Wepwawit is a lush desert city home to the Sha, built around the sacred river Aur. The city is designed for harmony, with canals, terraced gardens, flowering vines, and whimsical murals painted across its sun-warmed walls.
Beneath the city lies a labyrinth of tunnels, threading through the bedrock like roots beneath an oasis. The air is filled with the scent of blooming lotuses and cool, flowing water — a living contradiction in the heart of the desert, as though the land itself were exhaling.
The Sha were once nomadic hunters who answered to a nameless, sun-flowering face of Oseiro. For generations they ranged across the desert, driving their prey before them — until, at last, the great beasts were gone. They had hunted them to extinction.
The drought that followed was swift and merciless. The Sha starved. Then came the mirage: a vast golden city shimmering above the sands, which they understood not as a promise but as a test. They knelt in the sand and dug with their bare claws, and the marks they left in the earth formed the name WEP WA WIT.
They planted seeds in the wet soil they uncovered. They dug canals to catch the rare desert rains. They learned, for the first time, to nurture rather than pursue. The city grew from this act of reciprocity — a living monument to the moment the Sha chose to tend the world instead of consuming it.
- ✦Canals and Waterways — The city is split by the sacred river Aur, its channels lined with flowering lilies and clear, slow-moving water. The canals are the arteries of Wepwawit, carrying both life and meaning through every district.
- ✦The Tunnels — A labyrinth of passages carved beneath the city, used by the Sha to move quickly and unseen. The tunnels connect the city's heart to its outermost edges, and some are said to run deeper than anyone has mapped.
- ✦Temples — Open to the sky and terraced in rising gardens, the temples of Wepwawit are less buildings than cultivated landscapes. Their flora is meticulously plotted, each plant chosen for meaning as much as beauty.
- ✦The Polluted Stretch — A growing section of the river Aur where the creeping poison from the Scar has taken hold. The water here is discoloured and the lilies have died back. The Sha tend to it constantly, but the corruption gains ground faster than they can purify it.
The river Aur is the spiritual and physical lifeblood of Wepwawit. It originates far to the north, in the Scar — above the ruins of what was once Candorman's Hold. To the Sha, Aur is not merely a water source; it is a covenant made manifest, the same thread of reciprocity that founded the city still flowing through it.
For generations the Sha have kept the river clean, maintaining elaborate purification rituals and canal systems that filter and bless the water as it passes through the city. But the poison seeping down from the Scar is unlike anything their traditions prepared them for. It spreads slowly, quietly — and their attempts to halt it are failing.
There is a growing fear among the elder Sha that Aur cannot be saved by tending alone. What broke the river's source may require something more than care to mend.