...this may or may not have come up before, but what's a Rade? Ashvakrev for a raid/ride?
My imagination runs wild trying to imagine what this could be. The Slavic etymology is undeniable, but the exact word... Is it a variant of a Czech's word "strašidlo", i.e. a ghost? I suppose it could be some kind of forest spirit/unclean force, like leshy.
...is that vote still open? I'd love to read more about the necrochemists (a good scam is a good read in itself!), but if we had to choose from what else was on offer, let's see...
[x] Journal of a Yasaali businesswoman visiting Navath-Qor and the Grandest Maze, home of the Rem, on a sightseeing and trade expedition.
In order!
1) A Rade is a massive undertaking of Locusts, war machines, vesauvrim and Unchosen hangers-on, led by usually-one-but-sometimes-a-crew of charismatic, powerful high-treatment Locusts, which may just be wandering up and down to do mayhem or may have an agenda in mind. Think a Waaagh, ride of the Old Heterodynes, or the mercenary companies of the 30 Years' War.
2) That Is For Me To Know but please speculate, it will be likely expanded upon here or over in NFull!
3) The vote remains open until I say it's closed, and also you can ask for anything I've obliquely mentioned in any of my three threads!
You'll get something you actually voted for tomorrow, but it's late and this was easier to write.
Despite the fact that the Obsidian Confederacy of Azharach, commonly known as simply the Confederacy, has had a society of integrated Erzan and Oriza for centuries, even before the creation of the Confederacy proper, the priesthoods and the military even to this day remain rather separated between the two species. Long have they cohabited, been allies, friends, close as siblings, but the Confederacy recognizes their separate cultural heritages and the skills each group cultivates as different and worthy of specialization. Even with cross-pollination and different people joining different groups, units and specializations remain very much divided by species and which god you call your patron, these things affecting Confederate society right down to its foundation. Very few things matter as much to the Confederates in as many places as their gods and their worship, but one of those things is the military. Every individual learns from an early age to, at least, know their way around orders, basic defense, and at least one weapon, and will be called upon in a crisis. From there, many go into "civilian" jobs of crafting or selling, while others become full-time soldiers in order to learn more specialist skills beyond handling basic firearms and polearms.
Erzan, culturally, are strongly associated with polearms and sharpshooting. From javelins to archery to crossbows to muskets to rifles to repeating rifles over their history, from spears to glaives to halberds to ranseurs to longhammers depending on what is needed for the situation. Erzan units are pikemen, riflemen, sharpshooters, phalanxes, cannon crew and defensive lines.
Oriza, culturally, are strongly associated with blunt weapons and chains. Flails, fists, maces, staves, the iconic hammer sword and maul, various weights and blades at the ends of chains, whips and other similar weapons. But they are also strongly associated with throwing weapons. Orizan units are shieldwalls, heavy infantry, slingers, arbalesters, or small interfering unit tactics, designed to hold or crush lines.
A vital component of all Confederate units are Dedicates. These are magic-users who have mastered a fighting style and certain style of magic associated with their god thanks to their faith, a mix of chaplain and magician vital on the field.
Dedicates of Scal have mastered the God of Destruction's focus on combat and use their devastating martial arts, mighty chains, and ability to call meteors to be mobile engines of mid-short-range destruction.
Dedicates of Savnok have mastered the God of Protection's focus on defense and metal to create powerful shields and barriers, manipulate the environs of a defensive structure, and strengthen the armor and weapons of their allies.
Dedicates of Gaevir have mastered the Goddess of Life and Death's focus on properly shepherding life to command animals, heal their allies, cull their enemies, manipulate plants and the very fabric of health and bodily integrity.
Dedicates of Edah have mastered the Goddess of Crossroads' focus on travel and fortune to manipulate luck, make journeys and roads easier, hide things from prying eyes and survive environmental conditions.
Dedicates of Hossor have mastered the God of Friendships' focus on relationships with living things to speak any language, discern lies and truth, manipulate plants and animals, and stir their allies to inspiration and true potential.
Dedicates of Daiel have mastered the Goddess of Engineering's focus on development and progress to build and maintain machines and weapons, interfere with the machines of others, and manipulate material properties.
A dedicate is a vital component of the Confederacy in both the material and civilian spheres. The strength and specific list of their abilities is extremely dependent on the individual and various other mitigating factors, but they are valuable for the many things they can do to fight or protect or make life easier. Dedicates strong enough to make a massive individual difference are rare, while individuals who have one or two minor gifts are fairly common.
Mounted forces are important to the military doctrine of the Confederacy, though these days, motorcycles, skittercycles, skittermobiles, steam wagons and wheeled or legged machines of various types have phased out the yzobu, riding goats, terror birds and riding beetles. Riding animals are reserved for officers and garrison duty, and machines are phasing out machines under the increased doctrine of progress and preparedness. In the air, however, the White Vulture, riding bat, and other flying mounts still rule the day, with mounted pikemen and sharpshooters performing reconnaissance, harrying duties and bombing runs. The airships of the Confederacy are famous, flying fortresses that every other nation raced to keep up with, carrying cargos of flying cavalry and motorized gliders as well as gun batteries. The airships above bring guns and flyers, while the war machines below range from the simple skittermobiles, clusters of legs in front and treads or wheels in back, to the Heavy Machines, giant legs and treads carrying powerful bodies covered in guns and heavily armored. Some of these machines are patterned after various creatures and animals, and a few are even shaped like humanoid warriors. The Confederacy dedicates many of its work-hours and factories towards producing these, but never has quite as many as it would like, thanks in part to constant border skirmishes with Locusts, who consider war machines to be particularly prestigious combats and kills. To defeat a war machine using only their Ves-given skills and weapons is an enormous thrill to Locusts, even against machines designed specifically (and often effectively) to kill them.
Nashax has far fewer citizens than the Confederacy, and prosecutes few land wars as a result. The Nashaxi army, in fact, does not formally exist. Instead, the Guilds and Concords of Dragonslayers, the various organizational bodies of those who bend their engineering prowess or martial skill towards fighting, killing, training, taming, harvesting, or otherwise dealing with the many monsters, dragons and Nephilim that plague Nashax, are under ancient contract to come to the nation's aid when called by the priesthood. Their navy, on the other hand, is incredibly strong, their leviathans and warships and krakens and crab fortresses making them the singular naval power on the Continent, though some other nations can challenge them in many specific engagements. The navy is a proper military body, unlike the rough-and-tumble Dragonslayer groups and the merchant air forces, and it is joined in early adulthood, from the ages of 16-20, as a job under a specific trainer, much like Dragonslaying. Nashaxi life requires many skills and hard-bitten competence from its citizens, but mandatory military service and training are not practiced, unlike in the Confederacy.
Nashaxi Dragonslayers are romanticised as broad-hatted gunslingers with massive revolvers or revolving rifles, tattooed warriors with massive axes or polearms, or strangely-armored martial artists who can take down a monster with a single brutal starmetal-knuckled punch to the jaw. However, these wandering fighters or point men are only the most photogenic of the nation's many defenders, who are primarily made up of gun crews, trap setters and engineers who set up many dangerous traps to stop the monsters and bring them down. Nashaxi dragonslayers have access to rare materials, gun batteries, traps that can take down massive creatures, experience turning weapons on hostile targets, and experience fighting everything from gigantic dragons and mountain giants to herds of monokeras and swarms of bushwhack beetles, making them essentially a free-roaming military force. Nashax has no need to keep a standing army as long as the Dragonslayers remain vital to its internal defense and prosperity.
The Nashaxi navy is entirely clustered around its terrifying monster-dependent war structures. With very few exceptions, all Nashaxi naval structures are built upon sea monsters tamed by Wavewatcher priests commanding the bounty of the sea. Small fortresses built upon the shells of giant crabs, airtight structures strapped to the back of leviathans and krakens that can delve deep beneath the sea, warships pulled or powered by giant eels or lesser krakens rather than engines or oars, and even smaller sea monsters ridden by single or paired riders with magic rigs that draw air from the water, designed to attack small boats and hostile monsters and allow for rapid reconnaissance and courier work. Nashaxi sailors are proud of their monster-powered vessels and structures and look down upon all other types of seafaring vessel, seeing everything from a fisherman's coracle to a gigantic Confederate ironclad with mechanical engines at basically the same basic level of primitivity as compared to a starmetal and seabone fortress mounted upon a beast impossible to tame without divine intervention.
A discussion of the military strength and foci of Nashax and the Confederacy would be incomplete without a look at the Border Kraels. These inhabitants of the marchlands between the two nations, some nomadic and some stationary, consider themselves to belong to whichever nation is most convenient at the time, or else to none at all. The Kraels are not strong enough or united enough to claim individual sovereignty--they would never form a compact strong enough to fight the Confederacy or Nashax, and each individual grouping doesn't have the military strength needed to hack it on their own. Still, by dint of knowing the land well and being canny and clever, they've avoided being stamped out by either nation, neither of which can make any war or annexation stick long enough to mean anything. Characterized by their uses of the curved falcata sword, the bardiche polearms, and reconstructed, recombined firearms, as well as guerilla warfare and mighty riding arthropods, the diverse Border Kraels are determined to keep each other and the nations sandwiching them in a tense stalemate too unprofitable and risky to tip in either direction.
The Journal of Adilah Tazi Upon Her Expedition to Navath-Qor
Ah, dear journal, what a marvelous last few days I've had! So busy, so full of new sights and excitement, that I've hardly had time to keep track of the needful business and the echo messages home, let alone to be able to write down my thoughts and feelings! Even now, the pen shakes--I'd like to think I'm fairly doughty, as ladies of my class can be counted, but I could never break my hands' unfortunate habit of shaking like the quills of an angry maned-hound when I had cause to be emotionally worked up. Still, this is far too wonderful, too interesting to not write down at my earliest convenience! I only hope the waving and splattering is still legible when I want to read this later... Adilah of the future, can you read this?
Good Throne, how long has it been since I wrote here? Nothing since that amazingly dreadful wedding, over nine days ago? Where has the time gone, I wonder.I suppose I had better start from the beginning, then, for posterity's sake.
