Ithera · impact zone of the Arca Aurora · capital of the Guilds
La Cicatriz
In a nutshell
La Cicatriz is the furrow the Arca Aurora, a great settler ship, tore open when it crashed on the planet Ithera in Year 1. The five Guilds, which belong to neither side, were born there, and today it is their capital. It is a graveyard too, and the only place where people from both factions queue at the same counter.
El Vivero does not close its doors to anyone who bleeds.
What is La Cicatriz?
The Arca Aurora tore it open when it crashed in Year 1 E.A. (E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar). The Arca was a heavy transport ship of the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers.
It is a furrow kilometres long of churned earth and broken fuselage, set in the temperate lowlands and grassland of Ithera. Today it is a graveyard, an archaeological site and the capital of the five Global Guilds. These trade organisations take no side, and were born here among the crash survivors.
Two customs hold here. No one enters La Cicatriz armed. And it is the only place in the system where a Zenith and a Nadir queue at the same mission counter. Nobody questions it. The Zenith and the Nadir are the system’s two rival factions.
How is it laid out?
In three rings around the point of impact:
- The core, out to 500 m from the centre. It is the bow, where the main reactor struck. It is still cordoned off: a high-risk zone and the final destination of the Guilds’ highest-trust jobs. Ombrasks, giant predators, hunt there; the largest on record live here.
- The middle ring, between 1 and 1.5 km. It holds the guild headquarters, raised on recovered sections of the hull.
- The outer ring, between 2.5 and 3 km. The escape modules and lifepods came down here. They are the oldest civilian settlements on the planet. Their architecture mixes Zenith and Nadir styles, because it went up before those labels existed.
A sentinel patrols above the core: an auxiliary core of the Flota Aura, a small machine mind, that nobody rescued. It loops on an order forty-six years old.
Where is each Guild?
Each sits in its own direction from the centre, given in degrees, on a different part of the Arca.
| Headquarters | Guild | Direction | On which part of the Arca |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Vivero | The Pioneers, the settlers | 330° | The bioengineering module, turned into a dome of organic glass. |
| El Faro Roto | The Pathfinders, the explorers | 45° | The Torre de Navegación, the highest point in the zone. |
| El Aguijón | Apex Syndicate, the hunters | 90° | The surviving dorsal fin, facing the jungle. |
| La Fragua Baja | The Forge, the producers | 180° | The remains of the reactor core and its geothermal venting. |
| El Bastión | The Vanguard, the military guild | 270° | The command bridge, watching the access routes. |
What is remembered here?
Each headquarters has its memorial:
- At El Aguijón, the wall of fallen hunters’ names is read aloud to every recruit.
- At El Faro Roto, the Muro de los No Vueltos keeps the expeditions that went out for water and rescue and never came back. That was during the Cuarenta Días de Fuego, the forty days after the crash.
- At El Bastión, Colonel Ostrach, head of The Vanguard, repeats the names of her dead every year on the day of the fall.
Municipal Archivist Doret keeps the list of survivors. This is how she greets the survivors’ grandchildren:
“Your surname is on the list of those who walked out of the wreckage. Not many people can say that. Don’t waste it.”
Municipal Archivist Doret
What is daily life like?
La Fragua Baja has queues of cargo carts from before dawn. El Vivero has a seed market on the ground floor and its emergency clinic. Between the headquarters go round stories of the Cuarenta Días that nobody has written down and everybody knows. People also bet on the rivalry between Kestrel Vasko, head of the hunters, and Quill Sarn, head of the explorers. Who will give way first?
What is around it?
Most recruits first see La Cicatriz from the Pioneers’ Puesto de Enlace, on its edge. It is a modest post, half prefabricated and half recycled from the Arca’s fuselage, ringed by small hydroponic gardens (crops grown without soil). Nearby lie:
- Los Espejos de Rocío, a wetland, about 4 km west.
- Cañón Espina, a canyon system, to the south-southwest.
- El Vergel Pálido, a spore forest that glows, to the east-north-east.
- Puesto Meridiano, the Guilds’ neutral transit settlement, about 83 km north, where grassland gives way to desert.
And on the moon Selvane there is a great canyon that repeats the shape in stone: La Cicatriz Gemela.
