Before the Age of Collapse, Gitna was a home for the Iruxi of the Mana Wastes. Protected beneath a rocky outcropping and with access to a network of tunnels for shelter, Gitna became an important trade hub for the Mana Wastes, and an archive for the Iruxi people, where their traditions could be recorded and preserved and lost family could be brought back together.
The once-nomadic Iruxi who settled Gitna were reluctant to leave, even after the attack that destroyed Alkenstar. But worsening mana storms, so bad not even the cave systems could provide adequate protection, and attacks by larger, hungrier, and more dangerous mutant creatures soon forced their hand. Even though the Iruxi were forced to uproot themselves and return to a nomadic lifestyle, they refused to abandon what they had built in Gitna, and when the conditions of the desert permitted them to return, they did. With each visit they recorded the names of the lost and the newly born onto the city's walls, and in this way Gitna remained a site for rememberance and reconnection, a way to preserve the past and hold onto what was lost. The former settlement became a place of pilgrimage and a consistent meeting grounds for the nomads, who worked to maintain the wall and preserve their recorded knowledge with each visit. This tradition was passed down from generation to generation, and when other nomadic groups and displaced people joined together with the Iruxi so they all could have a better chance of surviving the perilous Age of Collapse, they too became part of the records.
When the Mana Wastes began to calm, nomads who had been raised on stories of Gitna and spent their lives travelling to the site dreamed of one day rebuilding the city. Too much had been destroyed or worn away with time, and resources remained scarce even after the mana storms relented, so for a thousand years it remained a dream. That changed when the Alchemist was finally defeated. Emboldened nomads returned to Gitna and set upon the hard, years-long work of rebuilding. It was a community-wide effort, relying on not just the efforts of many different nomadic groups but also their allies in the Mana Wastes. Trade with Cloudreaver Market, sometimes called "Kal Rifir" by the nomads, was instrumental in securing the materials needed to build a new city, and the Fleshwarps of Grittybank were recruited to assist with construction efforts. When any of the more dangerous mutants still roaming the desert came close enough to threaten the burgeoning city, artillerists from Pranee's Forge were hired to drive them off. Though the city retains a strongly Iruxi cultural identity, this connection with the Mana Wastes' other denizens and the varied ancestries of modern nomadic groups have made Gitna a diverse city. Gitna is the Mana Waste's most important cultural hub, and it is home to the most knowledgable scholars and the deepest repositories of knowledge about the Mana Wastes and their history. It's also become an important hub and trading outpost for the Waste's nomads, in recent years even moreso than the newly-renamed Moonlit Junction, and many semi-nomadic groups now use Gitna as a permanent home between their travels. The up-to-date knowledge the nomads have about the Wastes' conditions and what can be found in the desert are invaluable for treasure hunters, and the Relic Seekers' Union has long maintained a healthy relationship with Gitna's record-keepers to ensure they will have access to that intelligence.
The arrival of the Harbor of Hearts has changed the situation. Between the shardstorms and the new wave of adventurers drawn to the Harbor, the Mana Wastes are in the middle of a seismic shift, and the people of Gitna aren't going to let it endanger their home after they finally returned. The shardstorms in most of the world are small, brief, and localized enough that they rarely disrupt people's everyday lives except in the most extreme circumstances. The same isn't true in the Mana Wastes, where the storms have been large and intense enough to demand a real response. Many nomads have become Shardbound, or in more unfortunate cases, developed shardsickness that only a few have even begun to recover from.
The people of Gitna aren't about to lose their home so soon after finally reclaiming it. Some, such as the Fleshwarp elder Saamat, want to put pressure on the Harbor of Hearts to help protect their people in exchange for continued access to the nomads' intelligence. Saamat, who appears as a pale, fleshy humanoid in the general shape of an Iruxi, with a third eye located just beneath his jaw and a layer of thick scales over his abdomen, was born only a few years before the Alchemist's defeat, and he remembers the struggle to rebuild Gitna and how important collaboration with other residents of the Wastes was to their community. Others, however, have fallen in line behind Buso Esharuk, one of the Gitna's most recently appointed elders. Buso Esharuk, a Marked lizardfolk with brown scales, a short stature and a wiry physique, became one of Gitna's most respected desert navigators after spending her youth adventuring up north across the Golden Road. She believes that Gitna would be better off backing away from their relationship with Moonlit Junction, and instead redoubling their connections with the Wastes' other communities, and perhaps even reaching out to the wizards of Samsara Oasis. She sees in this new Harbor of Hearts an engine of commerce and adventurism that is poised to run over her homeland and turn everyone it touches into an unwitting vassal. Those who stand behind her are wary of the Harbor's appeals to heroism and the grand triumphs of adventures long ago and far away, and see its guildmasters as little more than walking dispensers of advertising copy.
As Gitna debates the question of the Harbor of Hearts, something else has been brewing among the city's youth for a number of years. A small but passionate group of mostly-Iruxi youth, inspired by the clockwork vehicles created by the Gearhounds of Pranee's Forge, have developed a variation of the Flamescarred Longboard designed to traverse long distances across the desert, carving through the sands at unprecedented speeds. Calling themselves the "Mana Carvers," these Iruxi have embraced a lifestyle of wanderlust and exploration, challenging each other to find the Wastes' most remote locations and be the first to leave their mark in the least expected places. No one has risen to this challenge better than Inish, a Gitna-born Iruxi with uncommon green scales who is torn between his love of his home and his people and his desire to leave the Mana Wastes and see everything there is to see in Garund and beyond.