Days clouded by shadows - The short story

Chapter 1 - The Golden Wastelands

The Celestials were a proud, gentle and noble race; born from the remanent of stellar birth, quite literally plasma that found its way down on a little planet, mixed with the planet's components and emerged as winged people.

They were explorers and wanderers, a detail that helped them to colonise every island, continent, mountain and sea on their little planet. They learnt from their environment, nourishing and flourishing from it.
Their exploration resulted in the establishment of multiple realms across the globe. They devoted their lives to understanding the magic permeating through spacetime itself.

Every realm had some special candour making it unique, but only one of the realms attracted their attention more than any other: the realm at the foot of Mount Eden, the Golden City.

The Golden City was by far the largest settlement of the Celestials, a very misleading name given the Golden City covered the entire realm except for a mountain at the north of it. The Golden City was a place in which magic, technology, religion, and indigestion often intertwined to fill you with awe, wonder and gastritis.
A place in which knowledge naturally congregated in its vault: the largest and most impressive university ever built, stored in its (almost) infinite galleries, passages and libraries inside the mountain.

Visitors and merchants would describe the metropolis as a vast living organism because its people gave it rhythm; its temples, bridges and ports gave it structure.
Merchants covered every single corner with their tents and goods. Scholars discuss high magic, tradesman and warriors in constant migration.
Cooks used to flood the streets with the aroma of their cooking. Cooks like Billy and his famous Bart's all-you-can-eat became a restaurant chain sprinkling the city. Every resident of the Golden City knew these restaurants. They all call it Bart's all-you-don't-want-to-eat or rather, what-you-should-avoid-to-eat.

The city had a permanent murmur, a kerfuffle to settle, a loud merchant to quiet down, a musician on a very big horse with Peter-Panny-king-of-boots trying to woo a lady, explorers trying to reach new realms.

The city would have been unruly chaos, but it was designed by a visionary people called The Commander. Theodore "The Commander" Novumgasum was the second Elder ever to have been chosen to lead a new nation, and the first ever person to challenge the order of things, or rather, the order in which Father, the first elder leading the realm of Dawn, did things.

When Theodore and his followers moved to this coastal area, picked by Theodore's scouts, he couldn't stop to admire the tallest mountain on their planet as it would provide them with several strategic advantages, as well as good platform to continue the exploration of the elusive force magic was.

Theodore planned the cityscape with the vision only a beggar acting to be blind could have, whilst fighting against the entropy introduced by the residents as they too tried to make the city their own.

Over centuries, Theodore saw the city getting filled to the brim with shops, trading spots, wizarding schools, tall residential buildings, towers, forts, naval ports and, to Theodore displeasure, lots of temples dedicated to weird imaginary beings referred as "gods".

Theodore admired the location, surrounded by natural barriers for extra protection from the elements or anybody who would be crazy enough to clash against the city. To its south, the realm ended on a shore overlooking fiords of the future realm known as Triumph. At the north of the city there was the mountain Eden and a little further north the great cascades flowing onto the oceanic lake, separating the realm from any land mass closer to the polar region. Vast seas fed by rivers off the lake flanked the east and west side of the realm, these became an important source of trade and revenue to the realm, and the primary network to travel in and out of the Golden City before the elders of Triumph opened their roads and bridges through the fiords to the shores of the realm.