For 150 years Harth-Hull was a mystery. A massive dark sphere floating above a canyon landscape, waterfalls cascading from its underside, sealed shut against the world. Nobody went in. Nobody came out. Whatever was happening inside stayed inside.

Ten years ago the sphere opened.

Now a Renaissance unlike anything Rictov had seen in generations. Art, ideas, technology, culture that had been developing in isolation for a century and a half suddenly pouring outward into a world that had almost forgotten Harth-Hull existed. The 10th Anniversary of the Lowering is celebrated as one of the great events of the modern era.

In the years after the Great Divide the eastern ruins of the fallen city of Derigiti began attracting settlers — people who felt drawn to the place without being entirely able to explain why. Something about the ground felt alive with possibility. Like standing next to a fire that hadn't been lit yet but you could already feel the warmth.

Over roughly a century those settlers built something remarkable. New Spasmenos is today one of the most technologically dynamic cities in Rictov — advancing faster than anywhere else, driven partly by the extraordinary old-world artifacts and instruments that keep surfacing during excavation of the ruins beneath the city. Whatever the people who lived in Derigiti before the Great Divide were building, it was extraordinary. And it works better than almost anything being built today.

The city is semi-independent — not governed by Polemas despite being largely populated by people of Polemas origin. It has the energy of a frontier settlement that knows it is becoming something significant and hasn't quite decided what that means yet. Everyone here is building something. The question is always; what?

The western half of the Derigiti ruins — directly across from New Spasmenos — remains completely uninhabited. Several attempts to settle it have failed. People leave. They don't explain why clearly. They just leave.