Spoiler notice — The Penultimate Dawn Cycle. This entry and its linked reference pages may reveal events, identities, and outcomes from The Hunger, The Thirst, and The Longing. Continue only when you are ready for story details; open closed sections deliberately.
The Cantifold Encyclopedia · Penultimate Dawn collection · Curated by Jackdaw.
CITIES OF THE HIDDEN WORLD
Pantonallia
The ancient underground capital of the Ethermen, centered on the Orange Keep and a vast city of living orange glass.
Center of the Ethermen World
Timotheus calls Pantonallia the center of the Men of Ether. Later accounts identify it as the former capital of the Ethermen world, a city hidden so completely beneath the surface that most later Earthmen do not even know it exists.
Water as a Road
The route into Pantonallia depends on a network of tubes, channels, shafts, and water-driven passages rather than ordinary streets or stairways. Travelers rise and descend through the system as water fills the ancient conduits, making the city feel engineered around movement unlike anything in the surface Clans.
A City of Orange Glass
Pantonallia’s architecture is dominated by glowing orange glass filled with countless Mage Mites. Buildings form a strange organic network of tubes, angles, curves, and branching structures, giving the city the appearance of a living system rather than a conventional collection of stone buildings.
The Orange Keep
The Orange Keep is the great central stronghold within Pantonallia, not another name for the whole city. Keeping the two distinct helps explain why the manuscripts can describe expeditions to Pantonallia while still treating the Keep itself as a particular destination within the capital.
A Civilization Preserved in Silence
By the time the city is rediscovered, Pantonallia is largely silent, but its technology, Mites, monuments, and hidden history continue shaping the Realm. The city becomes one of the clearest surviving witnesses that Ethermen civilization was once sophisticated, populous, and central to the world’s older order.
Related: Ethermen · Black Sustenance & Dark Mites · Juliana