Aleph Setting Homebrew - The Flowing Dune Sea
Aleph
Princess of Stabbity
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeah, so I finally finished this. It's part of my broader Firepeak Pave writeup, which aims to put actual content in the western half of that fuckoff huge desert east of the Fire Mountains where nobody ever goes because there's literally nothing there, but for now you'll have to content yourself with this small region.
An Ocean Carved In Sand
The Flowing Dune Sea
North of Gem, sprawling from the foothills of the Firepeaks to the fire-scorched bed of the Lost Anam and covering three million square miles along the way, there exists a natural barrier that brooks no caravan-wheel, sand-runner or camel-foot to pass it. It is a vast pool of wyld-pollution that has persisted since the days of the early Shogunate, and which could not be unmade by the combined might of Cahzor's greatest Gens, nor the cleansing fires of the Sword of Creation, nor the wealth of Gem. And indeed, few have tried, for this unnatural region - this inland sea in the desert's depths - is a bane to armies marching southward and a boon to trade on the Firepeak Pave.
It is the Flowing Dune Sea, and it is the closest thing to an ocean that many have ever known.
As the name suggests, sand in the Dunesea acts like water; it can be sailed on and swum through, but will bear no substantial weight. Its countless grains are almost as fine as flour, and bear a faint reddish tint that colours the waves the hue of a bloody sunset. The sea sits in a vast natural bowl of bedrock; pushing up into a hill range in the north and the Firepeaks to the west. Southwards, the land rises slowly, and the shallows of the sea are such that in places a man can stand submerged up to the waist in silken sand, his feet on hardened stone. Such places can be dangerous for ships; unlike water, the sands of the Dunesea give no hint as to their depth. In some places it can be seventy fathoms or more to the bottom. In others, it may be less than seven.
(Mechanically, movement across the sands of the Flowing Dune Sea must use the Sail ability rather than Athletics.)
Flora and Fauna
Though it looks like a barren erg, the Dunesea teems with life. Succulent sandvines and driftweeds are buoyant enough to float atop the waves; nourished by the sun and drawing nutrients from the air through their long and trailing filter-roots. Tumblestones bob amidst the sand; sand-worn hunks of pumice that play host to isolated floral ecosystems. A chunk the size of a clenched fist might be covered in tiny shoots of lace cactus and desert sage, while a drifting mass the size of a ship could host enough greasewood, paloverdes and palms to be mistaken for a small island.
These plants in turn provide a feast for sandmites, ants, swimming scorpions and other such insects - even dune bees, whose waxy hives can often be found on the larger tumblestones. Squawking crested gliding lizards are never far from the eye or ear, and sea vultures follow ships in the hopes of food. It is sandfish, though, which are the most recognisable export of the region. Brown-scaled, bone-dry things up to three feet long, with gnashing mandibles and rows of scoop-footed centipede legs to propel them through the sands, they bear little resemblance to the fish of Creation's seas. Nonetheless, they are plentiful and nourishing, and a good catch can feed a ship without trouble, given water and sufficient seasoning.
No wild place is without its predators, of course. Sailors trade tales of sinuous wyldwyrms; cousins of river dragons and the ferocious desert basiliscs of the deeper desert. Greater sand otters are half again the length of a grown man from nose to tail, and though they mainly hunt fish, they roam the shores in wolf-like packs and will prey on unwary humans if they can. Rainbow thunderbirds haunt the seas around Dheajen, preying on any who seem to bind the weather to their will. The thick shells of long-necked fisher-turtles shrug off spears and arrows they drag screaming men over the rails. There are even rumours of carnivorous scarab swarms which engulf and devour anything of flesh that they can catch. When water is scarce, blood makes an acceptable substitute - and the predators of the Dunesea are not afraid of men.
The Fallen Ruin
Long ago, Ramabah Minah bore another name, and sailed the southern skies as a glorious citadel and a shining gem of a golden age. But no longer. Now, squatters build shanty-towns in hangars that once housed shining skyships, and priests conduct worship at altars that essence technicians once used to interface with the citadel's systems. When war tore the world asunder, the floating city was crippled by sabotage and fell from the heavens to crash with cataclysmic force into the Bolyn Hills. One full Fifth-Segment broke from it entirely, lost somewhere in the sands of the Sea, and two more are buried under centuries of sand and sediment.
What remains is a testament to the heights of ages past: the vast stone ruins rise half a mile into the air and extend six miles up the gentle slope of the hills, with just as much buried beneath them. It is more mountain than structure; an enormous structure of once-living stone shaped around vast internal spaces in which ramshackle neighbourhoods and fortifications have been built by the men of a fallen age. A theocratic council governs the city; the Cult of the Len Swell mediating between neighbourhood-halls and setting the city laws that all obey, enforced by their control of the lake and their deadly sabre-wielding Lensguard. Beyond their edicts, each hangar-suburb is a self-governing law unto itself, ruled by one of the summit of minahlords and cooperating with its neighbours.
