SHATTERED REALM
The Final Hour
Desecration reigns, the one true God
An infinite desert stretches as far as the eye could see with a vast foul ocean to the west, the sight of Man is scarce but for white crumbling bones borne atop undercurrents of the sand, or the ruins and millennia-old half-devoured foundations of an once flourished civilization.
Brutality is branded into the veins of the land, extremities into its blood. Toxic rain falls rarely, only to boil midair into drifting clouds of poisonous moisture by day, or frozen into storms of deadly icicles by night.
1. The Dying World
"The raging forge blazes, but the Blacksmith was absent."
The world is ugly, sterile, horrible. But for all the cruelty and alien evil of the Defilers, the real enemy of life is the dying land.
Scorching dunes, hopelessly vast sear to ash the flesh of men who traverse them, laying traps of bottomless pits masked as unmoving sand in an ocean of seemingly indiscernible near timeless unchangeability. The desert is temperamental, unpredictable, her favour impossible to obtain. All-consuming dust storms swept across the world without a sign, cleansing all lives in their paths. Toxic rains wept often, mourning children long devoured by the sand and wind. The foul black inner seas boil and rage, waging their restless unending war against the uncaring wasteland above. The day's sky burns blue, blazingly clear, charring hope itself to cinder.
Night's touch was gentler, like the slash of a blade in the dark, claiming souls with frigid indifference and swift unknowabliity. The heaven would come out to weep, a silent wailing that cracks stone and freezes hearts with its piercing, starless intensity. The moon is an eternal accusation, damning and distant, the cold gaze of justice relishing a monster's suffering.
This is what is left of our Mother, our Earth, the loving world that birthed the sky and star. This is her carcass, for we have killed everything that she was.
This is our Sin, and our punishment coming due.
2. The Devourment Machine
7 sprawling metropolis lies atop the bones of the once greatest cities in the world, their very presence tainting the memory of the land like foul scavengers perching atop their prize of rotting carcasses.
They do not have names, these monuments of inhumanity and cruelty. Names imply differentiation, independence, liberation. They are merely the possession of their masters the Sovereigns of Ruination, extensions of their will, their dominance. Their greed and hunger.
Once, the Sorcerer-Kings were the lesser evil. Now they are incarnations of the same unholy machine, magnified sevenfold.
- The Masters: Sorcerer-Kings slumber away the end of the world in their palaces towering above the City States, periodically devouring the essence of the struggling, blood-soaked seed of nature around the city, slowly transforming into something utterly alien, so horrible mere words cannot contain their abstraction.
- The Mindless Cogs: Discovered Druids are captured at a young age, their mind seared away leaving only enough to be molded into tools of flesh and power, conduits to transmute the countless human sacrifices into pure life forces to feed the vegetation that otherwise could not survive the lifeless desert. Feeding the Kings' sustenance.
- The Obedient Dogs: They too have no name, the brainwashed children, the Kings' Guards. Most calls them Bloodhounds. Enchanters raised from an early age to be absolutely loyal to the monster they serve, the Hounds enact their masters' will even when there is none, maintaining the machine that feeds the Beasts and disregarding most anything else. They are the breath of the sleeping dragon, its oppressing aura, the permeating dread that gnaws away the prey's will and strength.
- The Rats: Parasites living off the scraps and leavings of the giant, they are slavers, abusers, rogue Enchanters, and any of those with enough strength and cunning to not be made slaves.
- The Pitifuls: Slaves make up nine out of ten of the population within the Sorcerer-Kings' metropolises. There are those who are born into bondage, those who were weak enough to be chained, and those who were strong enough to be broken.
And so the machine whines and rumbles, crushing humanity into corpses. Flesh slaves, born, taken or captured surviving nomads are either playthings or workers on Lok farms, beasts who retrieve sustenance from a special mineral mined out of the sand, the only source of food to feed the hungry, half-mad remnants of Man. Periodically sacrifices are chosen to have their lives siphoned and transmuted through Runic machines and mindless Druids into pure life force fed to the Kings' Garden. And each moon on the last day of prayer, the Sorcerer-Kings consume the Garden into themselves to fuel the fire of transformation toward something that would shatter the sky.
The vultures learn to break the carcass' bones to get at the last marrow.
