I have returned! With a setting location!
Where Once Was Water
The Anam Way
A River's Fossil
In days long past, the mighty Anam ran across the fertile plains to the east of what is now Gem. From its distant source far to the south, it ran north, joining with the Payum river before winding on to Isicus and the edge of the Flowing Dune Sea. Alas, for the Anam is long-dry, and the verdant plains that it fed are nothing but dust and sand. It boiled away in the Time of Troubles when the Sword of Creation lashed the land with fire, and now all that remains is the causeway it once followed; a riverbed as barren as bone that carves through the desert like a snake. It is a furious road of violence and death where mercy is foreign and kindness unknown. The people who survive, clustered around precious oases in this harsh climate, name their home for the nature of their lives there. Scholars of Gem and Antefar may call it the Anam Way, but to its inhabitants, this land of constant strife and conflict is known as the Bloody Sands.
As harsh as the Firepeak Pave can be, the Bloody Sands are harsher. Much of it is bare sand and rock, and what cacti and desert shrubs are able to eke out a life here are paltry things as far as food goes. If not for the
wyldtide, men would starve for sure, and even with chaos-born water and treasured oases, thirst is a constant companion. The Anam Way runs between the Wyrdsands, the Deep Desert and the Burning Wastes, and wyldstorms are common. Sometimes they bring life-giving food and rain. More often, they bring calamity and terror. Even the gods are cruel, for the sun high above is a merciless wheel of fire that turns the ground to a scorching oven at its height, and the wise and wary seek shade around midday unless their inhumanities allow them to ignore the temperature entirely.
Mutations abound among the natives of the Anam Way, and many of the native animals are monstrous - giant scorpions, desert basiliscs and ash devourers are but a few of the terrors an unwary traveller can stumble across and perish. Foxes and wild dogs with fiery eyes and coats of sand vie with great-cats of terrible swiftness for the ostriches, antelope and camels that sup from wyld-polluted waters, while twisted lizards and crocodiles sleep for months or years in torpor before waking at the approach of prey and glutting themselves on meat and blood. Even the birds are not to be trusted, for flocks of blood-drinking finches have enjoyed great success feeding on larger prey than the insects of the dunes.
In such a merciless and unforgiving climate, the only way to survive is to be as ruthless as the environment. Or, as many choose, more so.
People of the Desert
The Bloody Sands hold little in the way of consistent settlements or states. Instead, the base unit of the local culture is the
ayila, or family - those who share a tent, or a ship, or a colony, often but not necessarily always blood-related. Those families that ride together in a fleet or graze herds on the same land or mass together in raiding bands and swear to kill or die as one form
clans. And those of like kind - all those who scar their skin with fire, or ride scorpions and drink flowing blood, or hide beneath the sands from the sun's light - are the
tribes.
Some think of the tribes as monoliths, but this is far from the case. The main focus of Anam struggles and wars are the clans that roam and fight and vie for dominance. Bloodrider will fight against bloodrider, the sons of Ahra compete for the grace of the djinn and Dune Folk families will slaughter anyone not their own. Some clans are even cross-tribal; fireskinned and windsingers may join forces to raid the colony-settlements of antmen, or bloodriders and the Sons of Ahra ride together against the Dune Folk. Nor are clans fixed; they shift and change like the face of the desert as families compete and ally and fall out. The Anam Way is not known as the Bloody Sands without reason, and nothing there is set. The major tribes that interact with the more civilised regions to the west are:
- The Fireskinned: A cult that enjoys great prominence all along the Anam Way, the fireskinned are instantly recognisable by their practice of ritual thaumaturgic scarification, wherein they rub firedust into carefully-made open wounds to produce vivid raised red-orange scars. Though most of their number are mortal, there are many fire elemental allies and elemental-blooded warriors among their ranks, as well as some of the children of Akhammanu himself. The fireskinned make great use of stimulants such as pyresnuff, believing that the shortest-lived flames burn brightest and that in death they join the wildfires that will one day sweep across the world. They live, they die, and live again in flame and all things that burn until that fateful day. Fire Aspected Dragonblooded, fire elementals and those with ties to Akhammanu will find favour with this tribe, but may not enjoy what that means to a death cult of fanatical arsonists. Many of the fireskinned still dedicate prayers to the Cult of the Burning God, a holdover from the warring days of Elemi Piercing Sun, who in his heyday led mighty hordes from the Bloody Sands to pillage and raze his foes.
- Bloodriders: "Death to still water" is the cry of the bloodriders, who spurn any water source that stands alone, drinking instead what flows from desert streams and bleeding veins. They ride giant scorpions that they keep tamed by feeding them blood and whispering secret chants from their spawning, wearing carapace-armour and riding leathers harvested from their mounts and their prey. Beyond even the fireskinned, they are the most numerous of the Anam tribes, but the great god of the bloodriders is dead. The wounds he sustained each day fighting off the Wyld were what kept the Anam flowing, the scorpion-priests say, and when he finally perished the river dried up. Much of their roaming and the blood sacrifices they make to the sands are means towards an end; to find the unborn son the great god sewed into the stomach of the world and feed him enough that he can birth himself, and restore the barren lands to splendour. Where he might lie, and which clan will be his chosen midwives, is the topic of as many clan wars as it is myths.