Much of the internal space of Ramabah Minah is unused. Both unburied Fifth-Segments are more than four miles across, and there is yet more space underground left gutted by the plundering of the Gens. Some of the cavernous silos empty and fill from season to season, as nomadic tribes settle down in tent-cities for the duration of the drought season. Others lie empty in perpetuity, too dangerous and unstable to use except to mine for their substance, the prized organic minahstone. Even in death it is strong - though not so peerless that the Shogunate thought it worth the investment to salvage - and many Barzaran forts are built from stone quarried here.
One place above all is sacred in Ramabah Minah, and it is the Len Swell at the heart of the city. The mile-wide tower that links the four remaining segments together is ruined and open to the skies above, its upper floors gone. A dozen ancient conjured springs blend together to form a lake within its collapsing walls. It waters the crops that are grown in ancient hangars and soothes the thirst of the sweltering city, and its priesthood are sworn to defend it to the death from those who would sully its banks. They are right to be wary, for there are rumours of treasures in the depths - which if taken, will dry the lake up and leave the city to die.
Ships and Sabres
Antefar, proud queen of southern shore! She sits on the Firepeaks' bounty; a vast aquifer beneath her is fed by an underground river that spills down from the mountains hundreds of miles to the west and delves deep under stone and sand on its journey west. The Ante is the lifeblood of the city, and the dowsing traditions that discovered her are still alive and well in its people today.
As the largest port on the southern coast, Antefar is busy. With its location on a rocky shore where the Dunesea grows shallow, it is also dangerous. Protruding crags and deadly stonebars make navigating the narrow bay a risky proposition, and so the highest point of the city houses the dominant feature of its skyline: the Tower of Sails. It stands four hundred feet high, a giant among buildings, hewn from minahstone. Two dozen sails sweep out from its sides, each a wooden framework with a score of black and white panels and lantern boxes. The movement of these panels allows each sail to signal a ship in the harbour, and in this fashion each are given orders on how to move and where to dock. Within the tower are teams upon teams of men who watch from telescope gantries to track the ships and call out their positions to their fellows within, who track them on great models of the bay and plot their movements and courses. Were the tower to be taken or its trained officers slain, the harbour would be paralysed - and were it to be compromised, control of the city might soon follow.
Antefar is a merchant city. The Princes of the Coin control it and see that gold drips ever into their coffers. The League of Navigators does a brisk trade from those who lack the wits to learn the semaphore-code of the Tower, while the Antefaran navy is one of the major fleets suppressing pirate activity across the western and southern shores. The Shipbuilder's Guild produces the fastest ships that sail the dunes, and the sailors that crew them are said to be so skilled that ten of them can sail ten ships ten times around the coast before a hundred lesser men could circle it in one.
Despite its unquestioned strength, at present Antefar's navy is a burden upon it. The recent peace brokered with Dheajen has left it painfully short of funds and overburdened with warships and arms that it no longer needs, whose upkeep has far outstripped their advantage. The Princes of the Coin have set their servants to converting vessels from battle to trade, but their port is cramped and their dry-docks few, and they fear that their army will rise up in a coup if they push too hard for disarmament. Not only that, but the huge store of military equipment sits in warehouses, taking up space with no buyer to offload it to and no seller willing to give it away. Certain eyes are considering if the effort of stepping down their military is truly worth it... or if it would be more profitable to simply find a new target to point it at.
A Hive of Scum and Villainy
Such a den of sin and inequity as Sulhufa has never before been seen on Creation's seas. Or at least so its inhabitants would have you believe. The degenerate scum who inhabit the small island in the western Dunesea are proud of their home's reputation, and of the trepidation it rouses in merchant fleets. Midway between Ramabah Minah and Antefar, Sulhufa makes its living off piracy, smuggling and vice, and it has excelled at all three for the past two hundred years.
Sulhufa is technically a pair of islands: Sulhufa to the west and Pent, its smaller eastward neighbour. The latter, however, is entirely uninhabitable; it is a rocky spit of land that juts up from the sea, much of it treacherous pumice and accumulated sandstone whose appearance as a cohesive landmass is a dangerous illusion. The narrow strait between them is called the Turtle's Beak, named for its habit of snapping closed on the hulls of ships that try to navigate it. The island's native wyldworms lair there and react aggressively to any who approach their home.