The family business has been expanding tremendously over the past year or so, further and further east as we figure out how to properly ship things to and fro. Plenty of mead and ore to ship east, plenty of fine metalwork and art to ship back west. We've been chipping our way along, but the end goal has always been to secure a solid and direct line with some concern directly out of Navath-Qor. If we can get their fine goods directly from the Maze and its cities, then we can cut out all these dreadful middlemen and our profits and potential offered services will positively skyrocket. To that end, I decided to be the family member who would spearhead the expedition to Navath-Qor, and attempt the agreement and expansion personally. I've seen the products we get from there, the weavings and sculptures and metalwork, that curious spirit made from roots, the sheer craftsmanship (craftsbullsship?) of it all, but I've never, to my shame, been east of the Confederacy, so of course I had to go! The Grandest Maze! The country of the Rem! Navath-Qor! How could I possibly resist? It took a while to convince Mother that I was the one with the right stuff to bridge the gap and forge the alliance, but convince her I did!
We chartered the Twice-Gilded Wind, a lovely elegant air-trader with enough space in her belly for all but the most incredible windfalls and enough speed and complement of defences that we wouldn't need to fear for our lives every time some pirate or Locust or Seafarer that forgot they weren't a Skyfarer came a-calling with some rickety tub bristling with ballistae and stolen cannon. With us came several escort craft, whose names I've sadly forgotten, a half-complement of bird riders, and some marvelously lean and sinewy bodyguards, so pretty in their gilt masks and wraps and swords. I resolved to myself then and there to show the most collected, stylish, and interestingly scarred exactly how a lady's body is best guarded. It's only polite to provide for every need of your client, no?
The first two weeks of travel were very enjoyable.
Unfortunately for me, after that we began passing over the Ichor Sea, and lovely Maho was no longer able to devote quite so much energy to "guarding" me, so busy was she with actually guarding me. The air there is absolutely thick with dreadful little monsters and the odd Locust raider! Fortunately enough for us, they can be bought off, fought off, or otherwise dealt with, but they're absolute poison for the atmosphere.
The most exciting encounter over the Ichor Sea was with a sky-whale, that had riders! Curious thin creatures with a single long, crooked horn and four hands, they waved at us as we passed by, hanging onto long threads tied to rings sunk into some kind of howdah strapped to the beast's bony shell of a back. The sky-sailors aboard the Wind said it was good luck to see a sky-whale pass by so close, and even better luck for the riders to greet us in such a friendly manner, though they were unable to offer any explanation for exactly who and what those riders were. It was without the danger of the brief grych attack or the harrowing, nerve-wracking quality of that chase through the clouds with a Locust corvette, but the sheer peace and majesty of the encounter, I think, shall remain with me for quite a long time. There are so many wonderful things in the world, and I've seen quite a few, but not nearly enough! As long as my body and mind endure, I think I shall travel the world and see what it has to offer.
The air became so curiously dry as we entered the space over Navath-Qor. I remember waking up early due to discomfort from my parched tongue, and after refreshing myself I went to the front deck to see what was the matter. My first impression of the Grandest Maze was, absurdly, happiness at seeing how well it lived up to its name.
It is wheels and wheels of twisting, knotted canyons and gorgeous banded rock formations set into an uneven landscape of flat, table-like rocks, massive flat-topped mountains, and hardpan desert, with the occasional splotch of grassland, splatter of strange forest, or sapphire shimmer of lake or river showing up bright and cool against the red and orange and purple and white. Cracks in the uneven and endless slabs of stone, some deep enough to be almost night at the bottom, some bridged by great spans of stone, some bearing rivers winding through them, some opening out into massive dead ends or open spaces. Standing up from the canyons and the plateaus, or carved into cliff faces and the sides of crevices, are the structures of the Rem, massive, imposing pillars and statues and reliefs, heavy metal buildings with external, constantly-moving wheels or pillars, smokestacks and smoldering foundry-pits, everything covered with verses, sculpture or other ornamentation, and that's just from the air! You could tell every major city or port by the gigantic sculpted masks that flanked its entrances, shaped like the masks of their greatest heroes and prophets.
As we arrived at Belas Meet, I noticed just how big everything is, every street and door designed for enormous shapes, and how everything is ornamented. Black and colorfully banded stone, steel and gold and copper, semiprecious stones and bright enamel, everywhere you could possibly look. Plates inscribed with verses, reliefs or shrines to various figures, patterns and scenes, or even just smoothed grains and lines designed to draw your eye to the next piece of decoration. Everything we saw, from the streets to the buildings to the vehicles, was covered in as much decor and ornamentation as wouldn't interfere with how it worked. It really put my journey into perspective--this art I crossed the Continent to bring back home is as common as stone here! At home, of course we decorate everything, try to make it a work of art, but... I can't put it into words, but let me try. In the cities at home, in Adarii and Cosirien, they try to make everything look like an art gallery. Here, it's like everything is a temple. There's a sense of gravitas to it all, like it all really matters.
And, of course, all that grandeur is just doubled by the people themselves. Of course I've met Rem before, but at home they look too big, out of place. The Behemoths are simply a travesty as they try to get anywhere, the Buer trip over everything, even the Karkadann are larger than life. Horns catching on everything, hooves scuffing floors--everyone's heard the horror story about a Behemoth who stood too long next to a curtain and caught it aflame. But here, everything's built to their scale, their size, their use, and so it's us who are out of place, wrong scale, awkward. We're so tiny, compared to them. I mean, I am a respectable four-and-a-half cubits tall, but even the shortest Karkadann we met topped that by almost another cubit. The only solidarity we had was in the other visitors, and were there other visitors!
I think a few dozen of everything must have been sighted at those stony, temple-like docks of Belas Meet. Dour Confederates dressed like soldiers, in kettle helms and everything, looking around at everything like they were checking it for traps, swaggering Nashaxi in hides and jewelry and bizarre hats and cloaks, Nostrians looking sweaty but dignified in their furs and mail, little Chelqathi scurrying around in their drab cloth looking small even compared to us, and, of course, proper Yasaali in masks and elaborately patterned silks, though I saw a few had adopted local ornamentation in their masks. I immediately resolved to pick up such a souvenir myself.
Unfortunately, signing into customs took so long that we all became quite exhausted by the end, and we could not even meet with our contact, Interlocutor Askr, let alone tour the Meet. So I write this before I go to bed, too excited not to--tomorrow we meet with the Interlocutor, plan out the mercantile part of this trip, and get it all out of the way so we can go exploring! I don't plan to cut corners, but seeing what the Grandest Maze has to offer is absolutely why I came here at all. Tomorrow... Goodnight!
On the Continent, the Oriza people and the Erzan people are quite common, overtopped only by humanity in terms of sheer population, and they have spread to many corners of the landmass, creating their nations and establishing their culture. All these offshoots, however, all these places that they live in and the cultures that have developed from their travel, are variations on the original Orizan and Erzan cultures, the Clans and Holds, which have developed into what is now known as the Obsidian Confederacy of Azharach. The Confederacy is the seat of what is often referred to as "original" or "orthodox" culture for both peoples, a synthesis of both their ancient cultures combined into a modern grouping of states, from which all other Continental culture that any grouping of either species has is a mutation or splinter. Focusing on communal resources, martial prowess, respect of history, and other virtues, this syncretic culture and the clan cultures it derives from prioritizes a particular aspect over just about anything else: their religion and their gods. Even growing up as separate cultures, with different physiologies, traditions and skills, the two species have always had an overlapping pantheon, and the modern form of this religion is a key component in the glue that holds the nation together. The combined worship of the originally Erzan Gods of Ways and Paths and the shared Trinity Undaunted is represented in the history, storytelling, physical arts culture, and morality of the entire nation. The Nashaxi, who worship powers represented by the stars and the sea, count among their number many Oriza and Erzan, who are, by Confederate standards, apostates, and the various clans of the Border Kraels possess an eclectic mixture of faiths ranging from slightly mutated veneration of the Two Trinities to syncretic mixtures of that faith with animistic traditions or foreign gods, to the violent veneration of the Lastborn or the other gods of that grim and apocalyptic belief system.
The Trinity Undaunted have always been worshiped by both Oriza and Erzan.
SCAL is the scarred and grim god of disasters, of strength, of being changed by adversity and rising above suffering. His virtues are to fight for what you want, to treasure your scars, to try over and over again and learn from every failure, and his symbols are meteors and storms. His dedicates tend to be scarred, lightly dressed martial artists with chain-wrapped limbs who fight with dancing chains or fists, and travel the nation helping people fight their problems and aiding in disaster relief. Those who have faced devastating loss or change also tend to flock to Scal, hoping for strength in their trial, to learn from him the lessons it takes to make of their broken parts a new and stronger whole.
SAVNOK is Scal's counterpart, clad all in metal where Scal is naked, pierced with thirteen arrows, wounds ever-bleeding, where Scal has many wounds that have nonetheless healed into scars. Where Scal encourages to fight things head-on, Savnok asks only that you survive. Scal can be contextualized as representing an advancing front, a constantly rising ceiling of personal achievement, while Savnok is often thought of as a line in the sand, the place you will not retreat behind, the point you hold against all odds. Patron of defense and metalwork, his dedicates will often be military engineers or smiths, aiding in defending places or fashioning tools and weapons and structures of metal, and teaching people how to stand fast and stay true.
GAEVIR is the continuum between her aggressive and defensive brothers (or lovers, or simply sworn friends, depending on the mythic cycle in question). Where Scal's strength and deaing with adversity and Savnok's patience and holding the line may be with you throughout your life, Gaevir will be your first and your last friend in life, the presence at the beginning and the end of your life. The cycle of birth and death, decomposition and renewal, blood and volition, belong to her. Her dedicates are doctors, animal handlers, or even chefs, people who understand the circle of life and can preside over beginnings, endings, and the usage of the goods of the natural world, and teach the people how to make the most of what they have and to create and to die with dignity and honor.
The Gods of the Three Ways were originally worshiped solely by Erzan practitioners in addition to the Trinity, but in recent years have grown to be worshiped by the Confederacy as a whole, albeit with Erzan primacy among their dedicates.
EDAH is the goddess of travelers, choices, crossroads, the ever-smoking guardian of those who live by the road and overseer of all choices and branching paths. She represents a guiding force over those who live their lives on the road, those who rely on travel, and anyone faced with a difficult choice. Her dedicates usually travel the world protecting the roads, collecting experiences and stories, and helping people out of jams, returning to her caravanserai-temples in order to transcribe the stories they witnessed and the places they visited.