- Windsingers: All the tribes have their identifying signs, and the windsingers can be known by their ships. No other vessel on the Anam Way - or indeed the Firepeak Pave, some say - can equal the grace, agility and speed of a windsinger vessel. Clad in loose, pale fabrics that reflect the heat, windsingers dress their sandship homes with snakeskin and call them the bones of dragons, treating each precious vessel as part-home, part-shrine. Their faith is a corrupted Immaculate Heresy that praises the Dragon of Air above all other gods - a sign of their ancestral Shogunate roots that sometimes yield heroes with the blood of dragons - and they rarely travel north of the Broken Twins, preferring to stay close to their secret valley of dragon bones. Perhaps due to their reverence of the goddess they name Mala, they know magics that let them whistle down the winds to fill their sails, and every shipborne child is trained in the sling and bow from a young age. That this leaves them vulnerable to foes who can close the distance is no great worry - few indeed are able to board the swift ships under volleys of arrow- and bullet-fire.
- Sons of Ahra: The blood of djinns flows strong in the Sons of Ahra, and their boys are not considered men until they have mastered a wyld-camel mount of their own. Of all the tribes, the Sons are safest in their ventures out past the wyldshore that laps at the Anam Way, for they make deals and pacts with the denizens of chaos to pass safely through their territories, and learn the mystical arts of the wyldtide. Some Sons have even learned true Sorcery, becoming djinni themselves who no longer cling to petty mortality. Women are prohibited from following the path of the djinn-riders, and must content themselves with studying alchemy as wyld-witches if they seek power - though the crones among them who achieve enlightenment often hold substantial influence over their clans. Due to the habitat of their wyld-camels and their strong ties to the Dheajenese, the Sons largely roam the northern reaches of the Anam Way, where they trade the scavenged products of the Bloody Sands to the Flowing Dune Sea. Rarely do they venture south, unless chasing legends of unrivalled chaos-blessed power.
- Other Tribes:Other tribes call the Bloody Sands home, some common in this part of the Way or that, some rare almost to the point of extinction. Few at all are kind.
- The albino Dune Folk bury themselves beneath the sand to escape the harsh light of day, and conduct vicious raids on those not their own at night. Their well-known reputation as cannibals leads them to be attacked on sight - which in turn only increases their xenophobia and hostility towards other tribes. It is said that demon worship is common among their ranks - but perhaps these are merely vicious rumours spread by those who revile them.
- The formicae are in some ways more ant than human. They are sedentary compared to other tribes, each clan-colony dug into a rocky outcropping or half-buried Shogunate ruin, and trade warily with more nomadic clans - though if slighted, it is said their grudges never fade. Nine in ten of their number are female, most sterile as long as an active matriarch rules, but there is little traditionally feminine in their sandy carapaces, chitinous limbs and mandible-framed mouths.
- Serpent-men have skin closer to scales in texture, and the heads of cobras. Their nature bears less of the human need for companionship than mammal-men, and while many form families and clans, it is more common to see lone serpent-men than any other tribe. Their pacts with desert elementals help such loners hide from those who would hunt them, and allow their clans to raise great sandstorms to aid them when they attack with poisoned darts and fangs.
Sidebar: Bad Blood and Grudges
It is said that there are as many reasons for clans to fight as there are grains of sand in the desert. This is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it is certainly true that the Bloody Sands are embroiled in almost constant conflict. Even beyond simple competition for food and water, there are a multitude of calls to war for an aggressive clansman:
- Survival: Without the bounty of the wyldtide, the Anam Way would starve in a single moon. It still isn't enough. Food is scarce, water precious, and for most a life spent always on the edge of thirst and hunger is all they will ever know. When drought threatens or blight strikes desert crops or wyldstorms batter the Pillars, supplies of water, food and shelter are finite. Clans will slaughter one another to the last in their desperation to claim such precious resources, and some will force others to pay the price for their survival, offered as slaves or sacrifices to cruel fae and callous gods.
- History: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Seven hundred years have left plenty of grudges along the Way, and while the shifting nature of clans renders the oldest ones moot, there are usually enough remembered slights in the past seven years to fuel conflicts for the next seventy. Formicae colonies are known to remember not just clans but families and even individuals who have attacked them for decades, while the prejudice against the Dune Folk is a self-reinforcing spiral that has left them more hated than any other group in the region.
- Religion: Many tribal legends explain the mythical source of the Anam in one way or another, each with a culprit responsible for its disappearance and many with a way it might flow again. These explanations branch and diverge as stories do, so one bloodrider clan may blame the Sons of Ahra for the death of their great god, while others might accuse rival bloodrider clans of offering him insufficient worship. Windsingers slay any who profane or damage their sacred ships, and the cult of the Fireskinned yearns to burn the very world to ash. With so many conflicting beliefs, it is little surprise that the Bloody Sands are never lacking in gore.