3. Masters of Ruination
Created from the ambition of a madman, forged by the amber flame of greed and molded by the despair of the Desecration, they are truly the embodiment of Apocalypse.
7 Socerer-Kings for 7 kingdoms of Man. Once they were the lesser evil. They devoured that too, the very concept of lesser, and spit out a twisted distortion of it.
Udu the Corruptor, first born.
Opia the Faceless, first daughter.
Kel the Cruel.
Paer the Subjugator.
Imir the Eyeless.
Enu the Tormentor, second daughter.
Aman the Weak.
The only Sorcerers to ever lived, offsprings of Fenrir the Great Defiler, rulers of remnants of Man. Their Enchanting had grown unimaginably in the centuries after the Desecration, their mastery of mind infinite, their capability oceans of unknowable power through further dwelling into Runic magic. Their presence alone suppresses even the conception of opposition. Their dread poisons each living soul born unto their kingdoms, mental seeds that breed obedience and fear.
They are the monster we created, the peak of Man's reign upon the land. Our greatest sin, our greatest triumph. Our end.
4. The Abandoned Children
"The greatest sorrow of all is a child's betrayal against unconditional love, for only then will he realize what he had cast away."
Loeir of Marn, The Virtue of Hindsight, page 127
Druids are the most valuable of slaves, the rarest, most hunted merchandise. The land is depleted, sucked dry, yet like an instinctive habit, or a last struggle, Druids still appeared, even scarce and few as they were. Slavers had observed, however, that Druidism has more chance of appearing within secluded populations of dune nomads than the City States, and so the practice of shadowing nomad tribes and grooming them for a chance of Druidic slaves were popularized.
A slaver capturing young Druids could turn them to the Hounds for a handsome reward. The Druid is then lobotomized through branded physical Runes, leaving only enough cognitive functions to be conditioned into flesh processors compatible to be connected to Runic structures for the sole purpose of converting human sacrifices into pure life force for the Gardens. Once Branded, Druids are permanently damaged, and the use of their natural gift in such a way drains their own flesh durability, putting usability between two to three decades.
Old, unusable Druids are put through a process called Transmuting and compressed into a seed of pure power, which once planted spawn a Life Tree, a plant capable of surviving even in the harsh environment of the desert without a need for Druidic feeding, and can survive through several cycles of Devouring before becoming depleted.
As such, Druids are a resource of utmost value, highly sought after and hunted.
5. Bloodhounds
During the destruction of Fenrir during the Desecration, many Enchanter families were annihilated, but many more still bowed before the Mad Sorcerer, groveling before his power like rats. Those families were the foundation of the Sorcerer-Kings' Guards, or as most fearfully whispered their title, Bloodhounds.
The Kings divided the remaining houses amongst themselves like spare coins. Each generation, a family is required to produce at least 2 offsprings, the first born recruited to be an Inquisitor, the second and any following to be Hunters. Inquisitors prowl the streets and tunnels of the City States in groups of 3, keeping order, oiling the machine's cogs and snuffing out opposition like stepping on cockroaches. Hunters roam the desert in packs searching for nomads and pockets of stray humans to drag back to the Cities to be slaves.
The ranks of the Bloodhounds are simple yet effective:
- Lord Inquisitor: A single powerful Enchanter commanding the entire Inquisitor force.
- Master Inquisitors: command up to 10 teams of Inquisitor each.
- Steel Inquisitor: command up to 5 teams of Inquisitor.
- First Hound: commands the entire Hunter force.
- Second Hounds: command up to 10 packs of Hunter each.
- Third Hounds: command up to 5 packs of Hunters.
There are rumours of secret sects of Inquisitor magically enhanced by magical Runes and Runic contraptions specializing in hunting down their own kind, or powerful nomad tribes.
6. The Scavengers
"One can gauge the danger of a true monster not by the bones of its preys, but by the number of parasites living off its leavings."
Firem Malfus, Philosophy of the Oppressor, page 742
Even at the end of the world where few things of value remain, greed still flourishes like a deadly flower grown in blood.
Slavers are the self-proclaimed Nobility of the wasteland, trading in the most valuable good around. They often have their own band of hunters roaming the desert, fighting for scraps from amongst the Hounds' teeth.