HOSSOR is the god of, essentially, making allies among living things. Agriculture, raising animals, friendship and diplomacy are all under his jurisdiction, anything where another living creature's benefits and advantages are turned to your benefit. Making friends, forging diplomatic connections, raising and training animals, or growing plants, are all expression's of Hossor's desire to make life better and easier by forging connections. Dedicates of Hossor could be diplomats, counselors, farmers, beast-masters, or even just someone who sits in the tavern and offers advice.
DAIEL is the goddess of invention, engineering, scientific progress. She represents the desire to make sense of the world, to push the boundaries of invention and creation, to improve upon the world's natural designs with your own after plumbing it for secrets. Her push to have the edge on the world in terms of knowledge and technology has greatly characterized the Confederacy as a whole. Her dedicates build, design, question, discover, blow things up and try again, working anywhere that lets them find out what things do and make them better.
The Nashaxi worship the Stars and the Sea, who are not named beyond that, but simply groups of powers that speak in signs and lavish their worshipers with gifts.
THE STARS govern fate and creation and timelessness and knowledge from their perch high above, watching everything without comment. They represent an unchanging force, the map of history and predestination, the struggle for knowledge and the things that last beyond time. They are worshiped by the Stargazers, priests of knowledge and divination that adopt a neutral gender identity in honor of their distant and alien patrons, and their favor is represented by beautiful metals and minerals and strange artifacts that fall to earth. Stargazers often argue with priests of Scal about the provenance and jurisdiction of any given meteor.
THE SEA governs change, time, decay, secrets and destructions, the ever-changing force that chisels away at the coastlines and holds great beasts and hidden knowledge in its depths. It represents constant flux, erosion, adaptation, the forces of change and revolution, and great, overweening strength, and how to adapt to and work with that. It is worshiped by the mercurial Wavewatchers, priests of adaptation and resilience that adopt a fluid, changing gender identity in honor of their chaotic and unknowable patron, and its favor is represented by the services and the bodily products of sea monsters, hides and bones and monsters for riding, and by flotsam and jetsam from the deep sea, washed up on the shore.
The grim and confrontational faith of the Last War cycle teaches a wildly different cosmology from other popular faiths, and tends to proliferate in the absence of other gods or in areas torn by war. The Border Kraels, the unclaimed regions spattering the central Continent, and many rural areas of developed nations are popular places for this faith.
THE LASTBORN is the sixth and youngest of a family of divine siblings, and one of two survivors. A bitter, violent deity, they (each cult differs on the gender of the Lastborn) challenge their followers to constantly fight and hone themselves, to live for violence, to fight everyone they possibly can. They are less a deity of anything in particular, with no real portfolio, and more a demanding force. They are worshiped with violence, with increasing your skills, with making yourself more powerful, and asked to not let the supplicant die today, not yet, so they can spend their borrowed time becoming stronger. This is demanded of their worshipers because the Lastborn is building an army of the souls of the violent and valorous dead, and these exalted shades will be called into battle at the end of days, the Last War.
THE DEEP FATHER, or the Firstborn, is the oldest of the six divine siblings, a cruel and distant deity of deep water and control, an oceanic god who demands propitiation. To hear his cultists tell it, he created the world and his jealous siblings attacked him, and he was forced to kill all but one, the Lastborn, who imprisoned him in his weakness. He will someday return and make the world anew, rewarding his faithful. To hear the Lastborn's church tell it, the six siblings created the world but the Firstborn grew jealous and killed them, determined to remake the world without them. The Lastborn then imprisoned their weakened brother, but he desires to return, to destroy the world, for a world that he did not solely create may as well not exist. Whatever the case may be, he is old, and angry, and imprisoned, and waiting to be freed.
THE TAKEN GODS are the four siblings between the First and Last which were killed in the great war between them when the world was young. Their natures are gone now, buried by history, and only the methods they were killed by remain to identify them. The Buried, the Burnt, the Lost and the One Who Fell. They are sometimes propitiated for strength relating to certain rituals by Lastborn cultists, but they are dead, and cannot otherwise be worshiped.
There are other gods of the Continent, but these are those most immediately relevant to the four basic categories of Erzan and Oriza culture: Confederate, Nashaxi, Border and Diaspora.
Hey, now's as good a time as any to establish that I will consider requests, if you care to make them--anything mentioned in any of my three threads you want expansion on, concepts or details you want to hear more of, any of that! This is the best place for you to get anything you want, lore-or-expansion-or-ideas-for-future-stories-wise!
Not sure what to ask for. Of the nations, Dominion and Dis, the rebellion, the subsequent civil war and the split caught my interest. I am also curious about whether there is a map, as details who borders whom and who has stakes in what keep eluding me.
I suppose it means my interests lie in how various polities interact with each other.
The Once-Blue Coracle cornerclub, unofficial offices of Sarcovalt & Labrithaine Applied Injustices Firm, Bloodless Road, Pandemonium, the Brimstone Republic
Vaermesh Labrithaine, Ver to her friends and those who found it more expedient to pretend to be her friend than openly be her enemy, of Sarcovalt & Labrithaine's Applied Injustices firm, leaned back in her chair, taking a deep draw on her cigarette and puffing out smoke into the room. It rose to join the semipermanent fogbank of smoke occupying the ceiling of the Once-Blue Coracle, which, like any proper cornerclub, had a ceiling that was never visible during operating hours thanks to the patrons' smoke. Vaguely nautical knick-knacks, pieces of boat and anchor, mounted fish and paintings of the ocean, decorated the walls in between the bookshelves, narrow windows and mirrors, appropriate to the name, and the parquet floors were patterned in three different woods to create the large, abstract image of an octopus. Outside, steam rose gently from the caldera lake below and passersby crowded the streets, contributing to the loud, hot, brawling atmosphere of the city. Several Devils sat around the bar, drinking amanita sherry and talking with the bartender, while others sat in high-backed chairs or curtained booths or the leather couches in the reading and game rooms in back, engaging in that time-honored Devilish pastime of business, gossip, and scheming. It would be impossible for an outsider to tell who was on break or whiling away an afternoon and who was engaged in deadly-earnest wheeling and dealing, and the distinction was largely academic. Plotting and sharing intelligence is a leisure and a business activity all in one, here in Pandemonium, prosperous and steaming heart of the Brimstone Republic.
Ver took another drag on her cigarette, only to inhale the entire thing at once, fall off her chair and begin coughing ferociously as the door slams open. In sauntered Garivald Zenhrakt, adding his own noxious cigar fumes to the lung-blackening atmosphere of the club. Zenhrakt & Associates was a notorious thorn in the side of Ver's own firm, always getting in the way of her and her partner, snapping up clients, sabotaging gigs, putting their feet up on communal furniture, booking tables at the same restaurants and making cutting remarks about Ver's dates. All of which is ordinary and widely-accepted conflict firm etiquette, of course, but what is the big-city life of a problem-solving-and-creating Devil without a proper rival to sharpen her skills? That searing, bubbling hatred in the pit of one's stomach when they look upon their rival is what drives creativity, excellence, and skill. Still, Ver found it bizarre. Garivald didn't usually frequent the Once-Blue Coracle, loudly decrying it as inferior to his own chosen venue, the Glass Armonica. For him to come, not even to Sarcovalt and Labrithaine's official offices, but to the place where they actually got the majority of their work done? He was looking to either talk business or make trouble, and, given their mutual field of work, quite likely both.
"Garivald, you spavened nag, what do you want," Ver greeted him brusquely as he ambled over to her table and draped himself, artfully rumpled tailored suit, loosened fashion noose, hat with the pen in the brim and all, over the chair across from her. Ver herself dressed somewhat similarly, though the jacket was draped over her chair, leaving her in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, and she didn't wear her hat inside, not being an animal like some people. Still, Garivald strove to make "just getting up after a bender and sleeping in your clubbing outfit" look like a deliberate style choice, and he often made it work. A staff member quietly and quickly brought him a menu, and he propped it open in one palm, pretending to read it even as he addressed her.
"Why, Very old pal, can't I just check in on an old friend nope already bored of that gimmick. While I ordinarily love wasting your time, today I have higher priorities."
"Well, will wonders never cease," she shot back, lighting a new cigarette with a snap of her fingers, flame licking out from the sharp click of her teak-colored, teak-textured digits.
"I know, right? Absolutely bizarre, out of character, can't believe it personally. However. Business is business. And, unfortunately, today's business involves reaching out to you and your disquieting partner."
"Finally admitting there's things we can do that your nonsense parlor can't keep up with?"
"Collateral damage and social disgrace are hardly capabilities to be jealous of, Very. Still, I will, and I hope you know this pains me like silver to say, admit that you and Sarcovalt can't be beat, in the subcategory of 'conflict firms I haven't yet pledged to behead in the streets or received similar pledges in response from,' in the further field of 'precisely applied, protracted and entirely too enthusiastic violence."
Ver snorted, pleased in that way that a rival grudgingly admitting you're not worthless can make your day.
"Bout time you and your velvet-gloved bureau of catty looks and panicked yelps admitted we have harder bark."
"'Harder bark,' 'ridiculous and unsubtle,' words can mean so many things if you massage and wring them a little, no? But enough of the fun stuff. Labrithaine," his voice became more serious and he looked up from the menu, "I need to hire you two. Not your best workers, or your worst interns, or anyone in your firm, but specifically you and Sarcovalt. There is something... pressing, coming up from the Old Country."
The already-tense atmosphere of their little corner of the club gained a new pall. No honest ("honest") Pandemonium likes giving any more credit than necessary to the Dominion of Dis, the Old Country, and trouble originating from those ironbound lands always spells trouble for the Republic.
"This wouldn't have anything to do with our... peckish associates, would it?" she asked cautiously, drawing a deeper drag of her cigarette to replenish some of the warmth this change of direction in the conversation has robbed her of.