Sulhufa proper is a small island, about a hundred square miles in size. More than half of it is rocky and mountainous, inaccessible by land or sea. The remainder, on the southeast coast, is divided into four sections. The High Slopes are furthest from the shore, consisting largely of terraced farms on the steep mountainsides leading up to the highlands. Poor understanding of the soil and high demand for vice has led to these farms mostly growing opium poppy, a trade which has made many of the plantation owners rich. By contrast, the Middle Plantations on the low-lying eastern region are the source of most of the island's food and make by far the heaviest use of slave labour, using thousands of chattel slaves to till the fields and gather the crops. The Wyldshore extends along much of the eastern coastline and marks the western border of Scrapehull, the shallow area of the Dunesea east of Sulhufa that few dare sail into. Pent is the largest island it plays host to, though by no means the only one. It is a dangerous expanse of hull-gouging flotsam and prowling monsters, difficult to navigate and one of Sulhufa's primary defences against casual invasion.
The last region of the island is Sulhufa Town itself, the only large settlement on the island. Only a fifth of its population are permanent residents, the rest being temporary inhabitants on layovers between jobs or visiting for the debauchery and degeneracy the island offers. The port city sits at the southernmost point of Sulhufa, and is a densely populated, poorly maintained jumble of wood, brick sand and even minahstone buildings with little in the way of central governance. The richest plantation owners have residences on the outskirts of the city, and for the most part their word is what passes for law in a lawless city, enforced by militia and wealth.
This has not always been the case. On three occasions in the past two centuries, Antefar's powerful navy has attacked and annexed Sulhufa as a vassal state. Such attempts have never lasted more than a decade. Word of the approaching fleet inevitably reaches the island before the ships do, and the larger part of its population scatters in every direction. Some flee into the highlands, others settle in Scrapehull or along the west coast of the Dunesea - inevitably, they find their way back once the Antefaran garrison has taken control of the island. The farms and plantations simply aren't large enough to support the number of active soldiers necessary to prevent the seedy underbelly of Sulhufa from re-establishing itself, and all their presence accomplishes is to make the piracy and smuggling more covert. Eventually the governor either falls victim to assassination or becomes corrupt enough to return the island to its original state, and Sulhufa resumes its business of preying on trade routes. Some of the more cynical inhabitants joke that Antefar would not even want them gone - after all, with no pirates, what need have rich merchant ships of naval escorts to protect them? Others claim the navy's reluctance to attack stems more from the risk of losing ships to Sulhufa's wyldworms. All of them might soon be unpleasantly surprised, should Antefar's growing troubles spark a new expansionist war.
Bottled Fame and Brewed Glory
Though rooted on Creation's bedrock, the city of Dheajen oft barely seems a part of it. It is a beautiful city, one of white stone domes and hundreds of soaring minarets, each in a different style. The Wyld is strong in this part of the Dunesea, bringing an eternal warm rainstorm and birthing oddities in the weave of Fate. Honey within the city's borders turns black and tastes bitter, while salt is painfully sweet and yellows the teeth. Flocks of chaos-tainted thunderbirds live in the permanent cloud layer that stops the city from ever seeing the sun, and it is in fear of their fury that weatherworking is banned within a hundred miles of its walls.
The goal of all within Dheajen who have soul enough to hope and dream is to cultivate their power and refine their own essence to enlightenment, gaining immortality and strength beyond their wildest dreams. Alchemy is the path most take, and every minaret holds a lord whose mastery over their tinctures and potions has been successfully put through the greatest test: that of self-transformation and rebirth. Wyld-based potions that change the body and spirit are one of the city's chief exports, and the Dheajenese do a busy trade with Vu Khra to the north and the Anam Way's Sons of Almeau to the south.
Three unaging sorcerer-sultans rule Dheajen from the highest towers, and each will teach their Way - under strict conditions. The Vulture Caliph is the oldest, and many say the most powerful. Black feathers grow from his skin, and his pale head is entirely bald. None know from where he originates, for he looks like no people of the Threshold or the Realm, and his native tongue is known to none but him. He carries a tessen of blue jade and cobalt and honours the path of Journeys, taking only taking foreigners as students: those who have cast off their entire lives and left their homes and pasts behind. The Vixen Sultana has two faces: one a young woman and the other a grinning desert fox. Perhaps she was a human who gave up her humanity to become a spirit - or perhaps she was a fox who learned to take on human form. Her green jade and copper kiseru wafts perfumed smoke as she plays the Path of Sacrifice, making deals and bargains with any who come to her. One man might pay a year of his vitality for one of her workshop's products - another might pledge a mortal lifetime's servitude for apprenticeship and a chance at immortality. Savant Centipede is the youngest of the three, having taken their place on the third throne of Dheajen only a century ago. They are androgynous, neither male nor fully female, with chitin scales and segmented limbs. All their disciples are slaves in the Path of Humility, and they themselves wear a collar of insects, though none know what mighty being might hold them in servitude. Certainly, no other hand rests on the white jade and iron kusari-fundo that they wrap around themselves.
