Eue

Eue is a geologically dead world. Its landscape consists of endless bog and low hills, gray tableland, and charcoal-black desert dunes. It has no mountains, no rivers, and no seas; shallow scum-choked pools are the only standing water. The surface is blanketed by yellow and green slime molds and lurid fungal molds, whose biological activity produces the planet's thin but breathable atmosphere. The air is cold, dead still, and dense with a chalky quality, and the terrain has been described as a cold, damp hell of sands, slime pits, and blasted terrain. The sun is pale, weak, and gray, appearing small in a cloudless sky; sunsets are orange-red. Days on Eue are very long. Gravity is almost twice the standard of the Cielcin worldship Dharan-Tun, sufficient to cause structural damage to a Tamerlane-class battleship upon landing; Cielcin used lifters to lower at least one such captured vessel through the atmosphere. Eue lies far from human space, with the nearest datanet relay more than a thousand light-years away. Eue neighbors Se Vattayu, the original homeworld of the Cielcin.

Eue is the holy world of the Cielcin, who hold it as sacred and eternal and regard it as the closest thing they have to a homeworld. Cielcin tradition holds that no time passes on Eue and that nothing on the world ever changes. The Watcher Miudanar, known as the Dreamer, gave Eue to the Cielcin and taught Elu -- the Cielcin progenitor figure -- shipbuilding, atom-splitting, and space travel. Eue is orbited by thousands of Cielcin worldships, which appear from the surface as artificial moons. After uplifting the Cielcin from Se Vattayu, the Watcher Elu built the first Cielcin empire on Eue. That empire eventually collapsed following Elu's departure, and the Cielcin turned on one another across millennia until their first encounter with humanity at Cressgard. Navigational coordinates for Eue were preserved in the navigational matrix of the ship Ascalon, suggesting the possibility of a future human expedition to the world. The Watcher Miudanar had a physical body on Eue, manifesting in a black serpent-god form within Akterumu.

Eue is not governed by the Sollan Empire and lies outside human imperial space. It serves as the sacred center of Cielcin civilization and was historically the seat of the first Cielcin empire. The world hosted the Cielcin Aetavanni moot, in which Cielcin clans gather to determine collective affairs. Tens of thousands of Cielcin ships were in orbit during the Aetavanni held at the time of Hadrian's captivity. The Aetavanni on Eue was the site of the massacre of the Red Company.

**Akterumu** -- An impossibly vast ring city on Eue, built by the Enar (also called the Vaiartu), an ancient non-human civilization that preceded the Cielcin on the world. Its character has been compared to that of Phanamhara: a vast city alone in the wastes. At the center of Akterumu stands a colossal skull, the preserved remains of Miudanar's prior physical incarnation; within the skull the Vaiartu carved a mural in jadeite depicting Miudanar as a serpent wound about the stars. The city is surrounded by level black sands, with a twelve-mile march from its outer towers to the central temple. Anyone who escapes the city is hunted for sport across the wastes. Red canals are visible on the Cielcin worldship Dharan-Tun when viewed from Eue's surface.