Sidebar: Rebuilding the Way
Not all ambitions of the Anam Way are violent. Not all its people are powerless. And humans have ever been social animals, expanding as much through trade and diplomacy as conquest and genocide. Why, then, have efforts not been made to restore some semblance of civilisation and peace to the war-torn region? Where are the attempts to provide reliable fresh water, to set up sustainable sources of food? Why are the Bloody Sands still bloody?
- Culture: While many on the Way hold power beyond mere mortal means, few are of the mindset to put it to constructive uses. An elemental-blooded hero raised in the cult of the Fireskinned will not think to build when his religion calls him to burn, a bloodrider who gains a godly ally is most likely to ask them to aid in finding her unborn god, and a windsinger whose dragon-blood awakens will be more concerned with their sacred ships than any static settlement. Even those with peaceful ideals may be pulled by peer pressure or politics into using their gifts for war if not simply to survive.
- Emigration: Bluntly put, the Anam Way is an awful place to live. Yes, it is easy to set oneself up as the god-king of a sprawling town, but when the town in question is a dust-swept shanty fed by chaos-polluted crops amidst a wasteland of screaming fanatics, the appeal of such a choice wears thin. Most who gain enough power in the wastes of the desert simply leave. Why stay on the wyldshore when the Firepeak Pave offers wealth, nobility, fine clothes, exquisite food and slaves to dote on one's every whim? Savant Centipede of Dheajen is one such emigrant, who now sits on one of the three thrones of a rich and powerful city. Who would not be of a mind to follow their example?
- Scarcity: Even for those who choose to stay on the Way and seek means to make life better, it is difficult to find such things. The Anam's location deep in the desert makes Water and Wood elementals rare, and so the easiest way to coax water and food from the sands is the touch of chaos. Texts that hold spells to force crops through a harvest or create freshwater springs are unfathomably rare, and near any spirit able to tutor a young hopeful in such magics would rather be tithed every month to provide such things themselves than take a single payment and let the knowledge spread. Learning to fight in the Bloody Sands is easy. Learning to nurture and build is hard.
- Threats: Nonetheless, in some places lone individuals have bucked the trends. There are towns - especially in the northern parts of the Way - that are ruled by Dragonblooded whose peerless intellects have given birth to artesian wells and rigorously kept farmland, or sorcerer-mayors who know the secrets of bringing water forth from stone or conjuring food from the air itself. But such places face challenges by their very nature. A single source of food and water cannot support a large population, and a successful settlement with a surplus of food attracts raiding clans to swarm a rich and static target. Pockets of plenty in the desert wastes stay small and fortified - or else end up pillaged.
- The Way: The last factor in the timeless culture of the Anam Way is perhaps the subtlest and most pervasive. Sandwiched between the Wyrdsands, the Deep Desert and the Burning Wastes, A narrative warping lies heavy over the Bloody Sands; chaos whispers to the world that it is a place of violence and savagery, and every clan war or shanty raid echoes that whisper back to the Wyld. The further south one travels, the more the Way becomes a story - and there is no place in this tale for peace treaties or bounteous works. The full moon dampens the strength of the warping, but the wyldtide brings madness with it, rendering men caricatures of themselves. This is perhaps the most tragic of the Anam Way's vicious cycles, for there are vanishingly few who even recognise it exists. So long has the warping lain over the region that it is the norm for those that live there. Outsiders are the ones who are strange, with impossible ideals of peace and prosperity. Conflict is simply the Way of life.
Anam is lost to the hungry desert and now her former path can only be tracked by the great black jade obelisks who once kept her within her borders and nurtured her course so she flooded at the right times. They were once akin to geomantic acupuncture, diverting the flows of water-essence through needles hammered into Creation. Now, running for hundreds of miles through the trackless deserts, these thin monoliths still stand - one of the few traces among the sand of where Anam once lay. In the wavering heat haze they stand straight upright, but the dragon line that once ran along the river is gone, and the prayers on the side no longer glow with light reflected off the deep ocean. A few of them retain traces of their old power, and oases have formed around them, where moisture condenses off the jade. The least of the spires measure ten metres tall, while the mightiest five were great wonders, forty metres and more.
Of these five great Pillars of the Anam, only two are inhabited - two of the others are too far south, too lost in the hungry desert to be fit for mortal life, while the fifth and northernmost has never been found. The distance between spires is sometimes as few as ten miles, and never more than twenty five. Thus, the dark patches in the desert glare are used as a means of navigating the Bloody Sands, as they are never out of sight to a keen eye. A few of the spires have trading posts built around them, for in the sand-sea they have become lighthouses on the Anam Way. The marks and symbols carved into the sides of the pillars no longer lay more than the slightest of blessings on the cultures that use them, and the true names of the pillars have been long since forgotten. In this fallen age, the tribes and societies that depend on them have named them anew with titles and phrases always related to water - the shorter and more general the title, the greater the spire. Notable Pillars include:
- Kept Behind Cactus Spines: A comparatively small 10-metre spire, this is the closest Pillar to Gem, and serves as the waypoint to the rest of the Way. A convex mirror of polished metal sits atop the spire to reflect the sun's light towards Gem and catch the eye as a glint on the horizon.
