The New Light

This mountain stronghold is home to the Training Towers of the New Light's elite swordsmen, the Enlightened. This confers on Acies a more martial feel, rather than the usual scholarly, arcane atmosphere in a New Light city, with scarred warriors striding the streets and weaponsmiths on every corner.

Augo stands as a border stronghold for the New Light, looking out across the jungles of the Yuraquncha, its mages vigilant, its troops plentiful and well drilled. Visitors puzzle over this, since the jungle-folk have never threatened the New Light; but the mages disdain such arguments, retorting that they are concerned not with mundane historiography, but with a more profound reality - whatever that means.

After the Sundering, an intact Silver Light tower stood here. The New Light took it over, and rebuilt the stronghold. Within a generation no trace of the tower remained, but the mages deny that they tore it down, nor indeed damaged it at all. In truth, they insist, they simply made the tower stronger.

Memor is home to the Archive of the New Light - a huge repository of decrees, reports and diktats prepared for or by the arch wizards of the New Light. Moreover, as these mages see themselves as heirs to the Second Age's Order of the Silver Light, they have also collected here a huge body of texts relating to that legendary organisation; many lament that outsiders are strictly forbidden access to this ancient archive.

Outsiders mock Mentis as a retirement retreat for superannuated wizards. The oldest, wisest and most warped by magic of the order's mages come here, to end their days in a town which maintains a solemn reverence for its aging patrons. But insiders do not mock. The magic-scarred arch mages may be old, but they are powerful, and their networks of patronage stretch through the order.

The stronghold of Scio is famed for the Library of Reflection, which contains a small number of treasured tomes - the greatest books on the arts of divination, the history of prophecy, and the structure of the cosmos. Each room is lined with mirrors on all sides, but contains only a single book on a reading stand. Outsiders estimate that the library holds only fifty books. The wizards of the New Light say that, rather, the library contains an infinite number of texts.

Tractus is a haven for many young wizards of the New Light, who come here hoping to study the most advanced, experimental and uncertain magics. The town is thriving, with new plentiful arrivals, strange goods in the markets, tall tales in the taverns, and seemly endless construction work (generally to repair damage caused by wild magics).