Vampires of the Old Marshes rarely take prey. They are like their marshland home: calm, silent creatures, who do not often lust for blood. Nor does the sun much bother them, if they can stay to the twilight hours. An Old Marshes vampire can often be sighted lurking at sunset, sunrise, unbothered by the half-light. And though they are masters of powerful and cruel Curses, they do little magic besides. They are only true vampires in that they can neither eat nor die- for they are not among the living- and that sometimes, on bright nights when the midnight moon speaks to them, they do crave the Red Drink.

On a very clear night, that craving awoke in one Gareth of Queensrock, a man who died twelve months earlier and was still trying to live like he hadn't. He had fought off his new, awful desire for blood as long as he could, distracted himself from it with anything he could think of; but still, the part of him that was now a vampire demanded satiation. It took over him as tried to lay in bed with his human wife, Renalda, one night. She was pregnant, he didn't want to drain her, but the craving-

Three days before Athulwin was due to be born, his mother Renalda stabbed through his father Gareth's heart. She had awoke just as he had gone for her neck.

He was buried that night, in an empty funeral attended only by Renalda and three Uttering Monks. The monks did not know him; their order considers it a duty to arrive for the funerals of the unloved. At least someone, they say, should mark the end of a life. They closed Gareth's eyes and lowered him into the soaking, marshland earth. Renalda wept. Then they begin to talk to her, and revealed another purpose in their coming: that they knew Athulwin would be born a half-vampire, would carry some of his father's curse all his life with none of his power.

A wretched existence, they said. No life at all, they said. But the Uttering Monks, in their dark, private monasteries, know a great many strange things, they assured Renalda, for they spend their days speaking fire and their nights talking to the stars. They knew of a ritual to cure him. Her son would be a man- not half of a man, not an almost vampire, but a whole and mortal and pure man, accepted in the eyes of the world. Their price was only this: that he would be their man. That soon as he was old enough to be weaned off of his mother's breast, she would give her firstborn son to them, and they would raise him in their monastery according to their own traditions.

An awful trade? No doubt. But... Renalda was a widow twice over, with no craft of her own. In a village the size of a bloated thumb. Her nightmares were already filling with fears on how she could possibly care for this son-to-come so, with tears, she agreed. They sealed the promise in the way men of the Old Marshes do, by carving it in stone. A small but heavy stone was stuck, struck deeply, with ancient symbols to represent that weighty price. Renalda has it in her home to this day.

The sun rose and set two more times; Athulwin came into the world. He was a boy born into fire. Literally: the ritual of the Uttering Monks, to cleanse a child of vampirism, was to set a pyre burning, and to let the child be birthed right onto the flames. The child would not burn alive, a nun named Sister Alyn promised Renalda, for the monk's sisters too can speak to fire, and they will teach the flames how to only burn away that which is evil in her young son. His self will be untouched.

It was a half-truth; the burn scars Athulwin still has testify to that. But it calmed her enough to let the monks and nuns do what was needed. The infant screamed. It was a dark scene. We should not dwell on this subject-

Suffice to say, Renalda's baby was alive, all human, left to her until such a time as he could be weaned safely. Came and went. Athulwin was taken up into the Monastery at Queensrock before he was old enough to remember his mother. There he was raised, there is where he thinks of when he hears someone ask him about home. Those stone walls, those cramped passageways.

The aura of an Uttering Monks monastery is hard to describe. They are one of three monastic orders native to the Old Marshland, a land already filled with history and deep tradition. They are the oldest of the orders- and the strictest. Silence is kept at meal time, silence for the first hour after waking, silence for the first three hours before bed. All the space between is filled with a deep, growl-like muttering: the sound of the monks practicing their art. In a monastery of a hundred souls, like Queensrock's was, every corridor and common room and walled-in garden is filled with men's muttering, so that it bounces off the stones and becomes the background noise of the entire monastery. It is a bit like the sound of a distant ocean or a dying fire. It'll get into your bones.