- Sitting Stagnant Over Bones: This unsettling 10-metre spire is largely avoided, for a particularly brutal massacre opened a shadowland around it, and even the comparative shade it offers through its sapping effect on the sunlight is not worth the way corpses lie uneasy here - much less the risk of the Anam's dead spilling out to torment the living at night.
- Blood-Soaked Sands: This 20-metre spire stands at the heart of the bandit town that bears the same name. It is a favoured trading post for the scorpion clans, and the current leader of the settlement is Two-Face Maksa; an ambitious bastard granddaughter of the infamous raider-boss Baki Stingertooth. Maksa is a young upstart in her late twenties; the left half of her face is deformed with insectoid mutations, and she came to power two years ago in a brutal duel for control that left her predecessor's entrails soaking the red-hued sands. She intends to be every bit the hero her grandfather was, and even to surpass him. As of yet she has not decided on a suitable target to prove her mettle, but her thoughtful eye roams from the great spires to far-off Gem to the famed valley of the dragon's bones, and the scorpion clans muster behind her sanguine promises.
- The Saleh Lake Monastery: Once there was a city built around this 20-metre spire that rose from an island on a lake north of Anamra. The lake dried up and the city died of thirst, and now all that remains is the walled monastery that squats around the spire and their fields on the lakebed, ringed by an outer wall of crumbling buildings. Enough water dribbles down from the Pillar named Sweat of Honest Labour that the penitents here have saved the soil and carefully nurture it. They are called penitents, despite the fact that nearly all of them were born in this place and only the dusty dry archives remember what sins their ancestors were banished from Cahzor for. The prince of the divine court they honour is Lakehma Flame-Scarred, and he is no less a penitent for ancient sins than the humans given to him.
- Thirst-Quencher: The mighty, 40-metre high spire of Thirst-Quencher is the source of the Black Pool; an oasis formed from the stream that flows from its black jade carvings. The town of Black Pool is one of the largest along the Anam Way. It is a trading hub visited by every tribe and the only truly peaceful settlement on the Bloody Sands, enforced by the elemental dragon of Water who lives in the spire. Grieving Mist Widow once bore a different name as the wife of the Anam river's god, who fell to madness and Wyld taint as his mighty domain was corrupted by chaos and burned to dust. Now she seeks a way to cure him, and allows no mortal quarrels to distract her from her research. She thinks she is close to a breakthrough, and soon she will call the monstrous lord of chaos her lover has become back to the banks of his ancient territory; heedless and uncaring of the casualties it will cause.
- Gut's Gulp:The second of the great spires on their southern progression, and one of the other two that are inhabited; the Pillar of Gut's Gulp rises 40 metres into the sky as proudly as Thirst-Quencher. A cadre of gods have made their residence in a sanctum within this grand obelisk, and executions honour them by slitting open the belly of the victim and spilling the fluid inside onto the rubble and ruins around the black jade base. People come to Gut's Gulp for food. The water that streams from it vanishes quickly under the sand, feeding a shallow aquifer cradled in the geology of the region. This has given rise to farms and local herders whose output makes the town a net food producer, even with its substantial population. In past Ages, its position on the great river fell within a major centre for Shogunate canneries and factories that packaged and processed the produce of the Anam's fertile plains. Many were buried by the desert, and every decade or so a new one will be uncovered; glutting the market with Shogunate ration packs for a few months and providing a new cavernous warehouse or white-stone structure to pitch tents and huts within.
- The Gods of Gut's Gulp: Dust-in-Belly is a famine-god; fat and jovial and sanguine, he bears drink stains down his robes and crumbs on his coat, and presides over the lack of food and water so many suffer in the Bloody Sands. Bloody Nails' hands are soaked with blood and his face is marked with countless scars that crack and peel when he stirs up violence and conflict among his worshippers - often by impressing his own choleric passions onto them. Finally, Last Wall Crumbles is a ghostly pale goddess of ruin covered in the white dust of rubble ground to nothing; sedate and melancholic to an almost reptilian degree in her passionless recounting of the decay of man's works. Though young and low in status, these spirits have big plans. First, they mean to expand their reach and influence until their worship dominates the Anam Way. Then, they will spread their domains of famine, conflict and ruin to Gem, and see that great and wealthy city fall to chaos and civil war. The Firepeak Pave will be next, and the Firepeaks to the west of it, until all of the south is under their sway. The first step to their ambitions is Thirst-Quencher, and the dragon who lives there in mourning. The court of the Bloody Sands regards her spire with greedy hunger, and move closer and closer to action.
Sidebar: Islands in the Sand
Hundreds of black jade Pillars trace the course of the long-dead Anam River. Five are forty-metre titans, three of them lost to the trackless wastes of the north and south - for none know where the Anam flowed past Dheajen and Isicus; the minor Pillars that pointed the way are long-since looted, and south of Skol the land is too harsh for even the Fireskinned to survive. Of the rest, one in four are twenty-metre spires. These masses of black jade, while not as titanic as their greater cousins, still condense water on their surfaces from the parched desert air that flows from their bases in modest streams. As such, towns like Blood-Soaked Sands and the Saleh Lake Monastery have grown around most of them, and a Storyteller is encouraged to populate their own settlements around them. Most twenty-metre Pillars will have a three-word name, and all will reference a type or source of water or a place where it may be found.
