Stethelos
Host Plane: Nexis
Though the Clockwork City is the namesake of Nexis, to say that the entire Realm of Time exists within its lazily floating walls would be untrue. Far below its lowest sublevels, beneath the great turning gears and endless mechanical chimes of the inner citadel, lies a place nearly faded from living memory — the Desolate Shore. A stretch of coast where time itself falters, where waves never break upon the sand, and the air hangs thick with a gray, impenetrable fog.
Perched atop this stagnant, lifeless coastline looms a crumbling disc of ruins, an ancient city untouched yet long abandoned, known to only a select few as Stethelos. No one knows where it came from, who built it, or what nameless catastrophe left it barren — only that it has always been there, watching, waiting. Its moss-choked streets and tilting spires are eerily intact, undisturbed by time. Many believe the city is a living thing, for its walls weep when disturbed. Some swear to have heard a disembodied heartbeat, slow and heavy, reverberating through its hollow colonnades like a slumbering beast.
But it is not merely silence that dwells in Stethelos. Those who walk its streets hear whispers, unfamiliar voices speaking forgotten tongues, calling them by names they do not recognize yet somehow know as their own. These whispers weave through the still air like the song of sirens, luring visitors to high precipices and urging them to step forward, to surrender to the void’s call, to fall. Few can resist the pull, for in Stethelos, those who lose their way lose themselves.
The only safe point of entry, a deceptively innocent hillock known as the Green Meadow, was named by an anonymous planar navigator who completed her field report before succumbing to madness. In her final writings, she described the city as residing between the Viridescent Jungle and the Billowy Sea, though whether these landmarks are actual locations or simply figments of an addled imagination remains unknown. Some scholars insist that these places are no mere hallucinations, theorizing that they are the remnants of other realms, now forgotten by history, that were swallowed by Stethelos.
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