The wondrous city of Hestavar drifts amid golden clouds. Hestavar represents the greatest heights of art, architecture, and invention that civilization can attain. It is a fantastically wealthy domain, with buildings roofed in gold and streets paved in precious stones. In Hestavar’s mercantile arcades, things that are too precious or scarce to be sold anywhere else can be found.
Gigantic, shimmering, pale gold and silver clouds surround the city of Hestavar and mark its border with the Astral Sea. Through breaks in the clouds, approaching travelers spy slender towers and soaring domes high overhead. Astral vessels that enter the clouds emerge a few minutes later sailing upon the dazzling turquoise waters of the vast lagoon filling the lower third of the plane. Travelers without a vessel appear on one of the white sandbars dotting the perimeter of the lagoon. Dozens of islands covered in stately homes, white ramparts, and marble quays lie scattered over the surface of the lagoon, but the towns on the lagoon isles are only a small portion of the Bright City—most of the city is built atop the great floating earthmotes that mount higher and higher into the sky of the plane. Soaring bridges or buttresses link many of these motes, although other motes are free to drift.
It is always dawn in Hestavar. The clouds above the plane serve as its sun, shedding brilliant radiance from overhead. As the clouds drift and darken or brighten, the color and intensity of the light varies. At their darkest, the clouds take on a dark silver color like rainclouds, but brighter clouds behind them still glow intensely in a pale gold, peeking through in slanting beams like sunlight. It does not truly rain in Hestavar, but some of the earthmotes hold endless springs that feed small waterfalls high overhead. As lower earthmotes drift underneath, they pass through the falling mists.