The remaining three in four Pillars are ten-metre spires, slender and without great power of their own. These are used primarily as waypoints and lighthouses along the Anam Way, each with a four- or five-word name that references a more niche type of water - the less important the Pillar, the more niche or situational the name. That said, some waypoints, such as the marker for the route to Gem, are relatively well-known, and if another source of water can be found near a minor Pillar, a small settlement may still huddle around it for the chaos-warding benefit the black jade gives during wyldstorms.
The Forgotten Pyramid
From the heights of Namala, in the northern reaches of the Anam Way, one can see the edges of the Flowing Dune Sea. On a clear day, a keen-eyed lookout atop the stony plateau might follow the gaze of one of wind-worn faceless kings carved into the cliffs and sight the graceful towers of distant Dheajen. The townsfolk know that giants lived here once; it was they who raised the rocky crag from the sand, they who carved their likenesses into the faces of the cliffs, and they who broke open the stone and let water flow from deep beneath the ground. The sheer sides of the plateau render it invulnerable to desert raiders, and hordes of hostile clans have broken against its defences.
The safety of this stronghold, and its central position on the Anam Way just south of Dheajen and Isicus, render Namala incredibly powerful. As Bridgetown is the southern gateway to the Bloody Sands, so Namala is the northern gate - it is near impossible to pass through its territory without being spotted from the heights and run down by bands of austrech-mounted riders and mercenary clans. Even should one avoid the spying eyes atop the heights, Namala is a near-essential resupply station for water and food, and rare is the settlement within thirty miles that would dare give shelter to a traveller without a Namalan guide. One pays the toll, or one does not pass through Namala's territory - and to circle it is not an undertaking for the faint of heart.
Namala is ruled by proud and pious water-lords, who have kept the wellspring gods content for centuries. Their control over the water supply - and the vast reserves of fresh water stored within the heights - is the key to their despotic rule, and those who earn their ire are cast out into the wastes where only shiftless bandits dwell, desperately surviving on transient oases and the blood of animals. Undying Riverwell is the current water-lord, a Water Aspect born to the aristocratic custodian-cult who worship the wellspring. He is old and cruel and ruthless, and has taken thirteen wives in his hundred and ninety years of life. Not one of his offspring have woken their blood, and most bear the marks of chaos or inbreeding, so he looks now for a fourteenth, and an heir to pass on his rule to when he dies.
It may not be long. Despite his name, Riverwell is ill. Cancerous wyldgrowths infest his flesh and restrict his breath. His sculpted armour and furnace-rhino steed disguise the pain that walking brings him on the rare occasions he ventures out of his fortress, and his clothes hide the sores and lesions that cover his belly and back. Nonetheless, Riverwell seems uncharacteristically unconcerned about his predicament. To leave the wellspring gods without a successor would be anathemical to his beliefs and duties - and yet there is no apparent fear that he will. Perhaps he already has his eyes on a fourteenth wife, perhaps he has some scheme in mind to prolong his final years... or perhaps he has delved into
forgotten Anamranthra and found a way to cheat death's call entirely.
A Bridge between Clans
Once upon a time, there was a road across the Anam plains that carried great trains and swift groundcraft and many thousands of people every day. It met the Anam river where the mighty waterway was more than a kilometre across, and a titanic bridge of jadesteel bore it across from shore to shore. Part of that bridge still stands; a causeway four hundred metres long that is held between two vast and splintered pillars. The tops of the Broken Twins are shattered; jagged spikes of uneven height thrusting upward at the sky, but the great celestrium cables survive and the causeway is sound. This raised platform is accessible only by rope lift, and so has become a place of pride for the settlement clustered around the bottom where warbosses and leaders pitch their tents.
If the Anam Way had a heart, it would be these shattered spires and the ancient road strung between them like a ribbon. Geographically, Bridgetown is roughly in the centre of the Way as people travel it, and the tail end of the Payum River reaches them in the rainy season between Air and Water, with trade following the floodwater from Payumi and even the Ashen Kingdoms. The guarantee of annual water and the seasonal plants that turn this part of the desert briefly green have allowed the town to expand into the largest static settlement on the Anam Way, surpassing even Gut's Gulp and Black Pool in size. All the major tribes can be found here, and it is the source from which news and rumours spread up and down the Bloody Sands. The presence of the corrupt road god Chujitsusuna only amplifies its status as an information hub and gossip nexus.
Bridgetown's dominant position, heavy traffic and central location lead it being home to certain formalities of Anam culture. When strife among the people of the Bloody Sands must be settled but the parties involved are loath to move to open war, the Broken Twins are a traditional meeting-place for such clans and tribes to negotiate. News of pacts and alliances made here will spread quickly to all who should hear of them, while matters of single combat may be settled as they cannot be at Black Pool. It is a common sight to behold two chosen clan champions ascending to the causeway, seventy metres above the hot sands below, and matching blade against blade on the bare lanes where streams of traffic once flowed night and day. Many famous duels have been fought here, and the skulls of those who have died great deaths decorate the splintered towers in great numbers. It is said that the Burning God defeated no less than forty four blooded champions without rest nor pause for food upon the heights, until his army had swelled enough to assail the walls of the sky itself.