Any who come to Dheajen can cultivate. Even animals can be taught to refine their essence and grow in enlightenment and power, and many in the city are spirits who were once beasts, and gained sapience and the ability to take human form with tutelage or the following of a Way. Foreigners often mistake them for beastmen, but the enlightened creatures of Dheajen are in truth closest to spirits of the Wyld: shapeshifters able to resume their original forms at will who are neither god, elemental, demon nor any offshoot of humanity. Those who have progressed far enough to walk in the shapes of men are as ruthless and ambitious in their cultivation and pursuit of power as any high and mighty alchemist-lord - and indeed many dwell in minarets themselves.
The Isle of Beasts and Bodhisattvas
Of all the ports on the Dunesea, one in particular gives sailors a chill to think of charting a course for. Yet travel with this fearsome isle continues, for the things it has to trade are flush with the power of change, invaluable ingredients for Dheajenese alchemists and intoxicating substances for Sulhufan addicts. This is Vu Khra: three hundred square miles of the weird, wondrous and wild.
Vu Khra is ruled by beasts. Five animal kings reside on the island; each the equal of a greater spirit. The Red Monkey King is cheerful and talkative, a carefree fool whose love of battle for its own sake is his most defining quality. The strongest of the four kings, he will challenge any who catch his eye and offer the promise of a good fight. He is eternally dogged by the Yellow Lion King; a short-tempered and arrogant rival determined to rule the isle or destroy it. While vengeful and often unhinged, he is easily flattered by grovelling, and will soon forget those he considers unimportant. The Blue Roc is timid and indecisive, but no coward despite his sensitivity. While hesitant to begin a war for his own sake, he is a master of stealth and will fight like a demon for his short-lived infatuations, who can easily influence him while his feelings last. He is the closest to the reserved and rarely-seen Green Saurian, whose mysterious reserve seems elegant and almost civilised until his strict moral code leads him to join battle with monstrous strength and tranquil brutality. The last of the ruling beasts is the Black Crab King, who lurks in the deep ocean channel that divides the island into northeastern Vu and southwestern Khra. Brooding, blunt and stoic, he sometimes challenges those who wish to cross for his own dogmatic reasons, while at other times he refuses all contact with lesser beings in order to train a chosen student to his own exacting standards.
Vu Khra is perhaps the strongest locus of the Wyld in all the Flowing Dune Sea. The plants that grow there have black and white leaves and green roots that change colour with the seasons. Wyldlife abounds; Vukhran plants bear eyeball-fruit and tongue-fronds in the lowland forests, while watersprouts grow like trees from mountain lakes and rivers. The plains of Vu host migratory fields of clover that fly from place to place with wing-like leaves and helicopter-flowers that lift small animals and drop them from great heights before descending to take root in the corpse. The beasts of the isle are no less strange, and though none approach the strength of the Five Kings, there are fearsome monsters indeed in this frothing tidepool of chaos.
Humanity survives against such dangers by taking on their nature. The sages of Shenar, the island's sole major human settlement which sits on the southwestern tip of Khra, practice a school of bestial enlightenment that raises them above the weakness of mortality. The aim they seek with sacred drugs and the shunning of civilisation's comforts is mindless savantism: the state they call gnosis. In this state they experience an understanding that cannot be written down or spoken of, only experienced, in which one thinks nothing of options and chooses the correct action through pure and mindless instinct. Some of the sages who live as animals on the edge of the city have maintained self-oblivion through purpose-filled ignorance for years or even decades, acting blindly to protect their fellow citizens with their inhuman strength and longevity.
An Ocean Carved In Sand
The Flowing Dune Sea
North of Gem, sprawling from the foothills of the Firepeaks to the fire-scorched bed of the Lost Anam and covering three million square miles along the way, there exists a natural barrier that brooks no caravan-wheel, sand-runner or camel-foot to pass it. It is a vast pool of wyld-pollution that has persisted since the days of the early Shogunate, and which could not be unmade by the combined might of Cahzor's greatest Gens, nor the cleansing fires of the Sword of Creation, nor the wealth of Gem. And indeed, few have tried, for this unnatural region - this inland sea in the desert's depths - is a bane to armies marching southward and a boon to trade on the Firepeak Pave.
It is the Flowing Dune Sea, and it is the closest thing to an ocean that many have ever known.
