⚠️ This article contains mild spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1) and setup for Book 2.
"I explored ideas, studied histories, reflected on the fates of winged kind. Realised what we were taught is a lie, and Celestials make cattle of us two-wings. One who truly understands that cannot live normally anymore. He has only three ways: deny the truth and bow down, break and die, or spend his life fighting. I chose the latter. I do not regret it. But that sure as hell wasn't easy."
— Commander Zephyros, to Lia Domiandi
Tross is unlike any other sky city. Where its neighbours enforce the ancient hierarchy of wing-count as divine law, Tross abolished it — not through argument or petition, but through a brutal civil war that shook the Highfolk world to its foundations some fifty years ago and has never been forgiven. The city is governed by an elected council of equal Celestials and two-wings, open to all races, and commands the largest air fleet in the sky. Its enemies call it a menace and a heresy. Its citizens call it proof.
It is both things, depending on who is asking and what they have lost.
Tross offers something no other sky city does: a place where wing-count is simply not the measure of a person. Its doors are open to all races — even Deepfolk would be welcomed should they ever choose to ascend into the sky, which thus far they have not. The equality is genuine. The food shortages of the blockade years are past. And the vigilance required to defend what was won has made the city watchful, hard, and not always patient with those who cannot see what it cost.
Tross floats above the northern edge of the Expanse — the vast open steppe — and its weather shows it. Clouds gather around the city more often than not. The air is damper and colder than Aeloria, and the sky above is rarely the brilliant blue of calmer regions — more frequently a layered grey, with breaks of pale gold where the sun forces through. The city wears this weather as comfortably as old clothes.
The original architecture of Tross is monumental where Aeloria is spindly. Where Aeloria reaches upward in thin columns and needle spires, Tross spreads and vaults. Its oldest buildings are built in dark blue stone and ochre, their rooflines defined by low domes — broad, rounded, pressing down into the city rather than straining away from it. Vaulted ceilings span the great civic halls and temples. Archways curve over thoroughfares, heavy and deliberate. These older structures were built for permanence, not elegance, and they have the look of things that intend to outlast the people arguing beneath them.
The newer districts — those built or rebuilt after the uprising — are different. Functional. Simple. Plain stone, plain line, plain purpose. No carved reliefs, no gold inlay, no decorative excess. The older Celestial quarter was gutted and repurposed; the private mansions that once announced their owners' supremacy are now barracks, meeting halls, and distribution stores. A prince arriving from Aeloria might use the word drab. A citizen of Tross, asked to respond, might say: at least it's honest.
The harbor is busy and unbeautiful — functional piers, organized berths, working vessels rather than ceremonial ones. Soldiers drill in open squares. Supply depots are clearly marked. The city has the look of a place that never entirely stands down.
Tross's Core remains stable — a point of quiet pride in a city that was told, repeatedly, that it could not function without Celestial administration. The great sphere pulses at the city's heart as it always has, its rhythm unchanged by the change in who governs. The surrounding quarter has been opened up, the old exclusions removed; any citizen may approach. Children play on the lower platforms near it on warm days, which would be an affront worthy of exile in Aeloria or Zelos.
The integrated armed force of Tross — Celestials and two-wings trained together, ranked by skill and conduct rather than wing-count — is by most assessments the largest and best-supplied in the sky. Deepfolk weapons technology, acquired through the alliance forged during Tross's most desperate years, has equipped it with capabilities that conventional Highfolk magic cannot easily answer. The fleet is the city's most visible expression of both its strength and its anxiety: it is large because it has to be, because the city has never once, in fifty years, been allowed to forget that it is surrounded by powers that would undo it.
Weather is a weapon here as well as a hazard. Trossan researchers have developed storm-guidance technology from older resistance tools — mechanisms that can direct weather toward a target with precision. The fleet has never needed to use them in open battle. The knowledge that they exist is itself a form of deterrence.
Tross is governed by an elected council on which Celestials and two-wings hold equal seats. Councillors are chosen by their districts for fixed terms and can be removed by their constituents; hereditary claims to power have no legal standing. The commander of the armed forces is separately elected and answerable to the council in theory — but in practice, the commander holds ultimate decisive authority in all matters touching on the city's security, which in Tross's situation means most matters of consequence. This arrangement was understood, when first established, as a temporary measure suited to a city under siege. It has persisted for decades. Zephyros has held the position since the uprising's victory, and no one has yet determined when the fighting will be sufficiently over for the arrangement to change.
The system is genuinely unlike anything found in the other sky cities. What it produces, in practice, is a great deal of argument. Debates in the council chamber are long, frequently heated, and occasionally acrimonious. What they do not produce is a king telling everyone what has been decided. For citizens who grew up under the old order, this is still sometimes disorienting. For those who grew up under Tross, it is simply how things are done.
