History & Cultures · Important Locations
Besok
- Nation
- Kende, of which it is the capital
- Position
- Worked into a mountain system and wrapped around a volcano, which heats it
- People
- Alium, in the greatest concentration anywhere on Aropria
- Sound
- None from outside. The Alium speak telepathically
- Notable
- "Quiet" zones and quiet hours, so that anyone can sleep
- Guilds
- The Clerks, and effectively nothing else
- Population
- About 350,000
Besok is the capital of Kende and a great city on the scale of any great nation's — most of the Alium who live in Kende live here.
Much of the civilisation is worked into the mountain system, heated by a volcano the city wraps around. That is not decoration: the Alium have been cold since they arrived, and everything about how they build follows from it.
Arriving
The Alium have no vocal cords and speak by projected telepathy, so a traveller approaching the mouth of the mountain hears nothing at all. The opening is easy to pick out from a distance, and the silence makes the obvious assumption — that the city must be somewhere deep inside — feel reasonable.
It is not. Besok begins at the mouth, and crossing that threshold means walking into the full weight of a city's worth of mental voices at once. Visitors have been put on the floor by it.
An Alium can help, by asking permission and then damping the noise down to a manageable distance. Doing so for a staggering foreigner appears to be an ordinary courtesy rather than a favour.
Living with the noise
Because mental voices carry through walls and doors, the city keeps quiet zones and quiet times. Without them nobody would sleep.
Besok has upper districts and lower ones, markets and slums, neighbourhoods and urban centres, like any city. What is unlike any other city is that most conversation in it is, by default, public — not overheard, but simply available. The Alium live in a blend of independence and collectivity: each has their own mind, thoughts and desires, and there is a collective identity underneath that.
Art
The Alium favour thick, bright paints and vivid fabrics, which read strongly against grey skin. But their real art form is recitation.
Because an Alium can follow two conversations at once — and some as many as four — they have developed a form in which two or more verses are told simultaneously and woven into a single narrative. The strands can be different characters, or scene against dialogue, or narration against song. It is usually performed by two or more narrators speaking at the same time.
The height of the form is one Alium reciting every strand alone.
Guilds
Most of the continent's guilds are simply absent. The Clerks keep a presence and that is about the extent of it.
The Alium run their own guild for finding those gifted in congruence, in place of the Guardians of Tomorrow. Work that would elsewhere fall to the Ion'cavar is hired out to Garshallans. The Slaver's Syndicate is notably nowhere.