Everywhere I look Lodestar spans with its jumble of buildings, temples, and large circular plazas where there is always an occasional orator speaking to an eager small crowd of supporters; using the steps of some temple as their podium.

A good few senators would pay a small group of people to follow them and listen to their speeches. These paid followers would serve as a starting point for other citizens to gather and hear the loquacious words of the speaker. Crowds attract crowds.

All plazas are on the ground level. Loved by the public and merchants; they often have a fountain, or decorative pillar with a vividly painted statue on top, at their center. Splattered across them, singing and dancing troupes of mummers and street musicians often jostle for the best places to perform and earn some hex.

If I focus enough, even obelisk-like quadrangular water towers become clearly visible. With their filled square tops, the ignored towers enable fountains to have their erupting glory.

Far above ground level, carpeting the sprawling flat top of a moss to the east of mine, there are public gardens whose striking colors of dark-red flowers and purple grass mix with the white stone of the buildings and the pale imposing reddishness of the rock they sit on. Small waterfalls cascade from the sides of these and most other mosses into collection tanks or directly into ground channels. These channels are not very numerous but they cut the tissue of the city into large blocks of white buildings that sprawl endlessly northwards, consuming the horizon.

Many of these flat-topped hills of rock dominate the landscape. Most are of an irregular shape with none being exactly the same. To me, the most unusual mosses have two or three wide column-like formations, each of different thickness, supporting impossibly large rocks with buildings on their flat tops. And even more structures, homes, taverns, and shops are hidden from view on ground level—huddled in the space created by these nature-made columns.

Almost all mosses are connected with long white sky-bridges, which seem fragile when compared to the looming mosses, despite being more than wide enough for several sizable carts to be moving next to each other. The sky-bridges are smooth and strong but are relatively rarely used and mostly by younger people and merchants that live on mosses. Winged transportation is omnipresent, kinda cheap, and favored by the elderly. For large cargo the tedious ground route is possible.

Almost directly below us and slightly to the right I can see one of many unassuming cubical castella. The settling tank is three times taller than an adult. I've seen most of Lodestar only in the form of pictures and maps—although my moss gave me an excellent view of the southern area—and castella are seldom depicted.

It really is grimeworthy that my best view of the city comes as I'm forced to abandon it.