The House of the Second Sun is the grandest of the cities raised on the drifting islands of the Astral Plane. It is built around two colossal pillars that rise from the highest cliff-island and hold a glowing orb between them, far below Aurus but bright enough that the souls beneath read it as a second, smaller sun. The orb is the city's center and its name. Towers climb the pillars; the streets terrace down the island's flanks toward the Astral Sea, and the milling soul-husks that fill every island-city here fill these too, crowds that never thin and answer to no one.
The orb and the pillars
The Astral islands are not stable. They float in the opaque sea the way icebergs ride water, and the largest of them roll over without warning when the millennial quakes shake their underbellies loose. The House of the Second Sun is built on one of the great cliff-islands, which means the orb and the two pillars that carry it ride the same instability as everything else in the Astral. No one in the city will say what holds the pillars upright against a roll that has overturned islands twice their size, or what would happen to the orb if one of them failed. That the city has stood at all is the closest thing the Astral has to a fixed point, and the souls drift toward it for that reason.
Gihatti's seat
The palace at the foot of the pillars is the seat of Gihatti, the mortal who reached Celestia and came back a god, and who is named the king of the Astral Plane. His story belongs to his own record; what belongs here is the seat. He holds court in a plane whose dead cannot, by their nature, be ruled. The soul-husks that throng his city are bare strands of Aurus-light without will or purpose, and a will-less soul answers no command. So the king of the Astral keeps a kingdom of architecture and drifting crowds, a throne over a city that takes its own shape no matter who sits in it.
What this leaves unresolved is whether the kingship is sovereignty or a title held over no subjects. Gihatti's court treats the House of the Second Sun as the capital of the plane and the orb as a sign of his right to it. Others who cross the Astral Sea — ship-captains who read the currents, the willed presences that are not husks — have never agreed that a city of ghosts can have a king, or that reaching Celestia once made him lord of a realm he merely passed through. The question has no settled answer, and Gihatti has never had to defend the claim against anyone strong enough to press it.