Glassteel Towers

The Glasssteel Towers can be found all over Thivis - except for the Desolation - usually along the Ivory Roads. Each Tower has a well-made, defensible stone foundation approximately 20 m tall, originally of chaos-born materials. The exact material used for the foundation varies to some extent but stone is the most common. Nowadays, the foundations are in various states of repair and have been patched up many times over the centuries. The Tower's most prominent feature, however, are the Glassteel used in their construction which, due to its strength and light weight, allows the Towers to reach heights of even 400 m - while most Towers are tall, this particularly is the case for those Towers build in uneven terrain.

Towers are usually placed between 10 to 20 km apart, as their height allows them to simply overcome most geographical features that would otherwise block line of sight.

Glassteel Towers are equipped with a complicated machinery at its top - varying in terms of design and components - that can be used by a Channeller of the First Path to signal across great distances. These light signals are then picked up by another Glasssteel Tower and so on - creating a communication network allowing for fast transmission of news across the vast lands of Thivis. Of course, manning these Towers and keeping them well-maintained is neither cheap nor simple, and a single missing broken link can disrupt the entire network. As such, only the most important lines are functional, usually between capitals, centres of trade and important frontier fortresses. However, it is theoretically possible to modify a Tower to use more ordinary light sources, such as mirrors or small fires - this, of course, is far less efficient, cumbersome to use, and requires a stock of fuel, though theoretically it could be done through using suitable Channellers of the Second Path. Each Tower is usually also manned by a second person - though sometimes a sole Channeller is sufficient - who uses a telescope to read the signals send by the other Tower.

Communication by Towers is severely limited by the amount of letters that can be sent per minute - faster signalling is theoretically possible, but greatly increases the risk of missed or misread signals. Some of the machinery in the Towers appears to be designed to support faster signals, but with centuries of patchy maintenance and lost knowledge, these features have become largely unusable. As a result, most countries and organisations have developed systems of short codes which refer to the pre-set messages contained in closely guarded code books. At the same time, however, things are also complicated by the need for cyphers - as the signals from a Glassteel Tower can easily be seen by others nearby, encoding messages becomes necessary to keep them private.

Generally, a Glassteel Tower in today's time can transmit about a single signal per minute, which includes proper adjustment of the shutters and mirrors, and verification of the signal between the Towers. A line of Towers could transmit a signal at a speed of approximately 1,200 km per hour, under normal conditions. Maximum speeds are around 6,000 km per hour, but are limited to emergency cases and pre-determined codes.

The system used by the Towers consists of nine shutters arranged in a three-by-three pattern. Each shutter can be closed off and opened individually, allowing for large variety of possible arrangements, which are divided into a set of primary symbols that are particularly distinct, and secondary symbols - some of which are reserved to indicate specific known organisations.