The city maintains alliances with the Deepfolk clans and with the Midfolk trade powers — arrangements built during the blockade years when Aeloria and Zelos refused to trade, and which have since grown into genuine partnerships. Tross is the only Highfolk city that treats the wingless races as sovereign equals rather than useful inferiors.
The civil war that made Tross what it is today ended approximately fifty years ago, though its causes reach back further — to philosophers and religious reformers who argued that the original scriptures of the First to Fly never sanctioned wing-count supremacy, to scholars who showed the historical evidence, and to the growing, daily reality of two-wings who were talented and capable and blocked at every turn by those who happened to have been born with four wings rather than two.
The traditional Celestial rulers of Tross responded to rising discontent with crackdowns. The crackdowns produced resistance. The resistance produced, eventually, open war. It lasted years. It was brutal on both sides. The reformers had superior organisation and, eventually, Deepfolk weapons; the traditionalist Celestials had magical advantage and the weight of centuries of established order. Neither side was clean. Atrocities occurred. Brothers fought brothers.
The traditionalists lost.
Their fates divided into three. Many died in the fighting or were executed afterward. Some fled — to Zelos, where they were welcomed as evidence of everything that city believed about the reformers; to Aeloria, where they were tolerated with varying degrees of sympathy. A small number remained and swore loyalty to the new order, publicly renouncing Celestial supremacy, accepting positions under the new system. These last are watched with more suspicion by some and held up as proof of concept by others. They live with a complicated legacy.
The decade that followed the victory was harder than the war. The blockade imposed by Aeloria and Zelos strangled trade. Food was scarce. Power failed sometimes. The dire predictions of those who said the city could not survive without Celestial leadership seemed, in those years, to be coming true. They were not. Tross survived — hungry, cold, and stubborn — and then slowly recovered, and then began to grow.
It has not stopped growing since.
No account of Tross is complete without honesty about its contradictions. The city preaches the equality of all and practises it, genuinely, in its daily life. It also suppresses organised dissent without mercy, exiles those who work actively to restore the old hierarchy, and maintains a security apparatus that the city's defenders call necessary and its critics call excessive. Both descriptions contain truth.
The justification is not unreasonable: Tross is surrounded by cities that have never accepted its legitimacy, that share intelligence against it, and that would, if they could, restore the old order by force. The vigilance is a response to real threats. But fifty years of needing to defend what was won has left marks on the city's character. The habit of watching for enemies is difficult to lay down. The line between defending freedom and becoming unwilling to examine one's own methods has been, at times, crossed and then quietly uncrossed.
A visitor from outside — especially one arriving from one of the old hierarchical cities — will notice the warmth of the welcome extended to the wingless and the coolness extended to Celestials of obvious aristocratic background. The mirror is not comfortable, but it is not inaccurate.
Zephyros, who led the uprising and has commanded Tross ever since, describes the city's position plainly: surrounded by enemies, scarred by the cost of survival, aware of its own contradictions, and unwilling to pretend that freedom maintains itself. He has one wing. He calls it a fair bargain.
Commander Zephyros — Elected military commander of Tross and the principal architect of its founding ideas, now in his mid-forties, is its most recognisable figure and the closest thing the city has to a symbol. A two-wing of working-class origins, educated by a wealthy Celestial patron who later withdrew his support when the student's conclusions became inconvenient, Zephyros organised the resistance, was captured by Zelan forces, survived torture and the deliberate severing of his right wing, was rescued, and returned to lead the uprising to victory. He wears a grey military uniform, carries the gaunt look of a man who went hungry alongside his people during the blockade years and never entirely recovered his weight, and moves with the slight asymmetric lean of someone who has spent decades compensating for an absence. The right side of his coat has a wing-slit sewn permanently shut.
He is not warm, exactly. But he is fair, and he is honest, and in the company of those he has decided to respect, there is something that functions like humour — dry, infrequent, and slightly unsettling. He does not mock titles directly. He simply finds them, in a city where such things have no legal meaning, a little difficult to say without noticing how they sound.
Ambassador Atraeis — Tross's diplomatic representative to Aeloria: a four-wing Celestial who chose to remain in Tross after the uprising rather than fight or flee, who refused to fire on civilians during the war, and who has spent decades as living proof that the city's equality is not merely theoretical. She carries the particular complexity of someone who chose a side not because of ideology but because of loyalty to people, and who has lived with the costs of that choice ever since.
This article is about a Location — Free City · Sky City
| World Overview | World Index |
| Sky Cities | Aeloria · Zelos |
| Peoples | Highfolk · The Three Races |
| Key Characters | Zephyros · Atraeis |