The size of the city may be its downfall. Bridgetown has no water source of its own in the long dry months between the rains, and depends on the native deep-rooted succulents which draw water up into sweet-citrus gourds from the aquifer far below, which the floodwaters refresh each year. The harvesting of these vital cacti is done with utmost care, but even so, a root-rot disease has taken hold of the plants which increasingly threatens the entire local ecosystem. Farmers worry that the blight might spread to the annual crops that flower with the Payum floods, and the skull-priests of the great structure cannot say how they will sustain themselves should the waters come and the desert not bloom.
Sidebar: Miser-God of the River Road
In its heyday, the Fifteenth Fire Dragon-Road was one of the twenty five great highways of the South. Ten lanes of traffic flowed constantly night and day, and the road god Chujitsusuna rose to the rank of Anam-Zuryo through his devotion to his duty. It was a matter of great pride to this upright Heavenly officer that from the Anam Plains to the Fire Mountains, nothing escaped his sight and no journey went unaided. The Immaculate Faith commended him for his incorruptible honour and his uncompromising work ethic, and roadside shrines - with strictly law-abiding schedules of worship - were raised all along the thousand-mile length of his domain.
Then the Anam burned, and all Chujitsusuna's achievements burned to ash. He alone survived, sheltering under the great bridge over the Anam - and when he emerged after fire and fae had receded, it was to find a barren riverbed and a broken road through burnt-out wastelands. For ten years he raged, for ten years he grieved, and for ten years more he sent message after message up to Heaven begging aid. When he finally accepted his fate, it was with bitterness in his heart and the discovery that men were beginning to travel up and down the dried-up Anam's banks.
Seven hundred years on, Chujitsusuna is still a road god, but now his road is one of sand and blood. The goddess Wen Dji of a long-lost roadside restaurant chain is his most trusted underling, and his formerly trim figure now overflows the meat- and wine-stained uniform he once kept so scrupulously neat. Were he human, gout might well threaten his corpulent bulk. His chest is covered with scrap-metal medals he has awarded himself in the absence of superiors to promote or commend him, and he has not set foot outside Bridgetown in two hundred years or more. In truth, he has no need to, for his knowledge of his domain is still unparalleled; the minor road-gods who once served him out of loyalty now do so out of fear and debt.
Chujitsusuna knows more about the Anam Way than any other person on it, and is likely the only being alive who could map it from end to end. He will never do so. Such information comes at a steep price, and he extorts the tribes ruthlessly for the location of every warehouse, every ruin, every rival clan they wish to track. His blessings can ensure swift passage across the sands, point the way to another traveller no matter where they go, and even cut days or weeks off a journey, but few would dare request such things of him, for fear of the cost he would take in return. Those ignorant souls who are foolish enough to renege on his payment find themselves hopelessly lost in the desert, outmanoeuvred by their rivals at every turn, or are simply torn to pieces by the back of sandstorm hounds who serve as his hunting dogs.
Life in a Plundered Tomb
Sane men do not linger long in Laughingtown. It can be heard before it can be seen; the high crazed laughter is carried by the wind with unnatural clarity, sometimes for tens of miles. Those who sleep with the sound worming its way into their ear have nightmares of a gold-tinged monster slaughtering all who profane its home, and most will move on before three nights have passed. However, some value the thick walls, defensible location atop a rocky hill and chaos-warding properties of this plundered Solar tomb above their sanity, and so the outer parts of the complex are inhabited by families squatting in rooms and halls stripped bare of lavish tribute and histories of a dead man's life. Some of them are twitchy and haunted, spiralling down the slow and inexorable process of being driven mad. Others are dead-eyed and hollow-voiced, broken within by the relentless assault of a monster's hysterical laughter.
Despite the horror, Laughingtown is likely the safest place on the Anam Way from an outside perspective. Fae lords dare not approach the place, for they know that the nightmare within could challenge a demon prince or lord of death in battle should it ever break free. Wyldstorms batter at the marble walls to no avail, and the aesthetic gardens once planted in sheltered courtyards to bring beauty to a prince of earth's resting place have been maintained and converted into farms. Nearby villages and shanty towns know to flee to the sprawling wings of the crypt-complex when severe wyldstorms sweep over the region, accepting a few days of uneasy sleep for the guarantee of escaping the twistings of chaos. Those pursued by desert-djinni or slighted elementals will turn towards Laughingtown if they are close enough, for all but the strongest of spirits will break off pursuit as soon as they hear the haunting laughter on the wind. Even within its walls, fights are usually kept to first-blood or crippling, lest too much death draw the attention of the horror at the temple's heart. A family can have security for the rest of their days under the roof of Laughingtown. All they need do is pay the cost of a life full of endless nightmares.
