Realm V of VIII
The Lantern Gardens
Stairways of light at the edge of the world
In the southwest, stone stairways climb through gardens of violet and white blossoms, lit by lamps on slender posts. Gothic shrines glow from within, and a great bridge sweeps out over the void toward the River of Life.
This is where fairies gather most. Look along the stairs, beside the shrines and out at the very edge of the cliff.
Look closer
- Lamps lining the curving stair
- The arched shrine with golden windows
- The long bridge over the clouds
- Three fairies, one of them only a silhouette
Three fairies hide in this realm.
In our world
Lanterns for the first full moon
The Lantern Festival closes the Chinese New Year on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the first full moon of the lunar year. Streets and houses fill with lanterns, often hung with riddles for passersby to solve, and families share sweet rice balls called yuanxiao or tangyuan. The custom may reach back as far as the Han dynasty.
The Lantern Gardens glow every night. Choose a full moon in Shape the world to see them under the festival's moon.
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A garden that may have stood elsewhere
Greek and Roman writers described terraced Hanging Gardens built at Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II, yet no firsthand account survives, and two decades of digging around 1900 found nothing certain. The Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued that the gardens stood instead at Nineveh, built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib and watered by a bronze screw that raised water from below.
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