"Of course it does. As of late, there's hardly an international matter that they haven't dipped their tarsals into, which presents us a unique challenge. I won't insult you by pretending you don't know about the war, or assuming you don't know how badly that open conflict involving the Confederacy and the Old Country could fuck over our own plots. Luckily, my sources have pointed out to me several key breakpoints that might be levered in order to make the course of history pass in a way healthier for good old-fashioned business. Some of these points will require a level of skilled and sustained violence that our firm is not quite as specialized in delivering as yours. I will pay you directly, out of my very own pockets, as well as right of salvage, save for a few very specific items you'll be told about."
He signed the price margins subtly with one hand, and only long experience and training kept Ver's face from reacting. That's a lot of money...
"I'll be looking into this, Garivald, but you have my attention. Drop off the documents at--"
He interrupted her by drawing a wax-sealed folder from inside his jacket.
"I don't trust that pebble-eater you have for a secretary. Take these, show them to Sarcovalt, and meet me at the Glass Armonica for your answer, within the next three days. Time is somewhat of the essence, here, but we're not barbarians--you'll have space to think it over. If you let me down, Very, I won't be the only one in this town that suffers for it."
With that, he stood, bowed, extinguished his cigar in the ashtray and left without ordering anything, leaving the envelope, a real, and the clashing scent of his cigar in the air, and a lot of very complicated thoughts in Ver's head.
She left the real and two more on the table, a tip and payment for services rendered, gathered her jacket and bag and headed out of the club casually, unhurried, showing nothing externally about what was going on internally, as might be expected of any competent Devil. Showing your feelings in your walk is something that should be done deliberately, to communicate without words. Doing it inadvertently, betraying your thought process to anyone who's looking, is the indelible mark of a rank amateur, and, in some of the harsher deals and parts of town, a death sentence.
Targeted assassinations, legbreakings, muggings, awe attacks and other targeted acts of violence and fear are something that Sarcovalt and Labrithaine are no strangers to, a specialty of their conflict firm taking precedence over the information gathering, blackmail and anti-blackmail, and general intelligence work that, while bringing in plenty of money, is not their exact specialty. Ver wouldn't brag when inappropriate, but she's certain that there are several messy conflicts, maybe even wars, that she and her partner had stopped before they even got started by lancing the pressure before it could build up to the breaking point. Still, the potential war between the Locust Territories and the Confederacy, with Dis involved? Bigger-scale than anything a small-time conflict firm like hers had ever gotten involved with before. Though she intended to make Garivald squirm, unsure she was joining until the last moment, she'd already decided to get involved--taking risks is how one improves, and this, to her values, presented a win-win scenario--either get the prestige and loot attendant to involvement in such a big deal, or die trying to stop a war, a death that no conflict specialist could argue against as a fitting end to an inexpertly expanded career.
She finally reaches the actual, official offices of Sarcovalt and Labrithaine, a lovely rowhouse of sober stone and tasteful grotesques that's a far cry from the vaguely boatlike driftwood-and-brick structure of the cornerclub down near the lake. She enters from the back, because using the front door of your own office is for fools, and gives the secret knock on the wood-paneled wall to let her partner know that she doesn't have to murder whoever just came in through the back.
"Sirah? Darling?" she calls up as the heavy sounds of Siraverah Sarcovalt's footsteps sound on the staircase.
"We need to talk."
A Brief Treatise on the Godless Northerners (Noster loredrop)
Very few people on the Continent, after visiting the Empire of Noster in the winter, will thereafter consider the winter of any other nation to be worthy of the word. The winter in Yasaal is usually only the monsoon season in the warmer western areas and a time of still, frigid nights in the east, the winter in Chelqath is chilly but not terrible, the Confederacy sees its occasional blizzard and the Territories tend to be grey and unpleasant the year round. Nashax has its share of permanently snowbound areas, and is hardly warm the year round, despite the low precipitation. But winter in Noster is a beast all of its own, what the people of its forests and mountains and fortified cities think of as a living being with moods, desires, ambitions, and a wrath that knows no bounds. Great spiny mountains carve the nation into pieces, ominous and snowbound and filled with stone, minerals, and ancient secrets, and the areas these ranges divide it up into range from the flat, landmark-free icy tundra of the oblasts to the thick, dark and ominous taiga forests, and even the transient swamplands which only form in the thaw season. Its blizzards, the "Big Sisters," scythe across the nation freezing things solid and knocking unguarded buildings and trees to bits, and everyone who's wintered outside of a fortress in Noster's high country has a story of monsters, spirits, voices or other such whisperings calling out to them from within the spiraling blades of icy wind. In the featureless icy oblast, entire caravans and villages have been known to vanish without a trace, leaving nothing behind. Even keeping the Eternal Palace in the capital free of choking ice and adequately heated provides its own supportive microeconomy. Winter, the White Empress, the Grandmother, the Voice in the Wind, is a force that shapes the nation like tides shape the shore. The fortified cities, the thick clothing, the pale, angular people and the preoccupation with death, history and things past, as if frozen, all speak to the grip of ice that winter holds upon Noster.
Winter is one force that shapes Noster. The other, which could be considered poetically similar, and shapes most of the poetry and foreign opinion of the nation, is death. For Noster is famous the world over for its limited but potent ability to deny death. The practice of Necrochemistry allows those who can afford it to return as the everliving Deathless, who, despite the tendency for their flesh to rot of their bones or their personalities to change, faced with eternity, persist for long after their intended deaths. The most obvious example of this is the Evercouncil, formed of every Empress that ever lived and died without disgracing herself, going back to the original founder of Noster itself. Some of these rulers are fifteen centuries old, and they remain around to advise the current Empress. Each noble family has its own council of Deathless, and standing in the eyes of the Empress is in no small part dependent on how often they can afford the necrochemical process. The nobles scrabble and struggle to be able to afford this and in the best format proper, with plenty of inferior formulae existing, resulting in a wide variety of Deathless who are dealing with eternity in better or worse ways. Only the Imperial Family has the "perfect" formula.
Constant noble-subsidized attempts to perfect the necrochemical rites result in a lot of alchemical pollution, which is the primary threat to the nation's stability. Runoff in the soil or rivers results in commoners and animals who return after death as crude, mindless, murderous shufflers, or starving, clever, warped raveners. The nobility can't possibly afford to not attempt to secure as many Deathless in good condition as possible, and so no amount of legislation or taxing can cut off the source of these unliving threats.
The other manifestation of this obsession with death is the most valuable byproduct of the art of necrochemistry--necrocraft. Comparable to tanning or forging, this art uses the resonant energy that remains in the corpses of sentient beings, humans for preference, to refine skin and bone into materials superior to mundane leather or even iron. Animal bones and hide can be used in this process as long as at least some human or thinking being is used. Nostrian Bonemail, armor created from flexible, treated bone, is a superior defensive tool, lighter than steel and almost as protective, outclassed only by much heavier bone steel (an entirely different process favored by the Confederacy and Nashax) or esoteric materials like seabone, starmetal and monster hide. All who die in Noster, unless granted special dispensation through exceptional acts, automatically donate their corpses by dint of citizenship to these forges of flesh and bone to keep the nation supplied. Only extensive legislation by the Bright Empress, eight hundred years ago, prevented the nation from becoming greedy and bloated enough to condemn more criminals and innocents to death to feed the factories of necrocraft.
As a sociological consequence of having a somewhat reliable and consistent method of cheating death, the Nostrians have little truck with organized religion as the rest of the Continent understands it. While state-sponsored religious prosecution is a thing of the past across most of Noster, the attitude towards the veneration or propitiation of a god remains condescension or bemusement. Why give any power to any higher being when the veil of death is so easily transgressed? Nostrians tend to believe in abstract forces like luck or justice, to keep their superstitions, to speak of magical creatures, ghosts, the power of Winter, or, in some mostly rural cases, the office of Empress, but the major gods of the Continent--The Ways, the Undaunted, the Tribulations, the King of Life, the Lastborn--none of these have made much headway in the nation. Churches exist, believers exist, but travel the length and breadth of Noster and you will meet a dozen who believe in nothing they have not directly seen and/or been held accounted to for every one who professes belief in a commonly known faith.
The country's nobility begins with the Empress, whose authority is usually referred to in short as the Throne. The Throne and the Palace are eternal--empresses may come and go, and add to the Evercouncil, but it all exists in service to the undying Throne. The Empress is chosen by a vote held between the previous Empress, if possible, and the boyars, the next level down of nobility. Boyars are divided into High Councilors and Low Councilors, the former of which directly advise the Empress and the latter of which advice the High Council. Boyars oversee large, sweeping concerns, such as regions, trade routes, segments of the military, or the treasury. Below the boyars are the knyazes, who control large regions of land, and below them are the grafs, who control areas of land within each knyaz's domain. Least are the barons, a title granted by the minor favor of the Empress, the moderate favor of a boyar or the major favor of a knyaz, who control a tiny concern or a single city, and are not hereditary. Unique among nobility-having nations, the noble families are not tied to land, but to their armies and economic concerns. Every four years, the Empress and the Councilors have the nobles change lands, so that they are never overseeing the same place for too long. There are no ancestral family castles or lands in Noster--it all belongs to the Empress, and she shifts the nobles in and out of the lands as stewards. Only their armies and their materiel belong to them, and any mobile artifacts such as the famous Belozerskaya Mobile Library.
Nostrian nobility is further divided into two basic types--Iron houses earned their nobility through their ability to provide materiel, maintain armories, supply food and crops and mining, hold onto trade routes, and otherwise enrich the nation through trade and material goods, while Bone houses were granted nobility for their ability to provide soldiers, martial defense, and other living resources like academies, tacticians, and animals, and for their service in directly participating in wars and patrols and defense of the nation. Each type tends to hold the other in disdain for their own reasons, Iron houses thinking Bone to be overly violent, obsessed with rules and martial glory, and married to outmoded concepts, while Bone houses tend to think of Iron as cowardly, venal, slothful or duplicitous, obsessed with profit and their bottom line. These feuds, as well as those between the houses for other reasons ranging from philosophy to someone's thrice-great aunt slapping someone else's at a wedding, keep the nobility of Noster competing among themselves to earn the Throne's favor.