They aren't speaking to each other, of course, of course. They'd raise their voices for that. They are speaking, if you can believe it, to the raw elements of nature: the sacred art of the Uttering Monks is to learn the natural languages of things like stone, wind, thunder and fire, and to spend their lives practicing those strange tongues. In the meantime, they study much philosophy, much history, much religion, so that they form the spiritual and academic backbone of Old Marshes culture. Everyone outside those dark walls was uneducated, agricultural- but within them? There shown all the knowledge of the greater world.

This academia was learned before magic, for new students; by the age of four, Athulwin was already reciting religious history, between his dragging classes on writing, reading, languages. There was little arithmetic, and that was the one thing to be grateful for.

Many long years would pass this way. So many so that it would be better not to cover them all. One pattern emerged: Athulwin was a brilliant pupil, but only when he applied himself. He did not, as a rule, apply himself. Sister Alyn joked that they should have told the flames to burn out all his laziness, too. Nobody guessed at the true cause. It was that same thing which caused his straw pillow to come to the cleaners wet with tears, which caused other children to complain that he never laughed along with them. Young Athulwin had the condition which the people of Sinverland might have called "chronic melancholia," or what other cultures in other places might have deemed Depression- but what was here, in the Monastery at Queensrock, just a stark lack of work ethic.

He was flogged often.

It was perhaps inherited from his mother; it did not improve with age. He would've been outcast from the order altogether, if it weren't for his saving grace: Athulwin truly is a prodigy with languages. Monks learn mortal languages before magical ones, to prepare the mind. It was with an uncharacteristic eagerness that he tackled the words of the Wandering Elves, the rumblings of the Forrestal Dwarves, and the odd language of the Eld Fae- fairy folks who lived in the Old Marshes before humanity drove them out. He'd only been required to learn one.

Soon, with the blessing of the order, he was speaking to the stars. Now when he went wandering the swamps alone at night, he had a good excuse to be doing it.

And that was how he met Alder.

Alder, a man who only seemed to live at night and twilight. He appeared out of the fog to speak to the young monk whenever the swamp was dark and lonely- he claimed to be a Lord, but one without any land, and claimed that he had known Athulwin's father.

Athulwin knew he was a vampire. Alder knew that Athulwin knew, but why he kept coming out so late for conversations with a blood-sucker- that was the mystery. Still, they talked. The night hours were passed together. Alder never once tried to drink from him. It became a kind of unspoken alliance, this secret friendship between a vampire and a monk.

Their friendship formed over common interests. Language, history, philosophy. Alder always knew more than he should; it made you wonder how old he was. Athulwin learned secrets from the stars- he tried to impress Alder with them. Years passed, and they knew everything about one another.

Uttering Monks will temporarily take Vows of Silence, to meditate on the natural elements. Alder bore that time with patience, filling the air with only his words, while the dutiful monk nodded along. Something about the chatter made Athulwin's constant sorrow part, if only for a while. Time would be passed the same way as he prepared himself to learn to speak to fire, then to wind. He was becoming a true Sayer.

Alder asked often how his studies came. In the times where he was not shackled by a vow, Athulwin answered, never wondering why his friend would ask so much. It only became clear when, on a clear night with the moon swaying over their words, Alder made his proposal.

He wanted Athulwin to become a vampire, like his father, and of the same clan. It made sense now why he would play so long at friendship; vampires cannot participate in the monastery, so none ever learn Utterance except by turning a monk, and learning it from them. He promised Athulwin a very high position in the clan, for his part.

But he, perhaps drawing on something of his mother, was repulsed. He spat at the suggestion, almost literally. He demanded that the vampire unhand him- for he had now grabbed him by the wrist, and was tugging him closer. The moon was singing to Alder, he was going to turn him, he would try to drink from him as Gareth had tried from his mother, and-

In rare cases, a gifted Sayer who speaks the language of fire can go further than only talking to fire; they can breathe fire, like a fairytale dragon. That's what Athulwin did then. For the first time. Alder was left with half his body burnt from the flames; he staggered backwards. He wasn't dead, thankfully- but then Athulwin heard the words that would change his life.

