Stellar Atlas of the Zauberreich: Praxis, Capital System (and World) of the Zauberreich

The capital city of Praxis contains a dozen palaces for the Hexenkönigin (one for each of the Twelve Houses of the Galactic Wheel), the bureaucracy of the Zauberreich, and the most prestigious university of sorcery within the Golden Gate Sector of the Orion Arm.

Praxis is the last of the manufactured worlds; after the destruction of the Sol System in the Dust Wars, Humanity fully embraced sorcery in an impassioned example of the “fight fire with fire” philosophy.  To a degree, it worked; those worlds who refused to join the Zauberreich or embrace sorcery as a means of defense were devoured by the Dust or crushed in the ancillary wars, but the newly-forged Zauberreich survived.  

Even before the Dust Wars were completed, the talisman world of Praxis was wrought upon a lonely brown dwarf.  By sorcery was the brown dwarf tamed, and, to a degree, humanized, but not in the manner of the worlds of the Satya Yuga.

Floating in the upper atmosphere of Praxis is the Comb, a lattice of hexagons fashioned from adamantium incised with orichalcum runes and then covered in gold.  Each segment of the lattice is 12 miles long.  Upon this giant lattice is built the capital city, by turns called Praxis, the Comb, or the Palace of Palaces.  

Looking at only the buildable sections of the Comb, the actual lattice segments themselves, there is roughly 12 million square miles of liveable surface area on the Comb.  The Comb houses something like 2.5 trillion people, giving it a population density of roughly 200 thousand people per square mile.  To say Comb is densely packed is an understatement.  Over 90% of that population is Humans, with a wide range of aliens making up the rest.  Roughly two-thirds of the Comb’s inhabitants are slaves.

The Comb is lit and powered by the hellish radiation of the decaying brown dwarf.  The streets are literally paved with gold because gold is a necessary ingredient in the magic that channels this radiation for the use of the citizens and protects those same citizens from the dangers and heat of the radiation. Attempting to remove the gold, so legends say, removes the protection of the Comb from the one damaging it, meaning they will immediately burst into flame and vaporize.  By that same sorcery, the light rising up through the massive holes in the comb (each over 300 square miles in area), waxes and wanes in a 24 hour cycle that is the Human preference.  Likewise, gravity on the Comb is 0.97 g.  

Sorcery is a matter of daily life on Praxis.  The locals think nothing of it, nor do they question the thousands who get their hearts ripped out and their souls sacrificed to demons every Human year to keep their strange city-continent floating above the throbbing maelstroms of the brown dwarf.  Praxis is the most civilized city in the Golden Gate Sector completely lacking in temples to Astarte.  

Art by Stable Diffusion and JB Murphy (using GIMP).