Star Magic

There are many Gods in the Yellow City, and almost as many seperate sects and religious orders devoted to their worship. One of these is the Xáwúló, literally "the ones who look at the stars", a cult whose membership has grown in recent decades. Its members, who tattoo their skin with many tiny dots as if representing the firmament, can often be seen on rooftops and street corners at night, gazing up at the sky. It is their unusual belief that the stars are not a source of light alone, but represent distant other worlds which are inhabited by strange and foreign races.

Whether or not this belief is true (though it is viewed with contempt by the city's philosophers and scholars), what is certain is that the Xáwúló have found a way to communicate and even interact with something. For members of the sect are sometimes able to summon strange spirits into the Yellow City, through manipulating star light with mirrors and lenses. These ethereal beings are barely visible and possess only the weakest physical presence, and they cannot communicate in a spoken tongue, but their existence is undoubted.

Members of the Xáwúló maintain that these entities are the manifestation of beings from the stars. Others speculate that they are demons, ghosts, or ancestral spirits, who have tricked the Xáwúló into believing they hail from other worlds. What is certain is that they are unaccounted for in all of the treatises of the sages, and are viewed with suspicion and fear by the powerful philosophical guilds.