Aurelia

Everything grows in Aurelia. The soil is the richest on the planet, the harvests defy arithmetic, and at the center of it all stands the Tree of Life — three hundred meters of trunk, a canopy you can see from the ocean, and a heartbeat.

That's not a metaphor. The Tree pulses with light every six seconds. It has done so for ten thousand years.

The Aurelian priesthood interprets the Tree's dreams — visions that come to those who sleep beneath the canopy, symbolic, unsettling, and consistently accurate. Nations have quietly steered policy on an Aurelian dream more than once. Britannia sends botanical expeditions every year to study the root system. Aurelia permits it, watches them very carefully, and says nothing.

Here's what the priests don't announce: the dreams have stopped. Three years now. The Tree is alive, the roots still move, the heartbeat still glows — but whatever lives at the center of it has gone silent, like a watcher who turned to look at something else.