Rune knowledge is forbidden, those suspected of Magic hunted and flayed, but just as there are demands, there would be those who provide it regardless of risk. Secret societies of Mages experiment with whatever pieces of incomplete Runes they could find leaked from the Libraries of the Kings, playing with forces they cannot comprehend.
Runes as well as outlawed items such as old artefacts from the world before, stolen seeds from the Kings' Gardens or even Enchanter slaves are sold in hidden underground markets ran by shadow forces that somehow always managed to stay one step ahead of Bloodhounds raids. Rumours say there had once been an auction for a slave Druid. already processed to be one's personal Transmuter.
There are those who flourish, and of course those who barely manage to stay alive, struggling for each meal yet strong enough to not be made slaves. They are so very rare, and some say, incredulously, that perhaps sparks of kindness may yet live somewhere deep within some's hearts.
7. The Brokens
"Father once said, we have corrupted the meaning of fear, for the uttering of the word instead of the safeguarding animal instinct of Man conjures the sense of the overwhelming, debilitating horror that reduces one's mind to dust. And I said to him, what other kind of fear is there?"
Oria of Marn, The Introspection of Dreams, page 142
Slaves are the foundation of the Sorcerer-Kings' City States, the driving force behind the machine, its fuel, its grinding cogs.
Mindless slaves are an everyday commodity, regularly obtained and traded. The two main sources of slaves are captured nomads and desertmen, or breeder camps slaves, both of which has their own prize and benefits.
Desertmen are physically stronger than anything a camp could produce and so are more suitable to hard and punishing works. However, their savagery and disobedient tendencies are often more of a nuisance than benefit and require investment of time and resources to break.
Slaves from breeder camps are weaker, more prone to early death by infected bloodline and incest-caused diseases. But by the same circumstances they are much cheaper, easier to obtain, more varying in differentiated choices and one could buy them young for simpler training and more loyal possessions.
The most notable slave activities include:
- Lokgem mines: The mines which produce the mineral to feed Lok beasts are recorded as the activity with the highest turnover of slaves monthly. The work is grueling with minimal food, slaves are expected to mine gems until the end of a very short life.
- Lok farms: tending to the only source of food for the entire City States is however not much easier than mine works. The beasts are temperamental and wild, killing slaves regularly each day. Farm owners of course find it cheaper to buy new slaves than building safety guards. More than that, many believed the more a Lok beast kills the better its meat tastes.
- Hard labour: ranging from construction to pulling carts, to house serving, slaves are used for nearly all of the manual labour in building and maintaining the Cities.
- The Colosseum: Often where most captured desertmen ended up, it is one of the only entertainment in any City for the rich and powerful. Fighters are promised freedom after a hundred victory in duels to the death with increasing challenges. In all the centuries of its existence, only one fighter, a Dune Nomad warrior had achieved this feat, or so the warrior slaves whispered amongst themselves in hope-filled hushed murmurs.
8. Society and Commerce
1. Society is divided simply into predators and preys. Those with the power to enslave others thrive, while those without are broken.
2. There is no State-sanctioned currency system. The unit of trade most often used are slaves and Lokgem, as well as the exchange of valuable items. Rare metal and gold while still costly do not hold nearly the same value as they had in the world long past.
3. Only Enchanter families have last name. Most citizens have only a first name, often one to two syllables. Rich individuals who consider themselves high enough above in the food chain would often claim a last name for themselves, a symbolic action meant to proclaim their influence.
Slaves have no name. They are seen as a faceless mass with little to no distinction between each. Special, expensive slaves are given differentiating designation in term of physical qualities, such as Scar, Pig, Whore, Shield, Cook. Favourite slaves are sometimes granted affectionate one-syllable names like Syl or Pus, a favour seen as a symbol of status amongst other slaves.
Colosseum fighters are given distinctive regular names to differentiate and incorporated into gambling systems.
9. The Preyed
Dune Nomads, they are called. Desertmen, children of the sand, walkers of ruins. Outside of the Sorcerer-Kings' grasp, yet freedom was a foreign concept still, to them, tortured and tormented by the land, hunted by the Defilers' dogs, living in pain and hunger and fear. Yes, they are bound by more than chains. At least the mindless slaves did not retain enough of themselves to despair.