Hipalos, Heart of the Plains
Where the grasslands roll west into dry steppe and south into open savanna, the Daskilon faction keeps its strangest and freest city. Hipalos is the animal crossroads of the bloc — a sprawling, low, tent-and-paddock city of some twenty-two thousand souls that feels less like a walled metropolis than a permanent great fair of herds. The steppe nearby is mythologized as the very birthplace of horses on Kworgalya, and the Hipaloi lean into the legend with pride: their golden horses are reckoned the most beautiful in the world. Daskilon is the steel, the faction says, Velastra the mind and flame, Erothys the grain — and Hipalos the hoofbeat beneath them all.
A City That Breathes Outward
Hipalos has no tight walls. Instead a ring of yurts, tents, and paddocks spreads around clusters of permanent stone-and-timber workshops — tanneries, wool-sheds, smokehouses, wheelwrights, auction yards — and its "streets" are only the lanes between camp-circles, forever reconfigured as herds move and caravans roll through. Outward from the city the herds spread to the horizon, each beast pastured where it thrives: horses and cattle on the grass, hardy ponies and sheep on the steppe, rhinos and exotic stock on the savanna. City, herds, and horizon all blur into one. May your herd grow and never scatter, the Hipaloi say in parting, and they mean it as the truest of blessings.
The Soul of Hipalos
Horses are the soul of the city, bred in coveted lines: the radiant Golden Hipaloi, status-mounts across the continent; the tireless steppe endurance-horses; and the vigorous white chargers raised expressly for the Radiant Vanguard of distant Risbern. But Hipalos breeds war as well as beauty. In its savanna camps it raises and trains rhinoceroses — armored, terrible, and bound for the heavy cavalry of Daskilon's armies — alongside cattle, oxen, guard-dogs, and pack-beasts. You can steal a horse, an old trader warns, but not a Hipalon's knowledge. For that, you must pay — and listen.
Fast, Loose, and Always Moving
The Hipaloi fight the way they live. Their famed light cavalry are fast, aggressive horse-archers, masters of the skirmish and the screen, riding ahead of Daskilon's heavy rhinos as scouts and outriders. Their justice is as informal as their war is fluid — small disputes settled by horse-races, archery contests, and wagers overseen by elders, sealed with a shared cup and a witness rather than ink and wax. They are wild, hospitable, big-tempered and bigger-hearted, and they prize courage and generosity above almost anything a contract can name.
The Joyqueen's People
Hipalos is devoted to Charakyra, the Joyqueen — the Ruby aspect of delight and the fierce happiness of being alive. To ride at speed across the plains, surrounded by herds and friends, is itself an act of worship; her shrines are open-air things of painted stones and ribbons tied to hitching-posts. The year turns on her festivals of racing, trick-riding, and mounted archery, and on the great joyfires lit whenever a caravan departs or returns, where people dance and gamble and flirt and hang their reins in the smoke to season the road ahead. A day without a ride, they say, is a day wasted on someone else's dream.