As the name suggests, sand in the Dunesea acts like water; it can be sailed on and swum through, but will bear no substantial weight. Its countless grains are almost as fine as flour, and bear a faint reddish tint that colours the waves the hue of a bloody sunset. The sea sits in a vast natural bowl of bedrock; pushing up into a hill range in the north and the Firepeaks to the west. Southwards, the land rises slowly, and the shallows of the sea are such that in places a man can stand submerged up to the waist in silken sand, his feet on hardened stone. Such places can be dangerous for ships; unlike water, the sands of the Dunesea give no hint as to their depth. In some places it can be seventy fathoms or more to the bottom. In others, it may be less than seven.
(Mechanically, movement across the sands of the Flowing Dune Sea must use the Sail ability rather than Athletics.)
Flora and Fauna
Though it looks like a barren erg, the Dunesea teems with life. Succulent sandvines and driftweeds are buoyant enough to float atop the waves; nourished by the sun and drawing nutrients from the air through their long and trailing filter-roots. Tumblestones bob amidst the sand; sand-worn hunks of pumice that play host to isolated floral ecosystems. A chunk the size of a clenched fist might be covered in tiny shoots of lace cactus and desert sage, while a drifting mass the size of a ship could host enough greasewood, paloverdes and palms to be mistaken for a small island.
These plants in turn provide a feast for sandmites, ants, swimming scorpions and other such insects - even dune bees, whose waxy hives can often be found on the larger tumblestones. Squawking crested gliding lizards are never far from the eye or ear, and sea vultures follow ships in the hopes of food. It is sandfish, though, which are the most recognisable export of the region. Brown-scaled, bone-dry things up to three feet long, with gnashing mandibles and rows of scoop-footed centipede legs to propel them through the sands, they bear little resemblance to the fish of Creation's seas. Nonetheless, they are plentiful and nourishing, and a good catch can feed a ship without trouble, given water and sufficient seasoning.
No wild place is without its predators, of course. Sailors trade tales of sinuous wyldwyrms; cousins of river dragons and the ferocious desert basiliscs of the deeper desert. Greater sand otters are half again the length of a grown man from nose to tail, and though they mainly hunt fish, they roam the shores in wolf-like packs and will prey on unwary humans if they can. Rainbow thunderbirds haunt the seas around Dheajen, preying on any who seem to bind the weather to their will. The thick shells of long-necked fisher-turtles shrug off spears and arrows they drag screaming men over the rails. There are even rumours of carnivorous scarab swarms which engulf and devour anything of flesh that they can catch. When water is scarce, blood makes an acceptable substitute - and the predators of the Dunesea are not afraid of men.
The Fallen Ruin
Long ago, Ramabah Minah bore another name, and sailed the southern skies as a glorious citadel and a shining gem of a golden age. But no longer. Now, squatters build shanty-towns in hangars that once housed shining skyships, and priests conduct worship at altars that essence technicians once used to interface with the citadel's systems. When war tore the world asunder, the floating city was crippled by sabotage and fell from the heavens to crash with cataclysmic force into the Bolyn Hills. One full Fifth-Segment broke from it entirely, lost somewhere in the sands of the Sea, and two more are buried under centuries of sand and sediment.
What remains is a testament to the heights of ages past: the vast stone ruins rise half a mile into the air and extend six miles up the gentle slope of the hills, with just as much buried beneath them. It is more mountain than structure; an enormous structure of once-living stone shaped around vast internal spaces in which ramshackle neighbourhoods and fortifications have been built by the men of a fallen age. A theocratic council governs the city; the Cult of the Len Swell mediating between neighbourhood-halls and setting the city laws that all obey, enforced by their control of the lake and their deadly sabre-wielding Lensguard. Beyond their edicts, each hangar-suburb is a self-governing law unto itself, ruled by one of the summit of minahlords and cooperating with its neighbours.
Much of the internal space of Ramabah Minah is unused. Both unburied Fifth-Segments are more than four miles across, and there is yet more space underground left gutted by the plundering of the Gens. Some of the cavernous silos empty and fill from season to season, as nomadic tribes settle down in tent-cities for the duration of the drought season. Others lie empty in perpetuity, too dangerous and unstable to use except to mine for their substance, the prized organic minahstone. Even in death it is strong - though not so peerless that the Shogunate thought it worth the investment to salvage - and many Barzaran forts are built from stone quarried here.
One place above all is sacred in Ramabah Minah, and it is the Len Swell at the heart of the city. The mile-wide tower that links the four remaining segments together is ruined and open to the skies above, its upper floors gone. A dozen ancient conjured springs blend together to form a lake within its collapsing walls. It waters the crops that are grown in ancient hangars and soothes the thirst of the sweltering city, and its priesthood are sworn to defend it to the death from those who would sully its banks. They are right to be wary, for there are rumours of treasures in the depths - which if taken, will dry the lake up and leave the city to die.