Alder, with that kind of bitter, dripping rage that only vampires have, pronounced a Curse on Athulwin. The words of the spell were not in any tongue men could recognize. Hearing it felt like a hearing Utterance in reverse, upside-down; there was nothing natural about it. And though it was incomprehensible and unnatural, Athulwin found that he instinctively knew what it meant: that he was cursed to die. That the sorrow and sadness which has always been inside him would gradually work its way outwards, graying his hair and aging him too fast, working in him until it rotted his bones and brought him to a young death.

There was a possible release from this curse- if he would become a vampire. If he would one day embrace the gift Alder tried to give him, the Curse would break. Until then, he was doomed to grow weaker, and weaker, and then die.

With those words ringing in his skull, he fled.

The next two years at the monastery passed too slowly. Every day, it seemed, Athulwin found another gray hair in his head, felt his body seeming a little heavier even as he lost weight. He knew what was taking hold. One day, without warning, he ran for good from the monastery, leaving his vows behind him. It was an impulse decision, probably the only one he's ever made. All he knew- that he had to see the world before his ended.

That was how he found the Caravan. He has stayed for eight years, never knowing how long he has left before Alder's curse finally comes due. With his power to speak to the stars, he's become the official navigator, and so a kind of leader. It put more responsibility on him, more than he would normally like, but he doesn't altogether mind. It lets him leave a mark. Before the Curse comes due.

Utterance has been described as a kind of cross-breed between druidism and elemental magic. It is a form of language, allowing one to speak (literally, with their voices) to the non-living aspects of nature, like stone, or sunlight. The obvious use for such a power would be to control natural elements; to tell a fire to cook or to burn down, to teach ice to freeze itself around a threat, to call on rain for the crops. It can do those things, though not so often or effectively as a true wizard might. (Reason being: the elements can say "no" to one using Utterance.)

Instead, the main reason the Uttering Monks study it is for learning from nature. Nature, after all, witnesses and knows many things mankind does not. One who speaks to the stars may learn from them the correct paths to travel, may hear of ancient history those stars' eyes have seen, may be told of great and secret things that happen in the heavens. Those who whisper to the wind may hear it whisper back, telling them of news from far-off lands, of secrets said in a king's chambers while the window was open and the night breeze whistling by. They cannot control the elements with the same precision as a mage, maybe, but a Sayer (that is, one who practices Utterance) knows far more.

And this learning goes deeper than head-knowledge, too. Finally, a Sayer has an Aura. Their Aura is based on the elements of nature they most often speak too, because as you commune with something such as fire, you will find that burning power seeping into your own soul. The Aura a Sayer has is felt almost tangibly around them, and heard in their voice, giving most of them a kind of unnatural charisma. One who speaks to stone seems strong and unbreakable, one who speaks to ice becomes coldly intellectual. All of them feel impossible to argue with. A good Sayer tends to get their way in conversations. Their voice carries much weight.

As a last note: Utterance isn't one language, it's many. Each part of nature speaks its own tongue, after its own form. All these things have a secret language; twilight, shadows, thunder, time. But these tongues are not like the languages of men, that anyone can learn them if they just study enough. They are stranger.

Take the language of the stars, for one example: to hear it spoken feels like fire, like a burning light, full of wisdom and cold fury. It feels like you're hearing something from another world, something straight from the cold void of space. It is so much more than just sounds. So when someone speaks it, they do indeed form actual words with their tongue, but there's something deeper happening that everyone who hears it can sense.

