No surprise that the Elves’ proposal to found a colony and build an elfgate atop the Lashunta holystead met with hostility. So the Elves offered the Thakasa-rider caste the one thing they wanted but could not give themselves: permanent, year-round habitation on Laubu’s peak, which they provided by sinking the first wellshaft into the mesa’s heart. Irrigation and settlement by both Elves and Lashunta soon followed, and thus changed the region’s Lashunta civilization indelibly.
The Elves, by settling the the Thakasa-rider Caste upon Laubu and segregating them from their native clans, making them beholden to themselves (and to the Elves, who were their closest neighbors), had effectively taken over Lashunta government for the entire region of Northwestern Asana. Over the next couple centuries, through a series of feuds and coups, the Lauba sacerdotal Thakasa-riders consolidated into a monarchy, but bearing the legacy of sacrament that apocryphally grew into a legend of divine descent. Thakasa-riders handled communication across the whole of Northwestern Asana, controlled the tin and metals trade, and raided from above whenever and wherever they saw fit, unassailable amid the sky unless they chose to drop into bowshot, and with the Elves sending reaped profits back to Qabarat and Sovyrian.
The Elven-Lashunta alliance in Ofu-Laubu continued for the next fourteen millennia, with minor glitches and feuds here and there, sometimes with shifts in the dynastic line, but ever mendable. When the Thief-Queens forged their spectacular, chaotic empire across Western Asana and threatened Qabarat, Ofu-Laubu with idle flights pressured the Retaea Clans to deal with nearer dangers and withhold reinforcements from the queens in the South. Realizing the city’s mightiness, Queen Vemereth threw the whole Yaro and Retea strength at the Laubu’s crag, which siege fell apart after the only Thief-Queen to claim the title of Empress was murdered. The Thief-Queens would try again, including Anihaueth the Last. Yet none ever breached the city’s walls or climbed her heights. The Lauba dabbled in a war of conquest of the Voliahu Rainforest and extermination of the Sealnea Monkeyfolk whose origins are tangled in the legend of Sealnearas the Golden-Monkey Hero and involve some indelicate rumors that members of the Lauba royal family are occasionally born with tails. Under the rainforest’s depths, the Thakasa’s air-superiority lost its edge, and when Saint Yaraesa inerveded after the war bogged down, they graciously returned to their mesa.
Then the Elven Withdrawal (the Return to Kyonin) destabilized this ancient alliance. Although the Elves of Ofu-Laubu did not leave willingly, Sovyrian’s destabilization caused a chain of economic collapses across their Asana colonies, from which the Elven households in this far-flung outpost could not recover. Over the next thousand years, the Elves drifted away from Ofu-Laubu, some to Qabarat, some further afield, leaving the Lauba queens to rely on their own devices, seek new allies among the subject populations and outlying clans, and enshrine themselves in further superstitious mystery.
To this day, Her Godlike Hallowness, Queen Seri-Ilaueth, Heavenly Daughter, Warder of Berg and Sky, and Liss upon the World, is the descendent of these ancient Thakasa-priests. She rules a city who still readily manages the trade routes connecting from the Far Northern Silvermounts to the tropical south, very much the arbiter among the Shemez and Voliahu Clans as her most ancient ancestors. Qabarat, moreso the Lashunta, and less the Elves, remain their allies, their connection through the aiudara-elfgate a vital link to the distant world, although the Heavenly Daughter’s captains and ministers protest the Western Asana Alliance against the Formians and the drain of wealth, resources, and lives to try conquest on a foreign shore. Despite their history, their future stands unwritten.