The warding aspect of Laughingtown has led to another quirk of its population. No spirit will willingly set foot within ten miles of its walls, and so the ancient tomb has gathered a substantial number of expatriates who have offended or opposed one or more of the spirits on the Way. Divine servants and tamed chaos-beasts will not hunt their master's prey into the domain of a yidak lord that never slumbers, and while mortal men will kill for hire in any locale, the locals of Laughingtown are far more likely to step in to stop a fatal blow than in other Anam towns. Such expatriates are no less vulnerable to the maddening effects of the tomb's echoing laughter, but even those who have broken inside may know - or possess - things that mighty spirits of the Bloody Sands would kill to keep secret or retrieve.
Sane men do not linger long in Laughingtown, but a surprising number pass through it. Due to its safety and reliability against the Wyld, it serves as a trustworthy trading post that sees fairly frequent traffic, most of it short-stay stopovers to resupply and restock. Its position between Black Pool and Bridgetown makes for a constant market of goods with a broad variety of wares, as well as reliable gossip about current events. Travellers must be wary, though, for sometimes a wyldstorm may snag on the marble spires and trap those who shelter within for days or weeks at a time.
Sidebar: The Laughing Monster
Six hundred years before the Usurpation, a mighty warrior of the Dawn died valiantly in a blaze of glory. His body was laid to rest in a splendid tomb, and he was given many honours and paeans to see his soul depart this world and pacify his spirit. Nonetheless, despite all the pomp and ceremony, he died resentful of the outcome of his battle, and his po lingered uneasily in his flesh.
Centuries passed. The Solars fell, and the Dragonblooded rose, but those proud lords of the Shogunate knew better than to meddle with the grandeur of a Solar crypt, and shunned its ostentatious wealth rather than pillage it. But then the Shogunate fell in turn, and the savage men of the Third Age were not so wise. Like locusts they descended on the golden roofs and marble edifices, and stripped all that had value from its halls. A greedy Chosen - of which god no-one knows - was even so audacious as to slip the lethal gauntlet of defences around the burial chamber and strip the very rings and jewels from the corpse it held. But this was a step too far. The yidak lord awoke, enraged by the defilement of its home. The reckless thief was slain, but the innermost defences held it back from visiting retribution on the rest, and in despairing madness, the bestial ghost began to laugh. It has laughed for five hundred years, and unless the tomb's protections are breached will laugh for five hundred more, guarding the untold riches that still lie within the inner cordon of traps and seals.
In life, the Solar prince buried in the tomb of Laughingtown was a warrior and general who honed his skill against wyldlife hordes and demon princes in the military exercises of the Deliberative. In death, his yidak stands equal to a fetich-soul or Incarna in raw internal power, and the weapons and armour he was buried with are expressed in its corpus. Should a brave and clever hero slip through the defences of the inner cordon - or worse yet, break them open - the Laugher would be an opponent of terrible strength, made worse by its immunity to the light of the sun. If one were to defeat or banish it, however, a treasure trove of grave goods from the High First Age would be free for the taking - and were it bound, a necromancer would have gained a weapon that might scour a city clean.
- Mechanically, the laughter of the yidak lord acts as a constant assault on the minds of those who hear it. The desert winds carry it unpredictably across the sands, sometimes for tens of miles. Those who sleep within earshot of it are subjected to horrific nightmares that impose a -3 internal penalty to recover Willpower from sleeping. Drugs and earplugs can reduce this to a -1, but not even airtight walls can stop the sound intruding without magical aid. Each month of these dreams counts as a scene eroding a character's highest Virtue or Principle above 2 dots, or their most recently invoked should there be a tie. This effect cannot be resisted without magic, and such Principles cannot be reinforced without magical aid without leaving the laughter's range.
- In addition to this, each month of nightmares also counts as a scene building and reinforcing a Principle of Existential Dread centred on the monster at the centre of the tomb, which cannot be eroded without magic. This Principle is limited to 4 dots so long as at least one Virtue or Principle remains at 3 dots or higher, but upon losing the last such tie to other matters, it can increase to 5. After a year with the Dread of the monster at this level, something vital within the inhabitants of Laughingtown is extinguished and they are reduced to a level similar to the dream-eaten, so numbed and battered by horror that there is nothing of them left. The fact that such victims are seldom missed is another attractive quality of Laughingtown in the eyes of the Anam Way's more mercenary sorts.
If the corpse of Skol ever truly lived, it was a gargantuan beast of mythic proportion. Perhaps it would be more comforting to think that it was conjured by the Wyld in its current state, for the idea of such titans wandering the world would strike fear into the heart of any man. Visible for miles around, Skol is built in the body of a great humanoid behemoth, eighty metres high if it is an inch, that slumps impaled on a great spike of stone through its heart. Raised off the ground by its fatal rocky support, the town is as vertical as it is horizontal; a combination of mine and settlement that sustains itself on what it can gouge from a giant's remains.
It has been sustaining itself like this for longer than it should be possible, for even after seven and a half centuries, Skol is not yet inert. Its heart is impaled and its great skull has fallen from its shoulders to decay and hollow out on the desert floor thirty metres below, but still the vast cadaver tries sluggishly to heal itself, fed by a wyldstream that runs into the porous sandstone spire and not quite understanding yet that it is dead. Giantsbone, ichor, tienflesh, stonebarbs and behemoth-leather are all renewable resources in Skol, and all are in high demand on the Anam Way for their durability and strength.
