Urizen territories

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

The lands of Urizen are predominantly mountainous in nature, for they favour the heights and summits of hills and mountains as sites to construct their spires.

Return of the King

Morrow

The Citadel of Morrow is a combination of university, academy and library. The mountains that surround it have the densest population of Spires of all the Urizen territories. The heart of the Heliopticon is here, making it a centre of communication for the Nation. The lower slopes of many mountains are covered in well tended tea and coffee farms, supported by a complex series of aqueducts using principles of irrigation learnt from the people of the Marches. Morrow is the pride of Urizen.

Return of the King

Zenith

The Citadel of Zenith is constructed half-way up the tallest peak in the Nation and perhaps the Empire. The Spires here tend towards the contemplative, and many religious thinkers and philosophers come from Zenith, where they claim that the rarefied air helps them maintain a sense of detachment and clarity. Many of the highest mountains are covered in great arrays of metal mirrors that focus the light of the sun into underground caverns where magical crystals are cultivated and harvested in a similar way to which other nations maintain orchards. Zenith also has some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the Nation, with apparently bottomless mountain lakes providing succulent fish to supplement the diet of the inhabitants.

Arete

The fortified Citadel of Arete is the smallest of the three core Urizen citadels, and the territory is the wildest. Outsiders often find this counter-intuitive as Arete is also the territory with the lowest peaks, and many Spires are actually built in the foothills. In fact the lowlands are quite dangerous, being inhabited by several bandit tribes of orcs and barely a year goes by without a nest of trolls or a den of drakes becoming a nuisance. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong martial tradition here, but this is also a territory that produces more than its fair share of zoologists and botanists. These natural philosophers are sometimes blamed for the more esoteric animals and plants found here, and the occasional mutated hybrid horror that appears here is often a sign that a magician is straying dangerously close to insanity.

Spiral (Lost)

Another low-lying territory, Spiral was lost to the Empire around a hundred years ago. The Citadel of Spiral fell following an outbreak of an unnatural curse or plague. The people of the Citadel were transformed into flesh-hungry horrors, preying on their fellow humans. In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, they sealed the gates of their own citadel in an attempt to contain the contagion. While they were successful in containing the curse, the instability the loss of the Citadel created left an opening for the orcs to move in and conquer the territory. The surviving Spires were largely looted, but a few still hold out in isolated locations.

The truth behind the magical contagion or curse is unknown, but scholars point suspiciously to the nearby Black Plateau, a great plateau of volcanic glass with a dire reputation. Artefacts from the Black Plateau are often considered haunted or touched by malign evil, and are generally destroyed when they are encountered.