Noster is currently ruled by the 119th Empress Vyria Wyrm-Throttler, a former member of the Imminent, most elite guards of the nation and the Throne's primary defenders, who saved the life of 118th Empress Elisia Stone-Spear by strangling a dragon to death with her bare hands, an act that cost her a left arm and won her the endorsement for the Throne after Elisia's death of natural causes. A ruler primarily focused, so far, on shoring up infrastructure and ensuring military readiness across the nation, she is highly divisive--many love a martially skilled empress who seems dedicated to protecting and supplying the citizens and the armies, while others hate an iron-willed and unreadable leader who takes no guff from the noble families and has no interest in prosecuting any type of aggressive war or imperialistic expansion. One thing's for certain--with her skill at duels and the fanatic loyalty of her bizarre bodyguard, the locust Ten Scalpels, the reign of Vyria Wyrm-Throttler seems to be one that has no prospects of ending anytime soon.
Cold, morbid, vast, inhospitable, and powerful, Noster has remained a major power on the Continental stage for centuries, and seems poised to stay that way for centuries more. With Vyria's stabilizing rain, the flourishing of industry, and the healthy trade routes with its neighbors, Noster seems poised to have a very good century.
Noster is currently ruled by the 119th Empress Vyria Wyrm-Throttler, a former member of the Imminent, most elite guards of the nation and the Throne's primary defenders, who saved the life of 118th Empress Elisia Stone-Spear by strangling a dragon to death with her bare hands, an act that cost her a left arm and won her the endorsement for the Throne after Elisia's death of natural causes.
[...]
One thing's for certain--with her skill at duels and the fanatic loyalty of her bizarre bodyguard, the locust Ten Scalpels, the reign of Vyria Wyrm-Throttler seems to be one that has no prospects of ending anytime soon.
I take it Empress Elisia Stone-Spear was deemed unworthy of joining the Evercouncil? Or did she step down after her death?
Even so, they still hire Locust bodyguards.
I don't think we've heard of Noster in any of the two ongoing quests. I am surprised it was not a part of Iash Qoma rumor mill, given that it is supposed to be one of the major players. I take it it borders neither the Confederacy nor the Locust Territories directly?
From what I understood the Throne goes to the living empress, the dead ones join the oversee unless they fuck up in life.
So Elisia step down from the Throne at death to join the Evercouncil.
And of corse they employ Locusts, did you see what beast one could be even at forth treatment in Never Free character creation? I think that in Never Full they can reach up to 8/10 Treatment and we see the 6th Augur working indipendently. Really a combat specced 6+ is too good of a bodyguard to not have, the only difficulty I can see is that bodyguarding for an indeterminate amount of time doesn't appeal to most Locusts
Speaking of @Wicked Sanguine is there an upper limit to Ves Treatments?
Also can I request something about Ves specifically, when you have time.
From what I understood the Throne goes to the living empress, the dead ones join the oversee unless they fuck up in life.
So Elisia step down from the Throne at death to join the Evercouncil.
Speaking of @Wicked Sanguine is there an upper limit to Ves Treatments?
Also can I request something about Ves specifically, when you have time.
The Ophidians are a people seen throughout both the cosmopolitan areas and the lost and mysterious regions of the world, engaging in scientific research and social engineering or in delving and the creation of art, a scattered minority found everywhere with great prospects for the advancement of science, art or social power. There is no nation of them anyone has ever found, there are no cities populated exclusively by Ophidians or concerns that advance an Ophidian national agenda. They speak of Irem of the Pillars, a great city of endless columns and knowledge, but in terms such that no one can tell whether it is their homeland or their afterlife. They inveigle themselves into universities, into courts, into secret societies and archaeological concerns, always concerned with their hyperfixations upon social systems or ancient societies or magical research or mechanical development. Every house of science, every conservatory of art, every court of great power, every expedition into uncharted territory or some ancient ruin has had its fair share of Ophidians along for the ride, using their boundless hyperfocus on their area of choice to bring unbelievable progress and change to every involved field. The world is constantly changing, and Ophidians are always at the vanguard of that change.
The average Ophidian appears to the naked eye to be a colorful and alien serpent, with unusual patterns and hues ranging from neon to metallic to near black, with a wide variety of additional features that could include a frilled crest, a series of spikes, crests of feathers, extra eyes or elaborate horns. They range from six to nine feet, or four to seven cubits, in length from the tips of their snouts to the ends of their tails, and have many pairs of small, rudimentary legs running down the front of their bodies. Many, seeing Ophidians in the cities and in front of crowds, take them to be well-dressed humanoids with the heads, necks and tails of serpents, for almost all Ophidians employ exoskeletons of magical or mechanical animation to help them live, move, work and fight in the Continent at large. These are usually humanoid armatures clad in fashionable, extravagant clothing or some outfit that includes trappings of the Ophidian's hyperfixations, lacking a head or spine--the Ophidian inserts itself in place of the frame's backbone, resulting in an entity that appears to be a mechanical humanoid with a serpentine head and tail. There exist many frames which are not simply humanoid canvases for clothing--there are as many frames as there are jobs which require specialization, from spider-legged exploration frames to finned, enclosed submarine frames to heavily armored combat frames. An Ophidian's exoskeleton is like a humanoid's outfit: capable of serving as preparation for a task, a canvas for self expression, a defensive measure to preserve life, a signifier of allegiance or occupation, or even a weapon, and often more than one of the above. An Ophidian's frame is a vital aspect of its existence in the world at large, and one with neither a frame or the ability to build a new one will stop at nothing to acquire one.
More prominent than their serpentine aspect or their mechanical frames, though these of course capture the public imagination, is a trait of Ophidian psychology that, while of course not unknown to other species, is unique in being completely universal among them--hyperfixation. Every Ophidian has a special interest or field, which could be as broad as "marine biology" or specific as "Late Pre-Confederate Northern Erzani History", which their brains and psyches seem entirely built around. An Ophidian's hyperfixation allows them to perform incredible feats of memory, intuition, hypercognition, and other forms of mental acuity and gymnastics, as long as it has to do with the object of their fixation. Their society encourages focusing upon this and honing all abilities helpful to the fixation, to the point where many Ophidians tend to find themselves unprepared to deal with many aspects of life that fall outside of their special interest. One with an interest in mechanical engineering that chooses to focus within that discipline on vehicles and their maintenance may be found wanting of even simple biological, magical and geophysical information, even moreso when found within a "focus fugue." These trance-like states are a result of the Ophidian temporarily entirely suborning their intellect and reasoning to an interesting idea or phenomenon, becoming capable of incredible focused feats related to their fixation. Accounts exist of incredible masterpieces being painted or sculpted, wondrous and impossible weapons and machines being forged in a single night, massive and incredibly exhaustive treatises and papers being written in hours or an entire army swiftly, precisely and elegantly dispatched in one battle, within the almighty and little-understood state of the focus fugue.
Anyone of any species may fixate on things, or be a monomaniac of skill to the point where they cannot function outside of its use. Many people have special interests, areas of focus that they love endlessly returning to, that they are never without knowledge of or enthusiasm about. Ophidians are merely exceptional in that, without exception, every single one's psychology functions like this to a greater or lesser extent, and they can hone this focus to the point of a quasi-supernatural trance during which great and nigh-impossible things can be done. An Ophidian is guaranteed to be a master at their topic, and perhaps (though not often) mostly incompetent outside it.
The Ophidian patron goddess Yre, Yre the Unending, Many-Headed Yre, Thoughtful Yre, She of One Thousand Coils, is worshiped as a force of divine inspiration and change, a being worthy of adulation for her ability to hold a thousand different fixations in her many minds. So focused is Ophidian thought and literature around their fixations, their focus, that the most deific attribute they can think of, beyond mountain-shaping power or invulnerability or a position outside time, is the ability to multitask and treat every single thought with the absolute all-consuming gravitas that any of her children would dedicate their entire being to. Many of other species, especially Confederate scholars with their own dedication to theological studies and comparative religion, have attempted to find out if Yre is a real, active deity, as the Trinity Undaunted or the Lastborn or even the Sea and Stars, or if she is a living, unbelievably powerful being such as the Teuthic Hero-Gods or the Nephilim Saxra, Hoarder of Winds, or if she is simply a folk hero, a representation of everything the Ophidians think is worthy about a person, an example to look up to and a legendary figure. One thing's for certain: no one can get a straight answer out of Yre's children, and those trusted enough to be blessed with the secret are trustworthy enough never to let it spread outside the laboratories, ateliers and base camps in which Ophidians pass on their most secrecy-worthy knowledge.
Ophidians are a minority on the Continent, with an estimated population (the actual population, owing to the hidden and potentially nonexistent nature of their homeland, is something that is not commonly available knowledge) of perhaps a few tens of thousands at most, potentially far fewer, all across the Continent, from the Coast of Prayers in the far west to the Patient Coast in the far east. The massive presence of the Ophidian in the cosmopolitan public consciousness owes itself to their tendency to gravitate towards visible roles--the artist, the scientist, the musician, the engineer, the politician, the diplomat, the councilor, the archaeologist, the professor. If you are paying attention and have a role or interest that involves knowledge, a demanding and high-skill material profession, or artistic expression, you will find more than one Ophidian amid the leading lights of your field. Due to this hyperfocus on such fields, a floating economy exists around attending to the needs of traveling Ophidians who lack necessary skillsets in their travels. The logistical needs of an expedition, house staff jobs for one who's taken residence in the cities, or labor for a dreamer's scheme, all jobs full of opportunity and ripe for someone who's got an eye for potential profit and knows of the presence of a nearby Ophidian or coil of Ophidians with related interests.
Enigmatic, driven, and distinctive, there is a good reason such a small grouping has such a large part in driving the history and future of the Continent.
The power of Yasaal is the power of coin, of art, of a pretty face and a gilded facade... and, when push comes to shove as it so invariably does, the edge of a thousand sabers and walls that have repelled a thousand sieges. Prosperous, expansive and powerful, baked by brilliant sun and cooled by half a dozen rivers and the freshwater Good Sea, Yasaal shines with precious metal and rare woods and silk, thrums with bees and clever devices and great mechanical wheels, and menaces with masked soldiers and perfectly balanced rifles and war machines created with as much attention to symbolic and aesthetic presence as to raw ability to end mortal life. Yasaal is a bloody-handed empire with a pretty smile obsessed with aesthetic, propriety, and narrative structure, fitting the cycle of empire and the entire history of the Continent into endless perfectly-plotted stories and poems and frescoes decorating the sides of public buildings. Its coffers are full, as are its hearts--the former with the natural wealth of the nation, the trade from across the Continent and the plunder of less-successful empires, the latter with secure knowledge in their artistic and aesthetic superiority to any other culture in the world, as well as over their own baser nature. Yasaal is better, as the politicians and agitators and poets all agree, smarter, richer, sharper, bigger, more carefully honed and balanced and considered than any other place in the world. And they fully intend to keep it that way.