The wyldstream that feeds Skol as its natural regeneration struggles to come to terms with its demise comes from a nearby wyldpool that the monthly wyldtide renews at the new moon. The Bazaar of Bones is a goblin market of ramshackle stalls and impossible trinkets whose excretions and runoff form a greasy stream of oils and perfumes that run the mile-and-a-half to the base of the Skewer of Skol along a gutter of iridescent glass. Fae-pactors frequent the wyldstream to sup on it for power, and the Sons of Ahra consider the Bazaar one of the safer wyldpools on the Pave for young boys to learn the ways of chaos-bargains. The strange and misshapen beasts that are the market's primary stock in trade turn back into pebbles and sand if they stray too far from the wyldpool unless kept constantly fed with chaotic power, but Skol falls comfortably within their radius, and many are used in the mining and excavation of the corpse.
Ichor and tienflesh inevitably form a substantial part of the local diet in Skol, though the offputting taste and texture leave it a last resort when all other forms of food and water fail. Nonetheless, some develop a taste for the strange, unsettling flavour and eat it to the exclusion of all else, while others see no reason to let their tastebuds put them off a lifetime of free meals. A few of those who gorge themselves so, as well as some who have lived in the town for decades of dietary supplements, find strange changes taking place in their body as the flesh of the fallen titan catalyses their own. Stubby quills grow from their skin, their blood turns black and thick, and they gain a resistance to the siren call of the Wyld and its warpings, as well as a profound distaste for all of its ilk. Should they continue their singleminded feasting, they may experience other, more drastic changes, and even the miners of Skol's innermost organs know to avoid these creatures when their changes go too far to ignore.
Birthplace of the Winds
Nobody south of Black Pool has failed to hear of the legendary valley of the windsingers where dragons once made their home. Mala herself was born there, or so they say, and crafted every gust and breeze and storm before casting them out into the world to fill the sails of men. Yet almost nobody knows where Dragonbone Valley lies, save that the windsingers stay mostly in the southern half of the Way. Only their oldest and wisest know the routes, which they memorise and never commit to paper. When they navigate to their sacred home, crews bind their eyes and sail blind so they cannot be compelled to surrender the secret to torture. Some rumours claim the valley might be as far north as Gut's Gulp, others insist it is further south than Skol. Six times in the history of the Way, great raider-gangs have scoured the desert for it, and six times they have returned empty-handed, their numbers reduced by the merciless sands.
Dragonbone Valley sits between a raised set of hills some hundred miles or more off the course of the old Anam. Even in Shogunate times, this sheltered dip between desert cliffs was arid and dry, with no natural water source and nearly no signs of life. This is why it was made a boneyard for drakopters of that long-lost Age, and row upon row of celestrium chassis still stand in neat lines, missing many components but starkly intimidating still. The windsingers are descendants of the Shogunate forces who manned this isolated military base, which survived the chaos-tide of the Balorian Crusade through luck and jade and the shelter of the hills - though the most fearsome weapons once carried by its vessels were all spent against the numberless fae. In the centuries since that great battle, the ex-Shogunate culture has developed a branch of Immaculate heterodoxy that believes the stripped-down machines their ancestors maintained are the skeletons of dragons, the aging children of Mala who come to this place to die.
Proud and pious in this faith, no clan would dream of selling the jadesteel chassis that their sandships are built around, for all that they would be worth a fortune even in their stripped-down states. They believe that in cladding them with wood and canvas and snakeskin they are resurrecting the divine beasts and giving them new life - and the little gods of each family's sacred ship, young and ignorant and shaped by their small cults, believe this wholeheartedly and act with the arrogance and aggression they believe is their right as the ghosts of dragons-that-were. While most drakopters yield nothing but a skeletal chassis that an unusually light and sturdy ship may be built around, some still have armour, engines or even weapons that old ritualised maintenance procedures can coax into action. Those pursued by a clan-chief's dragonship should be wary, for it is not unknown for some to bear an essence lance or to move at terrible speed with neither wind nor sail.
The secret of the windsingers is well-kept. It is not uncommon knowledge that they believe their ships to be dragons reborn, but the snakeskin and canvas they clad them with disguise the jadesteel chassis within. Certainly they are unusually shaped, and their performance uncanny, but this is put down to the beliefs of the cult and the wind-calling magics their singer-shamans practice. If any outsiders have discovered the priceless artefacts at the heart of each vessel, they have chosen caution over greed and kept it secret so as to avoid the wrath of the tribe united. Those who wish to study the ships out of simple curiosity are met with hostility and haughty scorn. Still, if any stumbled across the barren valley through chance or cunning, they would find a fortune almost beyond counting laid out for them - the absence of any source of food or water leaves it lightly guarded through most of the year, visited only on pilgrimages or at great meetings of the clans. Such a prospector might well decide it was worth the eternal enmity of an entire tribe, if they could find some way to transport their discovery back to civilisation.
