CItragadda

Citragadda, the Court of the Dream

Citragadda is not a place one finds—it is a place that remembers you, waiting just beyond the veil of dream and meaning. A city-realm of impossible angles and shifting skies, it is the spiritual capital of Kol’s divine dreamscape, tethered loosely to reality by the breath of the Dreamer. Streets bend back on themselves, buildings rearrange in rhythm with forgotten songs, and stars spill into the sea like candlewax. Time does not move forward here—it spirals, looping back on key memories, lost futures, and divine potential. It is said that even the gods get lost in its depths, emerging with truths too strange to carry back.

At the heart of Citragadda lies the Divine Court, a swirling mosaic of thrones suspended in the breath between stars. Each throne burns with the presence of a high god, representing one of the cardinal forces: judgment, mercy, passion, creation, and entropy. Yet even these lords are subsumed by the city itself, for Citragadda is more than their palace—it is their mirror, reflecting their dreams, doubts, and darker desires. Auriel once called it “a crown of madness strung across the soul of a sleeping god.” Though the Court governs creation, it does so reluctantly, aware that their thrones rest on the bones of dead pantheons.

The city pulses with dreams, but also with shadows—whispers of forgotten deities, secret courts, and subterranean masks that wear the faces of their worshipers. There are markets that trade in memory, gardens that grow regret, and libraries that rewrite their contents when no one is looking. It is beautiful, terrifying, seductive—and fragile. Visitors who stay too long risk losing their names, or worse, becoming someone else's unfinished story. The very architecture seems to breathe, aware of every step taken within it. Within Citragadda, identity is fluid, and fate is on loan.

Though once luminous with divine harmony, Citragadda now flickers with instability. The slumber of Auriel, Ceslida, and Ansil—combined with Ahriman’s ascension—has fractured the city’s metaphysical foundations. Dream-horrors creep through alleyways, leaking from Oog’s restless mind and ancient evils long thought bound. Yet the Great Tree still pulses at its center, a beacon of potential reality. To those who dare to walk its dreaming corridors, Citragadda offers great power… and the risk of never waking up the same.

History

Citragadda predates recorded time. It is believed to have first coalesced from the raw breath of the Dreamer, a convergence of possibility birthed in the space between the First Age and whatever came before it. Some myths claim that when Kol the First Dreamer was corrupted, it was Oog who reshaped Citragadda from the dying sparks of its predecessor—a realm shattered by divine betrayal and reborn in quiet dream. Others argue that Citragadda has always existed, waiting to be found, and that all pantheons merely settle into it like actors onto a shifting stage.

During the earliest divine era, Citragadda served as the council seat of the gods, where the four Courts—Red, Black, White, and Yellow—held sway in delicate rotation. Each Age of Kol corresponded with the reign of one of the Courts. With the ascension of Oog as the Second Dreamer and the awakening of the Great Tree, Citragadda entered its golden age—a time of relative harmony when divine law, mortal fate, and planar structure were carefully interwoven.

However, cracks began to form under the pressure of divine entities such as Ahriman, Renji, and the banished Outer Gods. Their efforts began destabilized the metaphysical contracts that held Citragadda together. Nothing, however, was as crippling as Ahriman, the coopting of the Gris influenced empires, and the implementation of a dark, powerful ritual. The Song of Stillness—a ritual that halted the cycles of divine death and rebirth—plunged key members of the Court into slumber, including Auriel, Ansil, and Ceslida. In their absence, Citragadda has become unstable, flickering between beauty and madness, sanctuary and snare.

Threats

Citragadda is not merely a dreamscape of divine order—it is a battleground of unfinished stories, twisted reflections, and forgotten gods. Chief among its threats is Ahriman, the current Yellow Lord of the Court, whose control over entropy, order, and deception allows him to manipulate the city’s very logic. His ascent has introduced paradoxical laws and temporal instability, infecting the sacred corridors of the Court with unreality. In his presence, false memories become real, and prophecy bends to favor tyranny.

Beyond Ahriman’s schemes, the Waking Storms—tears in dream-reality caused by Oog’s growing unrest—bleed into Citragadda. These storms drag nightmares into the city’s streets: impossible creatures, recursive phenomena, or echoes of gods who no longer exist. Some scholars believe the Crawling Chaos has planted seeds here as well, hoping to corrupt the Tree at the heart of the city and bend the Dreamer into a mouthpiece for the Void.

There are also the Silent Courts, a rumored fifth faction said to dwell beneath the roots of the Tree—remnants of failed realities and masked beings who collect discarded truths. They do not speak. They only watch. When they act, cities vanish and gods forget their own names. Even Ahriman fears them.

Existence Beyond Reality

Citragadda does not abide by linear causality. It exists in the space between waking and dreaming, neither wholly in the Feywild, the Astral Sea, nor any known planar structure. Mortals do not travel to Citragadda in the traditional sense—they are remembered by it, pulled into its folds through dreams, madness, prophecy, or ritual. One might wake in Citragadda with no recollection of having died—or never return with the same face or fate.

The city seems to have its own awareness, responding to powerful thoughts, emotions, and unresolved stories. Buildings rearrange, weather shifts with narrative weight, and entire districts phase in and out of existence depending on whether someone still remembers them. Time does not pass uniformly—a second in Kol might be a decade in Citragadda, or vice versa. Entire religions have unknowingly begun and ended within its boundaries, only to be born again in another world.

Some scholars argue that Citragadda is not a city at all, but a higher function of the Dreamer’s mind—a dreaming logic engine tasked with maintaining reality through storytelling. Others believe it is a former god, long dead but too beloved to vanish, still serving as the stage for all divine theater. Whatever its origin, one truth remains clear: to enter Citragadda is to risk becoming part of the Dream, and dreams—once begun—are not always yours to end.