Almweth
Almweth is one of two Isan-controlled planets, along with Ranweth. Almweth is known for gigantism in its native flora and fauna, which grow much, much larger than similar life on other known worlds. Its global climate is similar to earth’s during the Cambrian period, when it was hotter and there was more ambient CO2 to drive plant and animal growth.
Pratonuovo
Pratonuovo is the largest colony on Almweth, founded by Perenni Isan under the leadership of the explorer Raphael Garazandaio. Pratonuovo is a continent similar in relative size to Asia, and it contains most of the temperate land area on the planet. Though it was the first Isan colony on Almweth, it’s only sparsely settled because the continent is huge. Pratonuovo has the best farmland in the Conflux, and crops grow to gargantuan size. It’s the breadbasket both for the Isan people and for the Conflux generally, and this vast agricultural empire represents the main political leverage for the Isan in the Conflux.
It’s also a source of conflict among the two Isan denominations: Its population consists of about 70% Perenni, who tend to be more secular, and 20% Anastasi, who the Perenni tend to see as old-fashioned and overly religious. (The other 10% are from the other civilizations.) The Perenni are descended from Isan who, prior to the Calamity that turned the green Isan homeworld of Alma into the graveworld of Karsa, lived a hedonistic lifestyle around food and drink and love. The bounty of Almweth, with fields of grain that grow high as pines, has led them back from the survivalist post-Calamity ethos of Isan-Kanri to the traditions of Old Alma, which in turn has stoked religious strife.
The colonial capital and largest settlement on Almweth is the city of Aloskarn, built in and around the fossilized bones of a titanic, ancient beast resembling a strange cross between a gorilla and a land whale that the Isan call “Ninev.” Ninev’s remains are embedded in a large hill, with Aloskarni excavating around the ancient skeleton. Ninev apparently died with one fist raised toward the sky: It’s the highest point in the city, and a governor’s residence and office known as the Fist was built atop it, with views from far above the city below.
Kingshollow and Bonneport
The main Malleon colonies, Kingshollow and Bonneport, are tropical colonies to the southwest and southeast of Pratonuovo, founded by Ras Nassaw, a second son from one of the most prominent banker families in the Eubancs Islands on Mor. Kingshollow was built in and around a colossal baobab tree dubbed the “Watchtower,” the largest known plant in the Conflux. Colonists hollowed it out carefully without killing it to use for housing and commercial space, as well as to tap for the water its root system draws up from the soil. Among the top branches of the Watchtower, just at the cloudline, is a complex called “Princeview,” which serves as both the administrative seat of the two colonies and a military airbase. The land is mostly arid and unsuitable for large-scale agriculture, and so the Holwers instead raise herds of the massive grazers indigenous to the island. These herds were a primary source of meat rations during the war: A ubiquitous propaganda campaign, sponsored by the Lyon Niccolo bankhouse, which heavily invested in Kingshollow slaughterhouses, encouraged soldiers to become “Mutton Strong” coining a popular expression that’s still in common use even years after the Armistice.
Bonneport has a checkered reputation, as the colony is mainly known for a plant called the thacabid, with huge stalks that grow almost up to the clouds and release pollen with a narcotic and soporific effect. The seeds, popularly known as “beans,” contain a concentrated version of the same drug and are commonly used recreationally. Beans aren’t addictive and are harmless in most users, but a small number of people with a certain genetic marker experience paranoia and hallucinations that the people around them have grown giant-sized, to scale with Almweth’s megafauna. Nonetheless, thacabid-derived medicines and painkillers are crucial medical products, developed primarily by Bonny Pharma, a company mostly owned by the Arcturus Karo bankhouse that’s the main employer of the colony. Bonneport is run by a vice-governor who’s elected on a ticket with Kingshollow’s governor, and there’s some tension between the colonies because their vice-governor reports to Kingshollow’s governor (as officials back on Mor consider the two colonies to be one administrative unit).
Lingcong Institute of Biology
The Catallax established the Lingcong Insitute of Biology (LIB) on a large island in a temperate zone on the other side of the world from Pratonuovo. It’s considered a satellite campus of Kenmouth College, the Catallax college devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the Conflux’s native life and the potential of hybridizing Conflux and extra-Conflux genetics to create a new direction for evolution.
LIB has turned its island, also named “Lingcong,” into essentially a huge zoo, with terraformed habitats to accommodate plants and animals from all over Almweth. LIB pays extravagantly for specimens brought alive and intact, funded in part by taking tourists on safaris and on a system of monorails that circle the island. LIB is also a major part of the Catallax’s PR efforts: The mascot for the safari park in LIB, Shoshana the Megatherium (a.k.a. giant ground sloth), is a cartoon character featured in educational programming and sold as a children’s toy.
