Part of my 2026 World Building Project

So, this will be a bit longer. The setting has changed quite a bit from how it started. So I thought I would recap the most important aspects of the city that I developed this month.

The City of Hawjio

The City of Hawjio exists in constant movement. The Deep is a rift in space that leads to a dimension that is full of incomprehensible creatures. Each year, the rift gains ground towards the lower levels of the Hawjio and is about 5 levels closer to the city

However, this is mitigated by the fact that the city itself has access to the ruins of an ancient civilization, called the Ziigaans by the inhabitants of Hawjio. These ruins make it so that the inhabitants of Hawjio can rebuild the ruins and do not have to build the infrastructure from scratch. Because of the ruins are always above the top level of the city, the city of Hawjio is characterized by extreme verticality.

The city itself is split vertically into ridings. The upper ridings are where the nobility live. The middle ridings are the engine of the city. It is where the trade guilds live. The lowest ridings are where the forgotten live, either because they refused to leave their homes as the city moved on, or because they were forced to stay behind by those in power in the city.

The Government in Hawjio

Authority in Hawjio is divided among the Empire, the Mage College of Wargysdinun, and the Temple of Vornild.

The Empire is the official governing body of Hawjio, and most of the nobility reside in the hierarchy of the Empire. The Empire keeps order in the city through the Imperial Guard.

The Mage College of Wargysdinun is the center of knowledge and learning in Hawjio. In addition to studying magic, they also are interested in researching both the Deep and any Ziigaan artifacts that are discovered.

The Temple of Vornild is the religious authority in Hawjio. They fulfill the spiritual needs of the citizens, and much of the Ecclesium are also members of the nobility.

The Secret Reality

This is the part that has been lost to time. The city of Hawjio was founded to seal away the Deep. No one in Hawjio remembers this, but they are actually located in a planar nexus. For thousands of years, they have been rebuilding and maintaining the seal to keep the Deep from gaining access to the material plane.

The mechanics of the seal is that, while the inhabitants of Hawjio perceive what is happening as the Deep moving closer, what is actually happening is that the rift is a mobius time loop. As the city passes through the Deep, it flows through a time vortex that results in the old city being recycled. The irony is, the Ziigaan civilization and ruins are actually the past of Hawjio. This entire cycle takes about 10,000 years.