Dragon Kings Project:Teleris
“When a hot wind blows, don’t fear, it’s only the jabber from Teleris.” – Norden saying
Contents
The City of Fools and Sages[edit]
Once a city famed for its astrologers and scholars, and its abilities to predict weather and the seasons, Teleris has fallen on hard times. Its failure to predict the shifting weather and growing desert caused by Khitus’s slow apocalypse has devalued the peoples’ belief in the city’s sages, astrologers and fortune-tellers. It has been sacked several times in the past hundred years since the Dragon Kings’ departure, and the Great Library is little more than ruins. People starve in the lower streets while the Trakeen spend their days casting elaborate astrological forecasts and performing complex funeral rituals. Rival mage factions squabble of the ruins of the Great Library and nearby city-states look at Teleris like a jackal upon a carcass.
But a new Priest-King has ascended the throne and is determined to make a difference to the city’s fortunes. And he needs your help. Will you make a difference, or will Teleris be little more than a desert ruin, fallen into oblivion?
Age of the Star Watcher[edit]
Teleris was established by the Dragon King Gurkhai, the Star Watcher, who wished to build a place of lasting scholarship. Where other Dragon Kings taught their subjects military strategy, leatherworking and metallurgy, Gurkhai taught the subjects of his city-state literacy, astronomy and mathematics. This lore was recorded in the Great Library. The greatest of all Teleris’s structures was the magnificent tower of the Grand Observatory, dwarfing even the palace and the Great Library. Many times the citizens would look up at night see their Dragon King sinuously coiled around the tower of the Grand Observatory, looking up at the stars.
Gulkhai was also famous for giving his advice and predictions to do with floods, weather and rainfall. Because of this, Teleris became famous as a city of sages and fortune-tellers. Gulkhai was occasionally known to tell people their personal fortunes, but these were strange and cryptic but usually very accurate in hindsight. He would give these to random petitions – a beggar child in the streets rather than a visiting noble; a water-seller in the streets rather than an important dignitary.
The Star Watcher’s Leave-taking[edit]
It is told in the oldest, surviving records of Teleris that Gulkhai ascended to the dry cliffs above the Valley of Leave-taking and summoned to his presence his most loyal servants – his Dramidgi and his Trakeen and his Gare Attessa. And Gulkhai said, “I go now to fight a war beyond this world. I bid for you to care for Teleris as I have cared for it, until I return. Do not forget what I have taught you, and watch the stars. And it may be that one day you will find me there.”
And then Gulkhai spread his great wings and soared up into the sky with a blaze of terrible light. And from that day, a new star appeared in the vault of heaven, and all who looked upon it knew that it was their Dragon King, watching down on Khitus as he had watched over Teleris.
The servants of Gulkhai stood on the cliffs and discussed things until morning, and then they cast the horoscopes that Gulkhai had shown them, and from these horoscopes chose a Priest-King as a steward to watch over Teleris until the Star Watcher returned.
Reign of the Priest-Kings[edit]
For the first few decades after the Leavetaking, Teleris prospered under the reign of the Priest-Kings, each chosen by the astrology of the Trakeen.
However, during the centuries of chaos following the exodus of Dragon Kings, many turned to Teleris to provide answers, especially to the changing rains and weather patterns as Khitus slowly became more arid and barren. But the Priest-King of Teleris and his astrologers denied that Khitus was changing, and continued to give increasingly-inaccurate predictions based on age-old tablets and charts.
When the desert crept across the land, and the rivers dried, many of the neighbouring Makadan settlements grew angry, especially at the Trakeen’s repeated statements that the drought would soon be over and the rain would return. Teleris was no longer the place that people would journey to have their fortunes told, or to gain blessings for future endeavours. Teleris grew poorer.
As the economies of once-prosperous city-states collapsed and cultures sunk into barbarism, Teleris was blamed for causing the drought, and the once-great city of scholars was sacked and burned by the people that had once turned to the Trakeen of Teleris for all their answers. The Great Library was burned and the fine temples of the Dragon King Gulkhai the Star-Watcher were looted and desecrated.
Now, Teleris is considered an example of folly, mocked at by many different people across the face of Khitus. "The Priest-King claimed it would rain, even as the sands of the desert covered and choked him,’ the people say.
Teleris Today[edit]
Today, Teleris remains inward-looking, obsessed by its astrology and rituals. Given the destruction of the Great Library (including the various tables and mathematical charts that once accurately predicted the weather of ancient Khitus), Teleris is now focused on the stars and on astrology. The sky is also the place of Teleris’s afterlife; the Trakeen say that if the citizens of Teleris are burried properly, they will ascend into the stars to join Gurkhai, their departed Dragon King. Therefore, the Trakeen are involved with complicated funeral ceremonies, including mummification.