Yasaal's self-satisfaction comes from many things, some legitimate and some very much not so, but holding pride of place in the pantheon of great Yasaali deeds is how they killed their gods.
Many centuries ago, thirteen hundred years by modern reckoning, the Godslayer Empress Mishari Adaro, May She Abide In Glory, was able to bring to an end the two Nameless Tyrant Gods, whose names were once engraved in every important building in the nation, and are now buried and forgotten for all time, the final insult to the cruel and domineering deities slain by a combination of a campaign of rebellion that denied them of sacrifice and a weapon so terrible that the mere act of wielding it took Godslayer Empress Mishari along with her divine quarry. Her last act as Empress was to cast the weapon somewhere so far and dark and deep that only the most valiant of heroes in the darkest of hours would ever have a hope of reclaiming it, so monstrous and dangerous was it. Since then, Yasaal has venerated only its empresses as reflections of the apex of human achievement, and the sun as a representation of abiding glory and beauty. No sacrifices, no obeisances, no propitiation. Yasaal is quite strong and beautiful enough without the patronage of gods, for which they have no need or desire. A sneering sort of genteel contempt is the common attitude of the Yasaali on the street towards the patron gods of other nations, though a few churches and communities quietly flourish within the Empire's borders.
Vital to understanding Yasaal is their fashion, and, more specifically, their masks. All Yasaali, unless alone, among the trusted, or sometimes amid foreigners who don't understand the significance of what they're seeing, wear masks, veils, special jewelry, elaborate facepaint, or some mixture that obscures most of their skin, because core to the ideals of Yasaali pride and beauty is the concept of rejecting how "fleshy" and living you appear. The ideal of Yasaali beauty is rising above gross biology and base nature to be something perfected and manmade, so sculpting your body with diet and exercise, modifying it with paint, piercings and tattoos, and concealing it with masks and skintight garments and veils to hide the skin and show the form is paramount. Skintight underclothing that conceals most of the skin but reveals the shape, with veils, robes, dresses and other outfits worn on top, is very popular, as are body chains and paint--anything which shows off the work that the individual put into the shape and function of their body while concealing skin, with its sweat and pores and such. Masks are worn by all levels of society, from the noseless, mouthless, featureless plates of the military with their two circular eyeholes and decoration that belies rank, to the incredibly detailed and jointed confections of precious metals and woods that perfectly mimic the shape and movement of the face beneath (or show the movement but resemble an abstract piece of art, a living pattern or a mythical figure or monster's visage) favored by the nobility.
Visible and artistically balanced prosthetics are a status symbol, as is being able to rely on mechanical or magical contrivances in place of animals wherever possible, and even beasts of burden wear masks and caparisons to make them appear as works of art rather than messy, hairy, smelly living things. The fashion goes further and further towards automata and animates as time goes on, biomimetic but beautifully bodily-function-free contrivances replacing beasts wherever possible as they can be afforded.
Made Men tend to be literally objectified as beautiful pieces of art that are capable of speech and movement, but the rights of created beings are spreading across Yasaal as slowly and unsurely as they are almost everywhere else. A beautiful created being is still a created being, and the double standard of wanting to conceal the sweaty, bleeding fact of their humanity and believing that very humanity adds to the reasons they deserve a special place in creation is pervasive in Yasaal. The exception is in some of the cities, especially in the most cosmopolitan and artistic sectors, where Made Men, specifically the finely crafted and appealing ones, are held above humans as the ideal of a thinking being, occasionally emulated with deliberate prosthetics or masks and jewelry fashioned after their construction, sought after for their opinions, and wind up being treated almost like living saints or idols, every action fawned upon, a prison prettier and softer than that of their compatriots but no less ultimately limiting.
Yasaali marriage is, at all levels of economic status, concerned entirely with forging valuable family bonds which can be used to increase social standing and profit. It is understood by everyone at every level that marriage is essentially expected to be loveless--it exists to bond the two involved concerns and for procreation. Romance, on the other hand, is expected to be extramarital, and for an individual to have multiple lovers at any given moment. The most romanticized of these relationships is, of course, artist and muse, though artist and patron, artist/patron/muse, and two or more muses are also popular stock relational structures. Of these, relationships where children are impossible are seen as purer and more noble--procreational sex is a regrettable necessity of biology, not something seen as anything but uncouth and primal. People will engage in all manner of relationships under cover of darkness, of course--it's merely that no Yasaali raised in their culture of romance will admit towards engaging in or enjoying any form of procreational activity, and even the idea of loving your spouse on their own merits is seen as eccentric or laughable. None of an individual's affairs or side lovers are to be ones they can bear children with--the idea is seen as laughable at best and grotesque at worst.
Yasaal's nobility are often compared to those of the same rank within their eastern neighbor of Noster. Nostrian nobles retain their staff and resources and move lands every few years, and their power is extremely limited and controlled by that of their Empress; Nostrian nobles exist so that the Throne can outsource its needs to various other families, rather than any kind of sharing of true executive power. By contrast, Yasaal nobles, who sit on their ancestral lands and scheme to grow their influence and power, wield immense influence both legal and in the "soft" realm, and it is only the constant game of jockeying for influence that keeps any one family from growing strong enough to threaten all the others. Yasaali nobles have collectively agreed that keeping the game perpetuated and never truly going for the throat unless the target has done something unforgiveable is far more tenable for both the nation and their bottom lines. Aggression and expansion are saved for the rest of the world; within Yasaal, they keep it civilized, secretive, full of intrigue and close to the chest.
There are currently eight Great Houses who each control a large chunk of the Empire's land, with the Empress's family administrating the Heartland: House Bashery, House Ylimari, House Shammas, House Boutros, House Soulan, House Hasheki, House Mbeko and House Elbaz. The ninth House, House Adaro, controls the Heartland region and traditionally has the most Empresses, though each House has placed many Empresses on the throne over the years. Where once they each had solidly defined roles to play in the proper function of Empire, each one has created so many trade routes and diversified its portfolio to the point where their original roles are a source of aesthetic motifs for their patronized artists and little else.
Yasaal is perpetually at the forefront of the Continent when it comes to the mechanical arts. Their machines, skittercycles and skittermobiles, airships and iron steeds, autoproctors and Made Men and vehicles and prosthetics and devices of all types, are rivaled only by the Confederacy's own creations, outpacing them in aesthetics what they may lack in robustness. A society so disdainful of messy organic creations makes up for it by overspecializing in the ostensible replacements for such unreliable forms, and that desire to move past the regrettable flaws of the living, meaty form drives much of Yasaali mechanical progress.
Yasaal's Empress is venerated as the apex of Yasaali potential--survivor of a battery of exhaustive trials at the behest of the previous Empress and the heads of the Houses, she represents the best of Yasaal's nobility fire-hardened and set upon a throne that her birth only served to get her foot in the door for the qualification. However, no system is free of corruption, to say nothing of the ways noble families can become amoral and stuck in their ways, and so there have been more than a few Empresses who seemed to get through on providence, nepotism and/or sheer luck. Empress Ayasa Adaro, Fourth Of Her Name, is one such candidate--not quite anything to anyone, an entirely middle-of-the-road choice, most of the current crop of nobles have taken advantage of her administrative listlessness to forge their own foreign alliances and build their bases of power. The remainder harbor fear in their hearts--with war on the horizon, the last thing Yasaal needs is a pallid cypher of an Empress that lets her nobles run roughshod over the precepts of the nation. The plots to strengthen, circumvent or replace the current Empress run thick in the current climate, and anyone with any sense is nervous about the future.
Powerful, imposing, and currently struggling under its own weight, Yasaal has always deserved its seat at the table through sheer cultural strength and raw imperial power, shaping the entire Continent east of its golden plains. But now, as wars and rumors of wars cross the land and the world begins shifting on its axis, under the auspices of a weak Empress and strong, divided nobility, can the Golden Empire endure?
The Continent is considered by just about everybody to be the cradle of civilization, at least any civilization anyone knows about. Civilization and society breed travel and commerce, goods and pacts flying here and there, and travel and commerce in their turn breed diplomacy, technological innovation and cosmopolitan growth of culture and knowledge. However, those aren't the only things that result from commerce. There's always someone who wants what they had no part in producing, someone screwed over by the process of progress, someone who simply enjoys living dangerously with precious few allies and a thousand enemies.
Civilization breeds commerce, yes. But commerce? Breeds piracy.
The trade routes, port and hub cities, and commercial pathways of the Continent and its nations are vexed by multiple varieties of pirate. The skyways, the sea and rivers, even the land routes and subterranean roads--each has their own arrangement of criminals in their own vehicles vexing the merchants, fighting the government, and skirmishing with each other, entire criminal economies of flying brigands, wheel-riding privateers, river-harrowing mercenaries and would-be pirate empires attempting to rule the Continent's coasts, skies, rivers or caverns with their elaborate flags, quirky vehicles and personalized methods of execution. Like its nations, mercenaries, and adventurers, the Continent's pirates have style, as brutal and unsporting as that style may sometimes be.
"Piracy" is simply defined, here, as living a life of prolonged banditry from your own vehicle. Whether it be boat, airship, skittercycle, crab fortress or caravan, if you raid ports, cities, travelers, merchants and other vehicles from your own mobile base of operations, and otherwise engage in crimes on the road from this platform, then in the eyes of all Continental law officials you are a pirate. The glorified bandit on their fast little corvette chasing down heavy Yasaali merchant vessels for profit, the Nostrian revolutionary naval deserter trying to bring down a corrupt admiral from outside the system, and the Lastborn cultist who leads a crew of violent dedicates eager to board other airships and fight their crews to the death for glory are all pirates.