Sidebar: The Lost Oasis
Few alive still remember the name of the South's shining Titan-citadel, but Ramabah Minah is indeed the wreck of the Oasis at the Edge of Infinity. When it fell, it bristled with essence cannons and magitech weaponry. Its hangars contained a flight of thousand-forged dragons and hundreds of priceless skycraft. A workshop equal to any groundbound factory-cathedral nestled in its interior, packed with the tools and blueprints to repair or reproduce any device or artifact the Deliberative deemed useful, along with biotemplates of every living thing in Creation. The very skeleton of the city was jade alloy under genesis-crafted living stone, and a disk of crystallised orichalcum a mile wide formed the eye of its superweapon.
Nothing of this treasure-trove remains. The Shogunate stripped it of every gleaming weapon and archived blueprint; even the jadesteel skeleton within its walls was torn out to feed the hungry forges of the Gens. Only the stone is left; once-living, it is dead and dull now, without the peerless strength it once boasted. Should the missing Fifth-Segment be rediscovered in the Flowing Dune Sea, it will have been plundered similarly of easy pickings - for the Shogunate spared no expense to recover the bounty of those they had overthrown - but traces of jade alloy in the submerged superstructure may remain for a character clever enough to find a way to mine what the Dragonblooded could not reach. The reactor core of the edifice fell from its heart as it plummeted from the skies, and some in the early Shogunate theorised that its leaking energies were what helped create the wyld zone. There is no chance of it still being repairable, should it be found in the sandy depths - but the materials alone would be worth a fortune.
Players who discover Ramabah Minah may deduce that the ruin it occupies was some great fortress-citadel of ages past and be eager to scavenge what they can from it. They will find nothing but millions of tonnes of dead minahstone - strong and light, but no better than the white concrete of the Shogunate's design. Nonetheless, Ramabah Minah is no mean prize. The heights of the ruins crumble further year by year, but it still retains its properties as a bulwark against the Wyld, and though the golden cannons are long-since hewn from their homes, the turret emplacements scattered across the vast shell still provide ample vantage points for Ramabite archers and lookouts. The Len Swell lake is a clean, fresh source of water that can quench a city's thirst. Ramabah Minah is an empty shell, but like a hermit crab the people of the Age of Sorrows have squirmed within to use it as a fortress.
Ships and Sabres
Antefar, proud queen of southern shore! She sits on the Firepeaks' bounty; a vast aquifer beneath her is fed by an underground river that spills down from the mountains hundreds of miles to the west and delves deep under stone and sand on its journey west. The Ante is the lifeblood of the city, and the dowsing traditions that discovered her are still alive and well in its people today.
As the largest port on the southern coast, Antefar is busy. With its location on a rocky shore where the Dunesea grows shallow, it is also dangerous. Protruding crags and deadly stonebars make navigating the narrow bay a risky proposition, and so the highest point of the city houses the dominant feature of its skyline: the Tower of Sails. It stands four hundred feet high, a giant among buildings, hewn from minahstone. Two dozen sails sweep out from its sides, each a wooden framework with a score of black and white panels and lantern boxes. The movement of these panels allows each sail to signal a ship in the harbour, and in this fashion each are given orders on how to move and where to dock. Within the tower are teams upon teams of men who watch from telescope gantries to track the ships and call out their positions to their fellows within, who track them on great models of the bay and plot their movements and courses. Were the tower to be taken or its trained officers slain, the harbour would be paralysed - and were it to be compromised, control of the city might soon follow.
Antefar is a merchant city. The Princes of the Coin control it and see that gold drips ever into their coffers. The League of Navigators does a brisk trade from those who lack the wits to learn the semaphore-code of the Tower, while the Antefaran navy is one of the major fleets suppressing pirate activity across the western and southern shores. The Shipbuilder's Guild produces the fastest ships that sail the dunes, and the sailors that crew them are said to be so skilled that ten of them can sail ten ships ten times around the coast before a hundred lesser men could circle it in one.
Despite its unquestioned strength, at present Antefar's navy is a burden upon it. The recent peace brokered with Dheajen has left it painfully short of funds and overburdened with warships and arms that it no longer needs, whose upkeep has far outstripped their advantage. The Princes of the Coin have set their servants to converting vessels from battle to trade, but their port is cramped and their dry-docks few, and they fear that their army will rise up in a coup if they push too hard for disarmament. Not only that, but the huge store of military equipment sits in warehouses, taking up space with no buyer to offload it to and no seller willing to give it away. Certain eyes are considering if the effort of stepping down their military is truly worth it... or if it would be more profitable to simply find a new target to point it at.
