Aureth is a realm cracked open by the fall of the Star Serpent. Where its body struck, seas boiled, mountains folded and the sky itself seemed to harden into glass. In the centuries since, people have learned to live in the shadow of that wound in the world, telling themselves that the worst of it lies safely buried beneath stone and story.
At the heart of the Golden Basin stands Lysora, city of the Eternal Candle. For seven hundred years its bound flame has kept soil warm, monsters distant and nights strangely bright. Most basin folk have never seen a sky full of stars – only the soft gold of the Candle’s dome, and the quiet fear of what waits just beyond its edge.
In Aureth, fire is never only fire. The oldest stories say that when the Star Serpent was chained, a splinter of its celestial blaze scattered like embers through the world. Some of those embers lodged themselves in people – faint, sleeping sparks that twist candles, answer prayers, or turn violent when pushed too far.
Candle keepers in Lysora whisper of called sparks: rare souls whose inner flame resonates with the Eternal Candle’s light. When the city’s great flame weakens, it reaches for those sparks, trying to pull them home. A chosen few become Torchbearers, carrying part of that bound fire out into the wider world.
A Torchbearer carries a shard of the Eternal Candle – a living flame that can bless fields, banish nightmares and ignite wards. Each use leaves a mark. The stronger the working, the more the bearer’s own spark is braided with the Candle’s will, until it becomes hard to say where person ends and borrowed light begins.
Not all who touch such power serve the same purpose. Some learn smothering: arts that drink the light from candles, ink and even memories, leaving a clean, echoing dark. In the wrong hands, that darkness is not merely absence – it is invitation.
From the lowest apprentice to the senior keepers in the high sanctum, Candlekeepers live and die by the rhythm of wax, flame and prayer. They are the ones who stand between Aureth and whatever waits in the deep dark.
To most basin folk, the Candlekeepers are gentle priests. To those who have seen the sealed chambers beneath the tower, they are jailers standing between Aureth and a second fall.
Cloaked in black and silver, the Shadow Extinguishers preach that the Candle is a shackle, not a blessing. They see a world kept small and docile under a stolen sun, its people fed on borrowed light and half-truths about what sleeps beneath Lysora.
For them, letting the Candle die is an act of liberation. In whispered sermons they promise a dawn where Aureth stands under its own sky again, even if that sky is full of falling stars.
Beyond the basin, broken halls and toppled obelisks rot under long grass. These abandoned temples once belonged to smaller hearth gods – spirits of kiln, forge and household flame that kept their own quiet covenants before the Candle claimed the sky.
Their wards have mostly faded, but some doorways still taste of old fire. Travelers who dream within those ruins sometimes wake with soot on their hands and the sense that something is still listening.
Lysora rises from a shallow golden basin, a circular city of stone rings wrapped around the great Candle. For centuries its light has warmed the fields, kept monsters distant and blurred the stars into a soft halo of gold. Life here is measured in the length of candles and the distance from the tower’s glow.
Around the city, Brightmarket serves as the southern crossroads, where caravans trade ore, spices and stories for blessed wax. Further out, the ruins of older fire faiths crumble under grass, reminding everyone that gods can be replaced.
Five days north of Lysora, pale trunks lean over shifting paths in the Whispering Forest. Mist glows faintly at night, old shrines crumble under roots, and every creak of wood sounds a little too much like your own doubts repeated back to you.
At the heart of those trees lies the Silent Hollow, a bowl-shaped clearing where no sound echoes and even birds avoid the sky above. Nearby, the Shrine of the First Ember waits half-swallowed by roots, its fading glyphs hinting that fire was always a price as much as a blessing.
To the east, the Ashwind Range cuts the horizon with jagged volcanic peaks, stone turned glassy by ancient firestorms. At sunset the mountains glow like cooling coals, and winds whistle through their passes with the sound of distant embers.
Beneath them, the Ember Caves pulse with a dull red light. Stories speak of creatures born there with embers for eyes, and of miners who returned with veins that glowed faintly in the dark.
South-east of the basin, the ground has fused into rippling sheets of black glass, cracked and warped as if the earth froze mid-motion. Sunlight shivers into blades of light across the surface, and travelers swear the land hums softly under their boots.
Just below that glass, pale shapes slide and coil – glass serpents that remember the Serpent’s fall in their own strange way. In the distance, the Heart Shard crater gapes like a missing tooth in the world, where a piece of the fallen god first struck.
At Aureth’s edge, grey cliffs and narrow coves make up the Hollow Coast, where the sea glows faintly on nights without a moon. Heavy mist rolls in smelling of salt and old smoke. Sometimes the waves laugh. Sometimes they sigh like something enormous turning in its sleep.
Nestled in a crescent bay, Mistwake Harbor hangs candle-shaped lamps from its masts at dusk until the water becomes a floating constellation. In fog-thick nights, footsteps seem to come from very far away, and more than one sailor claims to have heard their own name called from under the waves.
The further one walks from Lysora’s dome, the thinner the Candle’s protection becomes. In the deep forests and along the glass plains, people whisper of shapes that linger just outside the reach of torchlight – shadow-born things that have grown patient over centuries of waiting.
Some, like the glass serpents of the Shatterlands or the ember-eyed beasts of Ashwind’s caves, are remnants of the Serpent’s first fall. Others feel newer, as if the world is slowly learning new ways to be dangerous in the dark.
The events of The Last Candle of Lysora unfold in what later histories will call the Age of Flicker – the first time the Eternal Candle is seen to waver in living memory. Nights grow longer. The air cools at the dome’s edge. Creatures test old boundaries that once held without effort.
In Lysora, people tell themselves that great lights do not simply go out. In the wider world, forgotten faiths stir, the Shadow Extinguishers gather in the dark between cities, and the Star Serpent turns a little more in its sleep.
One quiet apprentice candle keeper is chosen to carry the city’s final spark toward the Hall of God’s Sparks – and toward the truth of what the Candle has really been guarding.
The Last Candle of Lysora is your doorway into Aureth – a coming-of-age story set against the slow dimming of a sacred flame. Follow Elion, Tira, Corren and Maevra as they leave the safety of the basin and discover how much of their world was built on borrowed light.
You can explore current and planned books in the series on the Books page.
Want to see how these places connect? Head back to the main map on the Home page and click the glowing embers scattered across Aureth. Each one opens a little window of lore tied to the regions you’ve just read about.
New entries, creatures and side tales can be added here as the Lysora saga grows – this page is meant to expand as the world does.