The Floating Towers

The Floating Towers of Arcanix, located above the city of Arcanix, is considered one of the finest institutes for magical learning in the realms. Those with a penchant for the arcane arts, whether young or old, are welcome in the Towers. Visiting the floating towers means seeing wonders undreamt of by most people in the realms—from baffling illusions to animated contrivances to captured creatures from other dimensions.

The floating towers are at once a college of wizardry and the personal laboratories of some of the most powerful wizards in the Five Nations. Many a would-be magewright or wizard comes to the Towers, hoping to study hard and someday ascend to the lofty ranks of Aundair’s finest arcanists.

Home to the Arcane Congress.

Environment
Arcanix is an elegant, six story castle supported by magic. There were a hundred and forty two staircases throughout its many towers and turrets - wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Firesday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Arcane architects aren’t constrained by the square footage within the floating towers’ walls; some rooms exist extradimensionally, and each tower has far more space on the inside than a conventionally made castle would.

In general, the floating towers have smooth stone floors, superior masonry walls, and 15-foot-high wood-paneled ceilings (with 30-foot-high vaulted ceilings in particularly large chambers). There’s no consistency to the doors within the Towers. Some wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and some weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. The floating towers are too vast to completely map, and such a map would be out of date by the time it was completed as locations in the Towers seemed to move around a lot.

Everburning torches light every corner of the floating towers, unless a member of the Congress has a specific reason to prefer darkness. Some everburning torches burst into flame only when someone enters the room, dousing themselves instantly when the room is vacant. Others burn with strangely colored flame, adding a bluish or reddish tint to everything they illuminate. The floating towers are a quiet place; distracting noise is conducive to neither study nor political machinations. The temperature is always mild within the floating towers, no matter what is happening outside.

The Arcane Congress built the floating towers over eight hundred years, so their walls have known many architects, both mundane and magical. Within the floating towers, there’s always a strong aura of transmutation (the spells that keep the towers aloft) and at least one other aura.

Subjects and Professors
Abjuration

Alchemy, Medicine

Alteration

Artifice, Mathematics

Chronomancy, Magical Theory 3, Necromancy, Summoning

Conjuration

Critical Thinking, Divination, Logic

Enchantment, Inscription, Languages, Warding

Ethics, Evocation

Illusion

Transmutation

History, Magical Creatures, Magical Theory 1 - 2, Geography