A Hive of Scum and Villainy
Such a den of sin and inequity as Sulhufa has never before been seen on Creation's seas. Or at least so its inhabitants would have you believe. The degenerate scum who inhabit the small island in the western Dunesea are proud of their home's reputation, and of the trepidation it rouses in merchant fleets. Midway between Ramabah Minah and Antefar, Sulhufa makes its living off piracy, smuggling and vice, and it has excelled at all three for the past two hundred years.
Sulhufa is technically a pair of islands: Sulhufa to the west and Pent, its smaller eastward neighbour. The latter, however, is entirely uninhabitable; it is a rocky spit of land that juts up from the sea, much of it treacherous pumice and accumulated sandstone whose appearance as a cohesive landmass is a dangerous illusion. The narrow strait between them is called the Turtle's Beak, named for its habit of snapping closed on the hulls of ships that try to navigate it. The island's native wyldworms lair there and react aggressively to any who approach their home.
Sulhufa proper is a small island, about a hundred square miles in size. More than half of it is rocky and mountainous, inaccessible by land or sea. The remainder, on the southeast coast, is divided into four sections. The High Slopes are furthest from the shore, consisting largely of terraced farms on the steep mountainsides leading up to the highlands. Poor understanding of the soil and high demand for vice has led to these farms mostly growing opium poppy, a trade which has made many of the plantation owners rich. By contrast, the Middle Plantations on the low-lying eastern region are the source of most of the island's food and make by far the heaviest use of slave labour, using thousands of chattel slaves to till the fields and gather the crops. The Wyldshore extends along much of the eastern coastline and marks the western border of Scrapehull, the shallow area of the Dunesea east of Sulhufa that few dare sail into. Pent is the largest island it plays host to, though by no means the only one. It is a dangerous expanse of hull-gouging flotsam and prowling monsters, difficult to navigate and one of Sulhufa's primary defences against casual invasion.
The last region of the island is Sulhufa Town itself, the only large settlement on the island. Only a fifth of its population are permanent residents, the rest being temporary inhabitants on layovers between jobs or visiting for the debauchery and degeneracy the island offers. The port city sits at the southernmost point of Sulhufa, and is a densely populated, poorly maintained jumble of wood, brick sand and even minahstone buildings with little in the way of central governance. The richest plantation owners have residences on the outskirts of the city, and for the most part their word is what passes for law in a lawless city, enforced by militia and wealth.
This has not always been the case. On three occasions in the past two centuries, Antefar's powerful navy has attacked and annexed Sulhufa as a vassal state. Such attempts have never lasted more than a decade. Word of the approaching fleet inevitably reaches the island before the ships do, and the larger part of its population scatters in every direction. Some flee into the highlands, others settle in Scrapehull or along the west coast of the Dunesea - inevitably, they find their way back once the Antefaran garrison has taken control of the island. The farms and plantations simply aren't large enough to support the number of active soldiers necessary to prevent the seedy underbelly of Sulhufa from re-establishing itself, and all their presence accomplishes is to make the piracy and smuggling more covert. Eventually the governor either falls victim to assassination or becomes corrupt enough to return the island to its original state, and Sulhufa resumes its business of preying on trade routes. Some of the more cynical inhabitants joke that Antefar would not even want them gone - after all, with no pirates, what need have rich merchant ships of naval escorts to protect them? Others claim the navy's reluctance to attack stems more from the risk of losing ships to Sulhufa's wyldworms. All of them might soon be unpleasantly surprised, should Antefar's growing troubles spark a new expansionist war.
Bottled Fame and Brewed Glory
Though rooted on Creation's bedrock, the city of Dheajen oft barely seems a part of it. It is a beautiful city, one of white stone domes and hundreds of soaring minarets, each in a different style. The Wyld is strong in this part of the Dunesea, bringing an eternal warm rainstorm and birthing oddities in the weave of Fate. Honey within the city's borders turns black and tastes bitter, while salt is painfully sweet and yellows the teeth. Flocks of chaos-tainted thunderbirds live in the permanent cloud layer that stops the city from ever seeing the sun, and it is in fear of their fury that weatherworking is banned within a hundred miles of its walls.
The goal of all within Dheajen who have soul enough to hope and dream is to cultivate their power and refine their own essence to enlightenment, gaining immortality and strength beyond their wildest dreams. Alchemy is the path most take, and every minaret holds a lord whose mastery over their tinctures and potions has been successfully put through the greatest test: that of self-transformation and rebirth. Wyld-based potions that change the body and spirit are one of the city's chief exports, and the Dheajenese do a busy trade with Vu Khra to the north and the Anam Way's Sons of Almeau to the south.
