Al-a-Nur

Al-a-Nur is city of several different religions, each represented by a tower.

Founded in the year Seven Hundred and Fifty-three of the second Caliphate.

The Roads are arranged in Concentric Circles like on the Lo Shen board. They are paved in lapis and turquoise stonesa rivers flows around it.

The Towers are in the ultimate defence position, Chang-O.

The people of Al-a-Nur are called Nurians.

The Tower of Sun-and-Moon
Roof of a diamond and a topaz melted into each other. They collect ways of worshipping. They are the oldest and poorest order.

The Tower of Patricides
Bright with blood trickling between its polished stones. Only males are allowed, the father trains the son. When he arrives in the age of Enlightenment, he kills his father. This rite is done with great care and love.

The Tower of Ice and Iron
Very high with twisted metallic spire.The Draghi Celesti; priests and priestesses, guardians of the city. They wear silver-blue uniforms, an over-tunic emblazoned with winged snakes and ivory serpent masks.

The Coral Tower
Deep rose pocked and rippled with anemones. Merchants. They wear vivid yellow garments and a crest showing a golden rooster wrestling a bright blue peacock.. They worship Ge-Sai, Star-of-Gold.

The Tower of Hermaphrodites
Hung with veils and inscribed with sacred ideographs, silver ink on a golden wall. The most divine thing is the merging of opposites, maintaining a balance. They hide their sex under plain clothes. Presbyter Cveti, later Ghyfran II was part of this Tower.

The Chrysanthemum Tower
Ablaze with Chrysanthemum flowers flashing gold and scarlet at the noonday sun. They are vegetarians and they worship all growing things. They have two sacred books- The Book of the Bough and The Book of the Carrion. Most of the Chrysanthemums are half-breeds like the Cynocaphaloi. Bartholomew, Balthazar and Bagdemagus are part of this Tower.

The Tower of St. Sigrid
Bristling with ship´s prows and wheels and masts. They are a sainthood and follow St. Sigrid. They all take her name including some kind of title. The Novices have their hair shorn and don´t love the tower for the first seven years. After that she spends on year aboard self-made boat. The rest of their religion is secret. Saint Sigrid of the Ways was part of this Tower.

The Nightingale Tower
The wind whistles through the walls. They worship the sibling-Stars Chandra and Anshu by making music.

The Tower of the Nine Yarrow Stalks
The surface is a divinatory piece a painted in a thousand shades. Women, Oracles. Believe waste to be a sin.

The Towers of the Living and the Dead
One walled in hawk and falcon feathers, tufts of fur thatching the roof, with doors of serpent-skin, the other one riddled with catacombs and crannies. The Towers have leaned closer and closer over the years and now a small bridge of silk and ebony connects the upper rooms.

In the Tower of the Living you get bonded with a creature and will live and hunt and die as one creature. They believe that divinity resides in even the smallest of beasts, and that they are the voices of heaven.

The Tower of the Dead studies corpses. They believe that life is only an initiation, that death is the beginning of enlightenment. The Corpse is the vessel of Knowledge, the soul goes on to other spheres, leaving the body saturated with the secrets of this world. They worship the Manikarnika.

In "The Tale of the Man Dressed in the Moon" it is told that the founders of the Tower of the Dead had caught and tortured one of the Yi. He told them a part of their secret, and that they practice a mutilated form of the art of the Yi.

The Papal Tower
A slender, simple Tower, fashioned from camphor wood and the roots of rose trees, knobbed with silver nail heads glittering like constellations set into the polished walls. Its roof is thatched with willow whips, its windows shaded in soft deer-skin, this is the Tower of the Papess.