Tower of Lenthos
Architecture
The white tower is the center piece and most visible landmark in the city of Lenthir. The structure has several spires and towers connected occasionally with bridges between them. The design is complicated and slightly chaotic, yet esthetic.
Interior
The entrance hall is large, and stretches up for several floors. On the floor there is an intricate mosaic design of a sun, not very different than the one in the plaza outside, only smaller to fit the smaller floor space inside the hall. There is a desk in the middle of the room where there usually is a clerk. There are balconies and railed pathways at the floors, some with bridges over the main hall.
When travelling deeper in than the entrance hall, however, things get chaotic. With a combination of pocket realms and dimension doors, one needs to know the exact route to a place to find it, or else there is a serious risk getting lost. The way back might not be the same as the way there, but it usually is. Every year several new students has to be searched for due to this, but they quickly learn the way to the most important places in the building, and a couple of months after the new school year starts, there are very few such incidents.
In this place, getting somewhere for the first time is always an adventure, my friend!
Several of the classrooms are stored in pocket dimensions to save space, as are the faculty offices. This is for saving room, since the need for rooms soon made the tower too small to accommodate all the students that were attending the Academy. Old, smaller rooms and classrooms might be forgotten and hidden.
Beneath the tower there's a small underground cave system that's used for more secret or sensitive projects. Few know the way down into this underground potion of the tower, and it has been used for several purposes through the years, like containment of dangerous creatures.
After Lenthos was replaced as an archmage, there were discussions about simplifying the interior design, but since the system was chaotic and intricate enough to be more effort than it was worth, the design stayed. It was initially created as a defense mechanism, and it does a good job as a final defense if enemies manage to get into the tower itself, so the occasional search operation for lost students is worth avoiding the effort of redoing the hallway system completely.
Communication
The Tower of Lenthos is rather large, and delivering messages by hand would take a lot of time. Some areas of the tower are so distant from the entrance hall that a courier would spend more than half an hour to deliver the message and go back again, which would demand several couriers being on call at any time, stationed at several places in the tower, just to cover the demand of all the messages being sent daily between the different faculty members.
As the tower grew, the realization of how impractical couriers would be resulted in the creation of a magical communication system. It was built as a network of tubes, branching out to every main faculty area in the tower. A number of small containers, just the right size to move through these tubes and enchanted to travel to the point the sender wanted it to go, carried messages to even the furthest points of the tower in mere seconds. The containers were initially made for sending paper notes, so these containers were rather small.
The system is called Tubular Arcane Messaging System, or the Swoosh by the students from the sound it makes as the containers travel through the system.
History
The tower itself was built as the personal mage tower of Lenthos the Wizard, along the river Nemosh on the border between Asharia and Kupria. Being one of the most powerful mages in the world at that time, aspiring mages started to sho up at his door to seek apprenticeship.
The stream of potential apprentices kept getting more numerous, and soon Lenthos had to turn them down as they arrived. He decided to hire some of his more promising former apprentices, and started a small academy in his tower, expanding it to the structure it is today.
The needs of the apprentices made a small town grow outside the tower, first as a trading outpost, then as a town with permanent settlements, ending up as the largest city in the Five Nations.
Related Articles
The Tower of Lenthos is the location of the Lenthiri branch of the Academy of the Arcane.
The Tower was originally the private tower of the mage Lenthos.
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