Three unaging sorcerer-sultans rule Dheajen from the highest towers, and each will teach their Way - under strict conditions. The Vulture Caliph is the oldest, and many say the most powerful. Black feathers grow from his skin, and his pale head is entirely bald. None know from where he originates, for he looks like no people of the Threshold or the Realm, and his native tongue is known to none but him. He carries a tessen of blue jade and cobalt and honours the path of Journeys, taking only taking foreigners as students: those who have cast off their entire lives and left their homes and pasts behind. The Vixen Sultana has two faces: one a young woman and the other a grinning desert fox. Perhaps she was a human who gave up her humanity to become a spirit - or perhaps she was a fox who learned to take on human form. Her green jade and copper kiseru wafts perfumed smoke as she plays the Path of Sacrifice, making deals and bargains with any who come to her. One man might pay a year of his vitality for one of her workshop's products - another might pledge a mortal lifetime's servitude for apprenticeship and a chance at immortality. Savant Centipede is the youngest of the three, having taken their place on the third throne of Dheajen only a century ago. They are androgynous, neither male nor fully female, with chitin scales and segmented limbs. All their disciples are slaves in the Path of Humility, and they themselves wear a collar of insects, though none know what mighty being might hold them in servitude. Certainly, no other hand rests on the white jade and iron kusari-fundo that they wrap around themselves.
Any who come to Dheajen can cultivate. Even animals can be taught to refine their essence and grow in enlightenment and power, and many in the city are spirits who were once beasts, and gained sapience and the ability to take human form with tutelage or the following of a Way. Foreigners often mistake them for beastmen, but the enlightened creatures of Dheajen are in truth closest to spirits of the Wyld: shapeshifters able to resume their original forms at will who are neither god, elemental, demon nor any offshoot of humanity. Those who have progressed far enough to walk in the shapes of men are as ruthless and ambitious in their cultivation and pursuit of power as any high and mighty alchemist-lord - and indeed many dwell in minarets themselves.
The Isle of Beasts and Bodhisattvas
Of all the ports on the Dunesea, one in particular gives sailors a chill to think of charting a course for. Yet travel with this fearsome isle continues, for the things it has to trade are flush with the power of change, invaluable ingredients for Dheajenese alchemists and intoxicating substances for Sulhufan addicts. This is Vu Khra: three hundred square miles of the weird, wondrous and wild.
Vu Khra is ruled by beasts. Five animal kings reside on the island; each the equal of a greater spirit. The Red Monkey King is cheerful and talkative, a carefree fool whose love of battle for its own sake is his most defining quality. The strongest of the four kings, he will challenge any who catch his eye and offer the promise of a good fight. He is eternally dogged by the Yellow Lion King; a short-tempered and arrogant rival determined to rule the isle or destroy it. While vengeful and often unhinged, he is easily flattered by grovelling, and will soon forget those he considers unimportant. The Blue Roc is timid and indecisive, but no coward despite his sensitivity. While hesitant to begin a war for his own sake, he is a master of stealth and will fight like a demon for his short-lived infatuations, who can easily influence him while his feelings last. He is the closest to the reserved and rarely-seen Green Saurian, whose mysterious reserve seems elegant and almost civilised until his strict moral code leads him to join battle with monstrous strength and tranquil brutality. The last of the ruling beasts is the Black Crab King, who lurks in the deep ocean channel that divides the island into northeastern Vu and southwestern Khra. Brooding, blunt and stoic, he sometimes challenges those who wish to cross for his own dogmatic reasons, while at other times he refuses all contact with lesser beings in order to train a chosen student to his own exacting standards.
Vu Khra is perhaps the strongest locus of the Wyld in all the Flowing Dune Sea. The plants that grow there have black and white leaves and green roots that change colour with the seasons. Wyldlife abounds; Vukhran plants bear eyeball-fruit and tongue-fronds in the lowland forests, while watersprouts grow like trees from mountain lakes and rivers. The plains of Vu host migratory fields of clover that fly from place to place with wing-like leaves and helicopter-flowers that lift small animals and drop them from great heights before descending to take root in the corpse. The beasts of the isle are no less strange, and though none approach the strength of the Five Kings, there are fearsome monsters indeed in this frothing tidepool of chaos.
Humanity survives against such dangers by taking on their nature. The sages of Shenar, the island's sole major human settlement which sits on the southwestern tip of Khra, practice a school of bestial enlightenment that raises them above the weakness of mortality. The aim they seek with sacred drugs and the shunning of civilisation's comforts is mindless savantism: the state they call gnosis. In this state they experience an understanding that cannot be written down or spoken of, only experienced, in which one thinks nothing of options and chooses the correct action through pure and mindless instinct. Some of the sages who live as animals on the edge of the city have maintained self-oblivion through purpose-filled ignorance for years or even decades, acting blindly to protect their fellow citizens with their inhuman strength and longevity.
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