Aurelia

Everything grows in Aurelia. The harvests break arithmetic and at the center stands the Tree of Life, three hundred meters of trunk with a canopy you can see from the ocean. It pulses with light every six seconds. It has done that for ten thousand years.

Anyone who sleeps under the canopy dreams. The priesthood reads those dreams and nations have quietly changed policy on a single one. Britannia sends a botanical expedition every year to study the roots. Aurelia lets them, watches them closely, and says nothing.

Aurelia also has STARs. Fewer than Arcadia, better trained, and never paraded. At Urartu they broke the Tarian army in a week, tanks and jets dead under an EMP before the first Aurelian crossed the line. A Tarian survivor of that war says he killed one of them with a knife. Aurelia has no record of losing anyone.

Three years ago the dreams stopped. The Tree still glows and the roots still move, but whatever lives at the center of it has gone quiet, like a watcher who turned to look at something else.