An important subset of the pirate is the privateer--someone who commits their crimes in the name of a specific government, company, or other large concern, and so can expect bounties to be paid and aid to be rendered from their employer as they carry out ordinary pirate activities, favoring targets their employer points out for them. Whether working for a national government or a merchant concern, the privateer has employment--a pirate may have agreements or take contracts from all manner of groups, but the privateer is consistently employed to advance specific interests, the personal guard to the pirate's sellsword.
The most dangerous of all the many pirate concerns are those who secure that all-important pantheon of followers, skill, luck, prudence, and style. Whether holding a reputation for traveling the ways doing as they please and leaving slaughter in their wake, being a dashing rebel and puncturer of imperial plans, or ruler of their own petty fiefdom, the "who's who" of powerful, influential pirates is full of the most colorful characters you might imagine.
There are several notable pirate groups and individuals across the Continent, and what follows is but a few of them, and of each one only some of their deeds are listed.
The floating fortress of Kraken Hat is a dangerous 'haven' for piracy off the southwestern coast of Nashax and Yasaal, always on the move ahead of the two nations' navies and the occasional Confederate monitor. Run by Beknih Tidehand, an ex-beastmaster formerly of the Nashaxi navy, Kraken Hat's sea monsters pull the fortress around, support it, and guard it from enemies and any pirate that breaks Tidehand's simple rules. If you pay tribute, don't kill anyone, and never trade in slaves, Kraken Hat will be a safe haven for you. If you don't, then the tendrils of the namesake foundation will punch a hole in even an ironclad's hull like a tooth sinking into the skin of a plum and send you to the bottom, your plunder to enhance Tidehand's fortress.
The False Admiral is a Deathless who grew sick of her meaningless life and undeath in a very safe Nostrian coastal demesne and ran away to seek an exciting unlife fighting her own country and getting into trouble. The False Fleet, a group of pirates who follow her command and pretend to military organization, are one of the greatest scourges of the Nostrian navy and shipping lanes. They have an odd form of honor, fighting with a level of mercy and romantic inclination that the False Admiral took to the sea for in the first place, and plenty of outcasts and deserters have fled to the strict but ultimately much more forgiving arms of the False Fleet.
Captain Ashrive and the Amaranth Tide claim to being Lastborn cultists, dedicates of their violent god who demands trial by combat in order to fight a divine war in the afterlife. To this end, the Tide attack other pirates and naval vessels, nothing that can't fight back, setting themselves up as a source of divine challenge to make their targets fight smarter and harder or die trying. They'll do anything to encourage a harsher and more competent atmosphere around the coast Yasaal shares with Noster, so that everyone who plies the seas with an aim towards fighting and protecting does it with a skill to make them worthy of the Lastborn's army.
Knell is an unsettlingly atypical Locust. She sails the sea off the coast of the Confederacy and Shallow Graves in an experimental ironclad intended to be a heavy Confederate troop carrier, attacking ships, but with consistent inconsistency. She seems to be looking for something, building some kind of collection, and she'll leave most of a crew or even all of them alive, or take every fourth crewmate alive and let them off at a port sans left hand or tongue, or maybe burn a ship to the ground and send it smoking into harbor. She doesn't fight for food, gold, or the love of bloodshed, but for something else entirely, and her ship heralds itself always by the sound of bells.
Yasaal, Noster, Shallow Graves and northern Nashax share a coast in the west of the Continent, northern Nashax, eastern Noster, and Navath-Qor share a coast in the east of the Continent, Nashax, the Confederacy, Shallow Graves and southern Navath-Qor share a coast in the south of the Continent, and Noster, Yasaal, Vespergren and Navath-Qor share a coast in the north of the Continent. Iad Koseverem is located on the southeast coast, and has its own sea trade. Iad Volemari and Iad Ekrekesh, Chelqath, and the Everbore are landlocked, though they mostly have access to the rivers.
Sea trade, ensuring ore and mineral wealth and weaponry from the Confederacy, monster parts and metamaterials from Nashax, art and food and cloth from Yasaal, furs and necrochemistry and lumber from Noster, everything else that people need gets where it needs to go, is complicated by the presence of the Seafarer Peoples. While an in-depth discussion of their cultures and histories is beyond the scope of this writing, the nomadic Northern and Southern Seafarer cultures heavily influence the flow of sea trade with their operations. The Seafarers control many islands, coastal settlements and floating, amphibious structures all across the surrounding seas and oceans of the Continent, and their raiding and internecine conflicts are as unpredictable and as vitally important to keep track of as weather. They can be hired or aimed at each other, either by the ship/clan or as individual crewmates, and where the inland centers of civilization like Iash Qoma or Shelomith City may never see huge concentrations of them, dealing with the Seafarers is something anyone that hopes to make profit or find adventure on the high sea must know all about.
River trade runs throughout the Continent, but several Chelqathi settlements including Shelomith City, several free city-states including brawling, industrial New Moloch, teetering, ruin-haunted Stacktown, and the singing, scheming, furiously free City of Keys, and the Teuthic worldship-city-state Iad Ekrekesh of the Iadra Tevoyamat have the greatest control over this form of travel. Rivers are vital for all manner of civilization, the only real way that older settlements can survive and thrive away from coasts, lakes or springs, and the ones that run through the Continent are favored for, among other things, their lack of influence by the strange forces known to lurk in the oceans. Rivers have their own gods, and these are often considered easier to deal with than the Sea, the Deep Father, and the many eerie voices of the Fathom Chorus. River spirits and dragons are far more easily bribed and understood, and while rapids and currents will kill you, mortalkind knows no terror quite like that of the great waves of the open sea, the seemingly limitless depths of what lies below. A river is dangerous but generally presents a known quantity. The ocean represents mystery, destruction and the unknown, quite literally in many cases.
Subterranean trade runs through the many strange and vast underground biomes of the Continent, and while much of it eventually centers in Iash Qoma, it's impossible to deny how much influence the Locust Territory of the Everbore has on this arena of travel and commerce... though many would like to. Caravans, riverboats, and even sea-and-sky-faring vessels can make their way through the Deep Roads and caverns that stretch beneath the Continent, centered around the Unfound Sea that Iash Qoma rises from and the network of tunnels that branch through and around the Everbore. There are cliffs, vast spaces, narrow tunnels, fungal forests, and lightless seas and rivers beneath the earth, and the direct routes, shortcuts, rare materials and/or avoidance of particular surface obstacles and threats make them worth traversing for many trade concerns, routes, and national interests. The underground regions have their own weather and biomes, the hot molten Waxwind and the distressingly lively Sea of Blood, impossible aboveground save in the most cursed or Nephilim-touched locations, and these are a vital consideration when taking your skittermobile caravan or modified airship below the skin of the world.
Sky trade is, of course, everywhere. The great shipyards of Yasaal's Ylimari family, the Confederacy's Clan Zhiraga, Noster's Bas Ulath, and the Grandest Maze bring forth their powerful aerial battleships, yes, floating fortresses of guns and aircraft designed to bring law and/or destruction to entire regions at once, but the gas forges' even more vital task is to create the many dozens, hundreds of trade ships that carry goods across the Continent. Airships generally consist of an envelope partially full of naturally buoyant gas and partially full of magically buoyant substances or charges, supporting a gondola and other structures depending on the ship's needs. Air technology has come a long way in even the last one hundred years, but heavy cargo remains inefficient to transport by air, unless it's exceptionally valuable, like starmetal or seabone. Still, there's plenty worth transporting by air, heavy industry aside. Cloth, weapons, gems, art, food, people, and above all information--Sky trade makes up for the lower amount of potential cargo and higher amount of risk when it comes to piracy and bad weather for how it can go overland and even over mountains. Chelqath, once limited to cheap goods from its bordering neighbors and those along the River of Queens, can now ship in things from the far edges of the Continent directly thanks to air travel.
The world of the Continent is one making constant, current progress. Ships and airships are driven by engines, as are the majority of vehicles in civilized areas. Music, stories and news are broadcast around the world through the Echo Network. The world is moving forward. And the blood in its veins is the commerce carried by airships, watergoing vessels, caravans and the explorers, merchants and adventurers that use those roads.
A Brief Digression Upon Environments and Fauna of the Continent
The Continent spans many different biomes and climates, and as a consequence boasts an extremely broad and dense biodiversity, including both natural creatures, naturally magical creatures, and those shaped by the otherworldly influence of the Nephilim, those vast and alien entities from other realms whose influence, acts and blood have significantly altered the history and ecology of the entire Continent. From the monster-haunted hills of Nashax, where the ecosystem is so hostile that the mortal inhabitants must propitiate alien gods to survive, to the desert scavengers in Yasaal's hinterlands and the canny predators of the boreal forests of Noster, to the strange and lightless inhabitants of the caverns below, there are many different ecologies to explore upon and below and around the Continent, and this is a brief and partial look at just one aspect of the complex ecosystems and biomes of this vast, diverse, wealthy and dangerous land.
Yasaal is a land that contains sunbaked plains, low mountains, rich river deltas, and even some dense jungle and swamps, and, much to the chagrin of its art-obsessed, biology-rejecting nobility, contains diversity to match.
Hyenas stalk Yasaal's lands, like most other places on the Continent, one of the most universal and poetically associated predators no matter where you go. Their characteristic laughter and terrible bite figure strongly in poetry, story and metaphor. For their part, Yasaali consider their brutal matriarchy and spotted pelts to be the only remotely redeeming qualities of the creatures.
Giant arthropods, specifically solifugids, spiders, beetles, bees and wasps, make their homes all over the map and are often domesticated.
If Yasaal is famous for any of its domestic fauna, it's the bees. Honey and wax form a cornerstone of Yasaali industry, and the bee figures prominently on the flag, in the art, and as a highly respected animal for being neatly shelled, industrious, organized, and brutally efficient.
Jackals and buzzards vex the land at its corners, providing the much-needed scavenger roles. Many smaller towns have standing jackal bounties.
Noster is cold, primarily. High, harsh mountains, frigid, windy steppes and tundra, sheltered valleys with undisturbed snow silencing every footstep, and trackless taiga forests with trees older than some nations. The fauna have adapted to fit.
Wolves, virtually unknown anywhere else on the Continent, are king here, along with the occasional bear, haunting the forests as they hunt deer, boar, and hapless peasants. Along with the bat and the raven, the wolf figures large in the mythology and heraldry of the nation, with some large and robust enough to ride or otherwise serve as beasts of burden.
