Padmurak

Padmurak is a tectonically low-activity world whose mountains are short and uninspiring. Its surface is airless, rimed with ice and snow, and composed largely of naked gray stone. The planet has no bodies of open water; its primary water source is massive ice caps at the polar regions. The planet appears gray and white from orbit, its air described as stale and lifeless. The atmosphere is not breathable by terranic life without equipment or a sealed suit. Dawn comes through horizontal slit windows with a pale yellow sun. Rockets are visible crossing the sky from the freight starport. The planet has a population of approximately 1.3 billion, organized into domed arcology settlements.

The planet sits in the upper reaches of the Sagittarius Arm, nearer the galactic core to the west. The domed arcologies form Faraday Shields, with iron-skeleton domes blocking standard radio and tight-beam transmissions and isolating each dome from the next. Beneath the domed city runs a network of ancient tunnels, carved by original colonists during the great outward expansion of humanity, now used partly as infrastructure and partly inhabited by outcasts and scavengers. A great reservoir fills the outer regions of First Dome, with a waterfront overlook, a monorail line connecting outer vuli blockhouses to the central district, and a bridge over sluiceways. The dome gates are massive steel portals that grind shut on neglected mechanisms. Tundra and wastes lie beyond the dome perimeter. Padmurak has at least one moon, on which the Lothrian military maintained a base used to supply the Cielcin with ships and cargo including human captives.

Padmurak's population of approximately 1.3 billion is divided into two classes: the pitrasnuks, the ruling Party officials who number fewer than a million, and the zuks, the worker underclass who make up the remainder. Pitrasnuks wear identical gray clothing with a black star of government service; zuks wear gray coveralls and live in blockhouse hive towers called vuli around the perimeters of the domed cities. Zuks are denied personal names under the Lothrian language system, the Lothriad, which eliminates personal pronouns and replaces open speech with approved stock phrases. Official communication is managed through earpieces feeding approved Lothriad phrases in real time.

The planet operates under the governance of the Lothrian Commonwealth's Grand Conclave. Citizens in outer districts wear tatty gray overcoats and cluster around oil drum fires. Rationing dispensaries -- marked with a black star and the word Paishka (Rations) -- serve the population. Foreigners require Lothrian escorts at all times and only Lothrian partisans are permitted to drive vehicles in the city. The state controls all movement and broadcasts attribute shortages to liberalist revolutionaries or the Sollan Empire, though Imperial intelligence suspects the liberalist threat may be fabricated propaganda used to justify repression.

Beneath the visible city, a hidden underground population of thousands lives in the ancient tunnel networks, including washouts, outcasts, and runaways who prefer the tunnels to life under the Conclave. A small underground community practices the Museum Catholic faith in secret, passing on names and the Galstani language in defiance of the Lothriad. Father Dias, a Museum Catholic priest who came to Padmurak to minister to the poor in the tunnels, was eventually captured by the Conclave Guard and likely sent to a labor camp.

The city was visibly deteriorating in the period of the Imperial diplomatic visit: crumbling roads, broken windows, shuttered hive-blocks, and rationing dispensaries indicate systemic decline beneath the maintained facades shown to foreign visitors.

Padmurak is the capital of the Lothrian Commonwealth, governed by the Grand Conclave, a body of thirty-five Chairs seated in the People's Palace at the heart of Vedatharad. The Conclave's ideology -- the Lothriad -- abolished individual identity in the name of equality, replacing names and personal pronouns with collective forms. Party officials (pitrasnuks) govern by different rules than the zuk population they administer. The Grand Conclave's enforcement arm is the Conclave Guard -- a secret police force that operates in matte-black armor and armored vans, staging false rebel attacks attributed to 'liberalists' or 'bahovni' to generate popular support for the Party.

