Star Tower

The Star Tower is the tallest building in the nation of Tsuji, and one of the tallest buildings on all the world of Jhembaz. Located in the city of Jawari , it is a temple to Anaka Ara, god of the stars—and because of this, it was decided that the stars should be visible from the temple. Normally, this wouldn't be the case, because Tsuji is located in the middle layer of the tree-covered world of Jhembaz, and the sky and the stars are hidden by multiple layers of foliage. The Star Tower, however, rises hundreds of meters through the upper layers, and the tip of the tower reaches the Skylands above the trees from which the stars can be seen.

The Star Tower is not a freestanding structure—a tower so tall and thin could not be built without additional supports, at least not without the aid of powerful magic to keep it from toppling. But as it passes through multiple layers of foliage, it has struts and buttresses that connect to those branches to help the tower stay standing. As it connects to those upper branches anyway, the builders of the Star Tower made doors leading out to some of those branches, giving the tower an additional, initially unintended purpose of providing a fast way of traveling to and from the upper layers of Jhembaz above Tsuji.

As befitting a Jawarian temple, the exterior of Star Tower is richly but baroquely decorated, with many gargoyles and filigrees and strange abstract carvings, and is studded with jewels to represent the stars that Anaka Ara presides over. These jewels are said to be guarded by Anaka Ara themself; any thieves who think to defile the temple will face the god's own spiritual servitors. On the interior, the temple is no less ornate, but even stranger, the rooms and corridors irregularly shaped and joining up in odd ways—it's difficult to even specify what floor a given room is on, because no two rooms are at exactly the same altitude, and passing from one room to another always involves going up or down a ramp or stairway. Two stairs lead all the way up the Tower from bottom to top, one winding around the edge of the tower and another spiral staircase in its center. However, given the immense height of the tower, it also has magical transporters involved to make it possible to traverse it more quickly.

While it was built for the worshipers of Anaka Ara to honor their god, and still serves that purpose as many ceremonies and sacrifices are carried out there, the Star Tower has also become a popular destination for tourists and sightseers. After all, aside from the Star Tower, the average Tsujian has no simple way of seeing the stars, short of making an arduous journey hundreds of meters upwar through the layers of the canopy. Many people therefore visit the Star Tower for the express purpose of traveling to its top and viewing the sky and the stars from it. As long as the visitors behave themselves and do not disrespect the priests and their god, the functionaries running the temple see little problem with this; in respecting the stars, they reason, these people are honoring Anaka Ara in their own way, and therefore they are after a fashion worshiping the god the tower is devoted to whether they know it or not.