The giant bat as a mount and hound is common across the Continent, but the best of the bats, the strongest breeds, are said to come from either here or Iash Qoma. The bat-riding knight is as much of a staple in the literature as the wolf-rider.
Corvids, both ordinary and gigantic, find the death-obsessed country a fine place to live and raise a flock, and figure large in local mythology and superstition, with both wild and feral creatures and ones raised to serve as messengers, pets or hunting birds often filling the skies.
Moose are dangerous enough at their common size and with their herbivorous nature. The carnivorous Antlered Crusher, half again as big and twice again as vicious? Quite another story.
Chelqath would boast rich, fertile lands, full of rolling hills and rich forests and riverbanks and plenty of game, if boasting didn't have a history of attracting every invading army for centuries. Instead, it quietly, circumspectly states rich, fertile lands.
Wild boars have spread across the land from the Yasherits Forest near Iash Qoma, also making their way into some of Noster and much of the Confederacy. Ranging from the common somewhat-smaller-than-an-adult-human variety to mountainous grand boars taller than a man at the shoulder.
Giant beetles with their gem-like carapaces, ranging from cat to truck size, are an iconic element of the nation's wildlife.
Goats and sheep, ranging from common white and black breeds to ones with four horns, six legs, two heads or three eyes, are the backbone of the economy.
The Tall Judges, gigantic herons with some ability to think and sense guilt, are feared but respected across the nation.
The Confederacy's forbidding mountains and beast-haunted foothills are full of wealth, and its wide, somewhat uninspiring grasslands hide strange and in-depth mazes of passageways, hidden wells, and even ruins, all of which have their own specialized ecologies.
The ezzaldiak, the yzobu and the escaraballo are iconic beasts of burden on the Continent. The first is a quadruped with five-footed claws, metallic-colored scales and a long snout, the second is a muscular mammal with a long stringy mane, shark-like teeth and six sharp horns, like a thinner, more agile bull, and the escaraballo is much like a beetle or cicada, save that it's shaped more like a yzobu or ezzaldiak. (For the purposes of you, the reader, understanding this, the horse does not exist on the Continent but these animals are in shape and usage not dissimilar to it.)
The White Vulture is big enough to carry riders, smart enough to remember faces and deeds, has a helmet-like head from its mask sweeping back, and is the iconic winged cavalry unit of the nation.
The wheelsnake is six to twelve feet long and bites its tail to become a rigid hoop that can move faster than an ezzaldiak while rolling. The venom is paralytic.
Nashax is famously cold, barren, rocky, storm-tossed and lumpy, and all of those broken hills, straggling forests and jagged coasts are haunted with the most vicious and monstrous wildlife to be found just about anywhere aboveground. Nashax's ecology is so harsh and mutated that, without the direct intervention of their alien gods, it's quite possible no one would live there at all.
The monsters that haunt Nashax are too numerous to name but the bellringers, baboon-like creatures bigger than humans that build crude bell towers and gongs, the monokeras, carnivorous hoofed mammals with a single long serrated horn, and the worm ogre, a colony of carnivorous worms that forms a giant humanoid predator, are particularly famous.
Strix are too smart to be mere animals and too violent and cruel to be people, and the owl-like lurking presences are sneaky enough that you'll never see them coming. Nephilic creatures, they wield perception-manipulating magic powers in their own right.
Navath-Qor is endless canyons, hoodoos, riverine ravines and badlands, a harsh land ruled by a harsh and enduring people, and the animals that haunt its shaded verticals and burning horizontals are just as tenacious and dangerous as its razor-sharp reaches and indefatigable residents.
Craghoppers, gigantic crab-like creatures with unnatural agility and stony carapaces, are popular beasts of burden here, in addition to the usual suspects.
The two-headed carnivorous rukh, birds big enough to carry beasts of burden away like owls with mice, are the bane of the Grandest Maze.
The Brimstone Republic is primarily volcanic, with stony plains and deserts, giant volcanoes, hot springs and swamps, an inhospitably hot but rich land full of dangerously hot but rich citizens, determined to exploit the natural resources of all their neighbors before resorting to fully exploiting their own.
Giant wading birds, the ubiquitous bees, volcanic-adapted worms and snakes, and the heat-loving firejack bird fill the niches of the ecology that common or imported animals don't.
The Dominion of Dis is a thoroughly mined and industrialized land rich in metal and mineral resources, every river and forest controlled, directed, and shaped by Dissian industry, Dissian needs and Dissian aesthetics. The wildlife thrives in the narrow cracks, but anything bigger than a rat is just as beholden to the demands of the infernal empire.
The only remaining unique creatures to this land are the Iron Crawlers, supernaturally powerful and tough centipedes the size of tanks, though the soul-tech pollution creates some truly terrifying variants of the common rat, city centipede, bird and feral dog.
The Locust Territories are universally the harshest and most unkind lands on the Continent, ruled by the harshest and most unkind of its cultures, from the haunted forests, ruins and hills of Shallow Graves, to the icy, rain-drenched, soot-shrouded crags of Vespergren, to the deep and almost comedically dangerous reaches of the Everbore, and the surviving wildlife which isn't dosed up with Ves is more tenacious and canny than just about anything from anywhere else.
The rat-wolf, with all the worst qualities of both, the bloodsucking spiders known as Red Guests that become smarter the older and fuller they are, and the illusion-weaving smokebird are some of the natural creatures unique to Vespergren, while the vesauvrim, animals dosed with Ves to become powerful, voracious mutants, are found everywhere. Boars, bears, elk, hyena and antelope, mutated and dosed with Ves, crawl the hills of the Graves, and the nightmares lurking in the Everbore are without number or, sometimes, names.
The Iadra Tevoyamat brought the flora and fauna of Balisse with them, and they have invaded the lands for miles around each one. From Ekrekesh's rainforests and cliffs, to Volemari's rushing rapids and wellsprings, to the rolling chalk surrounding Koseverem, each of the Teuthis city-states have inadvertently replaced much of the ecosystem around them with an uneasy synthesis between the natural inhabitants and invasive species from their faraway world.
The web-weaving, gigantic keshri, the Teuthis-like but unthinking and sapiophagous scolendrai, and the swarming belahek with their fortresses of narcotic crystals made from the blood of their prey are but some of the many bizarre crustaceans and mollusks brought from Balisse's briny tunnels.
The subterranean biomes, from the terrifying Everbore to the Unfound Sea upon which the greater Iash Qoma area crouches, possess their own weather and their own strange ecologies divorced from those of the surface. Things that evolved to live in darkness and things that crawled from ancient ruins and bizarre alien structures coexist uneasily and often violently in the world beneath the world.
The Roof of the World, to the furthest north beyond Noster and the spires of Vespergren, is a haunted, blasted landscape of frigid cold where the wind is not the only thing you hear howling from over the horizon. Anything that lives here is thoroughly warped or incredibly stubborn.
The Open South is the reaches of the subcontinent that, until very recently, was locked off from the Continent proper by impassible mountains and canyons. It is still being explored and discovered to this very day, its history as something known by the continent years old at most, and its creatures are just as fresh and unknown as its resources and geography.
The oceans and seas surrounding the Continent are harsh and unforgiving, spattered with islands that range from "full of dangerous wild animals" to "full of dangerous settled Seafarers", well-stocked with monsters and beasts, and containing ancient gods within their depths.
Dragons and other exceptional Nephilic creatures, while associated strongly with Nashax, are to be found all across the Continent. Every nation and region has its own unique stable of monsters and Nephilic influence which affects the rest of it thoroughly.
A Dragon is simply a creature large enough to present an existential threat to at least an entire village and violent, stupid or malevolent enough to be impossible to reason with. Their forms and abilities are radically diverse, usually twisted by Nephilic influence or magical/alchemical experimentation. The ability to kill a dragon and exploit its remains is highly prized and appreciated no matter where in the Continent you might go.
Nobody knows exactly what the Nephilim were or where they came from, only that it was not this world. They range from intelligent figures eager to carry out bizarre plans or games to simple monsters content only to propagate and pillage. The "true" Nephilim, directly from wherever they came from, if indeed it was only one place, are rare and mostly dead, asleep or imprisoned. Instead, it is the many descendants of these originals, whether through the traditional way of acquiring descendants or through pollution or ambient mutation, which are generally meant when the term "Nephilim" is brought up--plants, animals and monsters with their own magical abilities, strange, mutated forms, and/or unnatural and occult purposes and behavior patterns, brought about from millennia of drift from their alien originators.
I'll add more later if people want it but I wanted to make it in time for NaNo! This update marks 50k+ I've made spread over my three threads this month, thank you all so much for your support!
A continuation of one of the plotlines would be nice. I voted earlier for two con artists in Noster, but if that doesn't prove popular I am open to any of them.
Battle of Splinter Ford and Every Action An Act of Creation were pretty fun reads.
The monsters that haunt Nashax are too numerous to name but the bellringers, baboon-like creatures bigger than humans that build crude bell towers and gongs, the monokeras, carnivorous hoofed mammals with a single long serrated horn, and the worm ogre, a colony of carnivorous worms that forms a giant humanoid predator, are particularly famous.
I'd like to think that, among monster hunters, it's the Nashaxi themselves that hog all the infamy. Sure, if you see a bellringer not carrying something or making noise you oughta double your caution, and worm ogres'll kill you dead, but even the monokeras aren't cruel enough beasts to tell you how to do your damn job. Unless you're local, conventional wisdom among hunters is to seek work elsewhere. A locust hunter would find less frustration working with Oriza in the Confederacy, by some accounts.
(For the purposes of you, the reader, understanding this, the horse does not exist on the Continent but these animals are in shape and usage not dissimilar to it.)
Our modern horses actually have a pretty fascinating history, and are very much a product of Earth Geography (PBS Eons has a lovely video on the subject, which I shall provide below)
For the sake of including weird dogs in the South and justifying my own initial misunderstanding that horses were rare rather than nonexistant, however, I'd suggest that perhaps there are equines -- er, equids, even -- down South, in the vein of smaller odd-toed bois like eohippus. I'm not sure about other members of Equus? Asses and zebras might still be a thing, but you'd have to ask The Samng for a sure-know,,,