LIB’s mission is to understand the physics and biology of native organisms’ gigantism. Almweth’s native flora and fauna grow so large that, anywhere else, they would collapse under their own weight—but Almweth’s great beast have the same strength, speed, and endurance as their normal-sized equivalents, but proportionate to their size. There’s something about the way Nephelium interacts with the genetics of native organisms to allow them to grow far beyond what should be possible, and LIB researchers want to find out how it works and how far the effect can be pushed.
Jaegersfreud
Far to the south of the other colonies, past Levyat Ocean, is Jaegersfreud, a Feron colony on a tundra continent filled with massive dire beasts. It’s home to the Huntmaster Lodge, a guild of hunters known as the best in the Conflux. Their headquarters, Jaegerhalla, is built in the shadow of a huge Nephelium-infused monolith that resembles a gigantic arrowhead, angled as though pointed for a volley at the sky. They call it Godspite after a weapon from ancient Feron myth, a celestial arrow that could slay a god. The Huntmaster Lodge is known for brewing jekt, a Nephelium-infused medicinal liqueur that takes the edge off both the bitter cold and the fear of confronting gargantuan tundra predators. It’s also served as a shot in Feron bars throughout the Conflux and has the unfortunate effect of lowering the fear of confronting the big guy a few seats over who looked at you funny.
Jaegersfreud’s economy is based around using every part of the kill, meaning both meatpacking and manufacturing. Hunting parties out of the lodge are structured loosely like Feron military units, and they’re trailed just out of sight by Stervyats, massive mobile factories on treads designed to process a giant kill of meat, fur, and any other useful materials within hours. (Picture the Jawa vessel from Star Wars for a sense of scale.) The Stervyats themselves have their own train of camp followers: merchants, barmen, grifters, and prostitutes whose vehicles convert and link into heat-trapping tent cities every night wherever the Stervyat stops.
While majority-Feron, Jaegersfreud and the Huntmaster Lodge have substantial Malleon and Isan membership. The Huntmaster Lodge was founded by Feron who had rejected the dominant Feron belief system called the Great Chain of Predation in favor of a new philosophy they called the Brotherhood of the Hunt, and this founding group included a few Malleon and Isan who had also proven themselves among the best beast hunters in the Conflux.
Jaegersfreud is also home to a secret Catallax facility called the Annex, a huge underground complex built by the LIB into and below a mountain in a remote zone that the hunters avoid. (It’s too cold for Stervyats—while their oil is designed for low temperatures, it still begins to lose lubrication in the harshest Jaegersfreud cold, causing frequent and expensive maintenance problems.) The Annex mostly consists of huge habitats, where they bring captured beasts to study their gigantism, both through observation and dissection. Where the official business of the Lingcong Institute is about basic research relating to Almweth’s megaflora and -fauna, the Annex captures the great beasts with military and transhuman uses in mind: Both to train and weaponize them, and to unlock the secrets of their genetics to create human hybrids with great size and strength.
Lodge of Fates
The Lodge of Fates doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist on Almweth. Like the other two Conclave Lodges, it’s part of the Wyrmtree, a transdimensional space with “roots” that connect each of the planets, as well as the Engine Star itself, to a nexus on Ranweth. But it’s considered a part of Almweth because all the known entrances to the Lodge are on that planet. Getting into the Lodge requires an injection of Wayserum—a liquid infused with exotic matter from the Wyrmtree on Ranweth—which allows passage through portals at various places on Almweth known only to the Conclave.
While each Conclave Lodge exists outside of normal space, the Lodge of Fates is special in also seemingly existing outside of normal time. Most Lodge members live, study, and work in the Green Wing, a part of the Lodge that contains pockets of fast-movng and slow-moving time. Initiates to the Lodge of Fates are known as “fish,” because at that stage, explaining time to them is like explaining to a fish what wetness is. The Green Wing teaches that time doesn’t always move at one second per second, and how to learn to exploit that.
Most of the Conclave avoid the Red Wing, where time barely exists at all. Visitors to the Red Wing report seeing Conclave members from long in the past, as well as unknown ones perhaps from the future. When someone leaves the Red Wing, they quickly lose most of their memory of it the same way the waking world dissolves the memories of dreams. But the more one goes in, the more one feels a longing to return and stay forever. Only experienced Conclave from the Lodge of Fates are allowed into the Red Wing, except with the express permission of the Master of Fates, and even then, most Conclave who could go there choose not to risk it.