The Commonwealth has been in a state of trade embargo with the Sollan Empire since the Persean Wars. The Commonwealth has spread across the upper Sagittarius, blocking Imperial expansion westward and pushing Imperial settlers into the Centaurine by way of Gododdin. The Sollan Empire maintained a consulate in a sky-spire in First Dome. Consul Damon Argyris, who served as Imperial Chief Consul for nearly fifty years, was compromised by the Grand Conclave and became an agent for the Conclave's scheme against the Imperial delegation. Imperial intelligence suspects the Conclave has deliberately allowed the Cielcin to grow stronger in the galactic east as a strategic calculation.

For three generations, the Grand Conclave under the influence of MINOS sorcerers agreed to sell its own citizens offworld to the Cielcin in exchange for protection from being consumed -- effectively becoming a suzerain state of the Cielcin Prince Syriani Dorayaica. This arrangement was orchestrated by Iovan, the Ninth Chair, who is identified as a MINOS posthuman consciousness inhabiting a Lothrian body. The Cielcin-Conclave alliance was used to ambush the visiting Sollan Imperial delegation: Conclave Guard forces disguised as liberalist guerrillas attacked the convoy on a bridge in Vedatharad, capturing Hadrian Marlowe. The Tamerlane in orbit was simultaneously seized, and the Sollan embassy was subsequently liquidated. The Commonwealth's military freighters were actively supplying the Cielcin with ships and human captives, staging from a Lothrian military base on one of Padmurak's moons. After Hadrian's escape, the Commonwealth's treachery became known to Imperial authorities, and the Lothrian Commonwealth's covert alliance with the Cielcin was exposed.

**Vedatharad** -- The Great City and capital of the Lothrian Commonwealth, sprawling across snow-streaked tundra beneath mighty domes of common steel and alumglass. The city is organized into domed arcologies called kupa, each sealed beneath its own dome. The effect from the air is of crumbling utilitarian efficiency: brutal concrete blocks and right angles, with hive towers rising like factory stacks around the perimeter of each arcology. Great stacks vent steam that condenses and drips from the glass overhead. Military police stand on every street corner. The original city predates the domes, having been built by Lothrian colonists in underground tunnel networks that now serve as infrastructure. The city has a population of approximately twenty to twenty-five million. Numbered domes include First Dome (the central administrative dome), Eighth Dome (a more residential and industrial zone), Eleventh Dome (the outer starport dome), and Thirteenth Dome near the southernmost tip.

Beneath the domes runs an ancient underground network of tunnels, waterways, and sewers predating the domes themselves. A hidden clinic was built and operated deep in these tunnels by Father Dias and later maintained by a woman named Magda.

**People's Palace** -- The seat of the Lothrian Grand Conclave in First Dome, situated behind a perimeter wall of concrete and steel half a hundred feet thick and three times as high. Within, a central ziggurat rises in great steps a thousand feet toward the apex of the dome. The interior features floors of white and black marble tile, a low polished pool lit from beneath, and entrance doors carved to resemble open pages of a book. A round amphitheater chamber serves as the venue for Grand Conclave sessions, with the Bench -- an arc of thirty-five high-backed granite seats elevated ten feet above the floor -- at its center. The central chair of the Bench is always empty. An upper level of dining rooms and marble terraces overlooks the city streets below.

**Eleventh Dome** -- One of the outer arcology domes of Vedatharad, containing the starport where visiting ships land. Its boulevards are drab and unrelieved by greenery, with steam-venting stacks.

**First Dome** -- The central dome of Vedatharad, reached from the outer domes via underground highways and a long bridge across a churning reservoir, beside which a mighty dam releases cataracts through its sluices. The People's Palace stands at the heart of First Dome, surrounded by a broad circular avenue on which the foreign embassies were situated, including the Sollan Imperial consulate in a sky-spire.

**Lahe Uenalochta (Everfrost Station)** -- A Lothrian water-harvesting facility in the south polar region of Padmurak, reached from Vedatharad by a nearly two-day train journey. It operates under a dome and serves as both a labor camp and a place of punishment for those who fall out of favor with the Conclave.