Editing Hestavar (section)

==Geography==
Pale clouds of bright metallic hues look down on Hestavar. The first glimpse of the Bright City that visitors get is of a terraced city thirty miles wide and just as high, held aloft on a cascade of earthmotes that drift in set patterns or remain in place if they are locked in by silver bridges.

Astral vessels that enter the cloud veil emerge a few minutes later sailing on the surface of a great lagoon that occupies the lower third of the dominion. Travelers that fly or swim through the clouds come out above one of the sandbars that dot the lagoon, perhaps within easy reach of a home or a palace built in the lagoon, or perhaps out among the fishing boats.

It is always the height of daytime in Hestavar, though the sun walks the city as a deity instead of waiting in the sky. The clouds above the dominion serve to reflect Pelor’s glory, shedding brilliant radiance from overhead. Sometimes the clouds darken to a silvery cast, but usually they shimmer gold.

Whether one travels by boat, by flying beast, or by foot, a traveler eventually comes into contact with the city’s directional jargon. In a city where the illumination constantly rains down from the upper cloud cover, direction is reckoned by the landmarks of the dominion. The people of Hestavar reconnoiter their city by the directions ''windward'', ''leeward'', ''waterward'', and ''lightward''.

The windward side of the dominion sits toward the swirling Eye of Storm—the remains of the primordial Heur-Ket—and the Salts neighborhood that is within it. Leeward is, of course the opposite direction, toward the calmer (and richer) end of the lagoon, with its cardinal being the neighborhood of Seven Pearl Shoal.

The city is navigated vertically with the directions waterward and lightward. For the most part, the gravity of the dominion often works as one would anticipate: lightward is usually up and waterward is usually down. However, a few anomalous earthmotes and islands on the windward side of the Bright City feature strange gravitational features. Often these indicate damage to the city done during the battle with Heur-Ket, but sometimes they are changes purposely perpetrated by exalted houses for reason both novel and industrious. Such anomalies are prevalent enough that the waterward and lightward directions are more useful than up or down.

Lightward is accompanied by a relative distance. Low lightward is of a lower altitude than high or highest lightward. Such references to altitude are often pointless when describing waterward, unless the starting point is lightward, or when describing one of a number of trendy taverns, feasthalls, and expensive villas that sit underwater in or around the Painted Reef.

Another dimension of travel has its own rules in the Bright City—the dimension of time. With a steady and unblinking sunlight coming from the uppermost clouds of the dominion, there is no night in Hestavar. Instead, the city measures time by way of a number of water clocks situated on the hundreds of earthmotes that feature endless springs, and by the large one atop the tallest tower of Whitebell Bastion in the lagoon.

Time in the Bright City is split into three 6-hour cycles called belling (short for bell-length, since each cycle is announced by a cacophony of ring bells), and each is named after one of the three deities that calls Hestavar home. As a matter of reverence and custom, the city tends to rest and meditate during Ioun’s belling, but the city never really sleeps, and it only slows slightly during this belling. These bellings are further split into two hands, and each hand is split into 3 hours.