Steps of Aes'tun

The Steps of Aes'tun are an ancient ritual site just outside Vertenalith on Benu Wen.

Each city tends to have its own special staging area for both Challenges and Falling and Adorning Ceremonies on its outskirts. And for Vertenalith, the capital of Benu Wen, it is the Steps.

They are not, and never have been, the steps TO anything, but are purely and reverently symbolic in the fact they have precisely 463 steps, which is the same number as days in a Wennian year, the steps are stained with the blood of challengers from top to bottom, and never cleaned, and that they rise into the Whitewing Mountains at just the point where they ascend into cloud-cover, meaning that the evaporating blood is said to be what tinges the clouds red. This is not scientifically accurate. The pinkness of the sky is due to the gases present in the atmosphere. But it is a W'hoorn idiom (and rather spectacular phenomenon) nonetheless.