Caldrith

Caldrith is a city-state that has organised itself around the management of knowledge. The Institute sits at its centre — architecturally dominant, institutionally pervasive — and the city radiates outward from it in concentric rings of decreasing privilege. The inner compound, where Lira Malken once worked, is manufactured for sterility: clean, mechanical, and unforgiving. Even a breath leaves traces.

Outside the walls, unacknowledged slums exist in a state of administrative non-recognition — present in practice, absent from official maps. Beyond them: the Hollow. The site of Nirah's first major in-bounds resonance collapse still glows faintly on remote survey overlays. Pale, like bone through frost. The Institute calls it a field surge. Those who were close enough to see the sky invert call it something else.

Caldrith's relationship with Psions is definitional: they are classified, monitored, trained, and instrumentalised. The resonance stabilisers humming at 420 nanohertz in the Institute's corridors are as much psychological as functional. The artificial daylight calibrated to suppress emotion and keep sleep cycles aligned. The entire city is, in a sense, a conductor — designed to channel and contain.