Astarte

The City of Dreams, the Starry City, the Shadow Web, the First/Last Nexus

To speak of Astarte is to remember it, to remember Astarte is to dream of it, and to dream of Astarte is to be in Astarte itself, the city which prospers on the imagination.
Gather up any number of people, separate them so no communication between them is possible, and order them to depict a city with the name Astarte any way they please. All their descriptions and artworks will converge onto the same picture: glass spires rising to a sky lit only by starlight, a great gleaming library in the distance, an observatory, an ancient clocktower. Before that, however, their individual imaginings will run into one another far more often than would be expected by chance, and separate drawings or descriptions from a hundred different individuals may be joined up to form an exquisitely-detailed map of a wondrous city.
No one knows who founded Astarte, or when. Time flows strangely around the City of Dreams, and so its native language has no precise words for “last” or “first”, instead using one word in either’s place but which means neither. It is possible that Astarte is the firstborn of all societies, its foundations laid by the very first minds of Verse; it is also possible that Astarte has yet to be built, cobbled together by disparate refugees fallen from different branches of the All-Tree as it finally Rots away.
Even so, between a beginning and an ending, a past and a future, many things exist to fill the space within. Astarte is no exception, and there are many diversions to be had in the snares of the Shadow Web. Its markets are always busy, crowded with sapient beings looking to buy and sell nearly anything. There are street performers and artisans on every corner, and the con artists here are entirely capable of scamming you out of more than just your money. Its library is furnished with knowledge from all over Verse, and its observatory keeps track of the stars which foretell the fates of every known world. Both are open to the public, and the University welcome new students in nearly every discipline imaginable. The First Nexus stands open in dreams, offering countless wonders and adventures just beyond the mind's eye.