Known also as Mataras — a Lashunta name meaning 'burning mother' — the Sun is an incredibly inhospitable star of near-incomprehensible heat and pressure. In its heart, massive energies regularly tear holes to the Positive Energy Plane and the Plane of Fire, giving birth to whale-like fire elementals and plasma oozes, as well as efreet, salamanders, and intelligent flame-dwelling creatures with supernatural resistance to the star's conditions. Roughly a century ago, Sarenite scholars discovered the Burning Archipelago: a collection of inexplicable, deserted bubble-cities tethered together by magic and floating unburnt within the sun's flaming seas, accessed via a magical tunnel that opens miraculously through the corona. Though it remains unknown who built these cities, the Burning Archipelago quickly became the Church of Sarenrae's most sacred settlement. Today, the Radiant Cathedral in the central bubble attracts worshipers and scientists from across the system, while gleaming Sarenite sunskimmers service orbital power stations and corporations operate solar-powered robotics plants and 'jungle boxes' of mutated organisms. Trade delegations from the Plane of Fire regularly use the Archipelago to meet Material Plane contacts, and they bring word of strange ruins and whole empires of fire-immune creatures floating within the star's deeper layers — the so-called 'deep cultures' whose refusal to respond to messages has spawned conspiracy theories suggesting that time itself warps at the sun's core, making these civilizations representatives not of the past but of the future.