That's no accident. Before one can speak the language of, say, water, they must spend months or years in silent and intense meditation, learning to think like water. The same goes for any other natural language. Someone who wishes to speak to the wind must think as quick and surely as the wind. And during this time, the student must take a vow of total silence; they cannot speak a word in any language, even an ordinary one. This can take much focus. Only after a long time has passed is the student ready for a proper Sayer-Teacher to be brought in, who will finally show them the real words and syntax of the language that they wished to learn. After that, their vow of silence can be broken, and it becomes like learning any mortal language.

Each natural language is different, so this process has to be repeated for every Utterance one learns. You may already know how to speak to lightning, but if you want to speak to thunder, you still have to go back and start your meditations from scratch. So only the very old or very dedicated can know more than a few Utterance languages.

The Eratie are considered a beastrace: humanoid creatures that bear some of the features of animals, or else (depending on who you ask) animals that speak and walk on two legs. For Eratie, the animal they take after is undeniably the bat. They have all the expected features: chiropteran faces ending in a snout, with dark eyes for seeing at night, black and light fur covering their bodies, and huge ears for picking up on echolocation. And, of course, there's that huge set of huge leathery wings sprouting from their shoulders- hard to miss that one.

At least, that's the stereotypical Eratie. The way an Eratie looks varies much depending not upon their genetics, but upon the mystical energies in the air when they are born. An Eratie may or may not be born with wings; they may or may not have fur; their faces may resemble that of a common fruit bat, or may be more that of an ugly Natalidae. It varies by the stars that are overhead, and by the poorly understood Powers that swirl around them when first they come into this world. Even the time of day plays a role: Eratie born at the stroke midnight often have tiefling-esque horns. They call these variations in their bodies their "Forms," and as they are a people who categorize everything, they of course have a name for each. The most common form is the one they call "Baítudatu-Thumilie," and that is the stereotypical one described above.

Most of the world population of Eratie exists in the land of Tureiamú, which is considered their homeland: it is a small peninsula that stretches out somewhere south of the lands of the Old Marshes and Trist, almost approaching towards the coastal kingdom of Ordos. But, historically, the Eratie who live there have had little traffick or trade with the humans, who they consider a brutish and dangerous bunch, and their culture shows this. Over thousands of years living in the same places and rarely varying their way of life, the Eratie-Tureiamú have been built into a complex, strict culture that prioritizes tradition and orderly behavior. Their caste system is enforced, and unquestioned. Their houses and clans are maintained by blood and by ritual. The lives of those who are born under Tureiamú's sun are set out both by the station of their birth and by their astrological signs. Even the shoes that an Eratie puts on in the morning may as well have been pre-planned according to three thousand years of tradition. Who is there to argue with it?

Each Eratie is meant to behave after their own kind, after all, following their destiny as their Form, Calling and House would dictate it, and this is the only way. Those who break from their destinies are shamed or outcasts. They have walked the Unsteady Path, that winding road which leads to decay, and cannot be made clean again.

Terilu's path to necromancy began with a plague. He was less than eight years of age, and some vile disease was sweeping through New Dawnlit- the stone, crumbling old city where he was raised.

Like most Eratie, the young Terilu was living deep within a crowded "nest-" a single massive home where dozens of Eratie (all of the same caste, of course) reside communally under one roof- when the sickness began. In a normal year, a nest is meant to be a warm, busy place, where every child has as many mothers as there are women, and has as many fathers as there are men.

All the children of the same age were Terilu's nest-siblings, and he shared meals and jokes and conversation with them all throughout the nights. All in the nest were related, all of the honorable Third Caste, and this made them as good as brothers and sisters. Each of them would be one day trained in the approved professions for ones such as they: meaning that for most of them, they would have educated, upper-middle class jobs. The Third Caste was considered the caste of the artists, the writers, the scribes, the wizards, the architects, the scientists; the thinkers and the feelers of their world. Young Terilu and his nest-siblings were lesser gentry, the lower part of the aristocracy- wealthy and privileged, though not in charge.

But, in a year like this, with this strange plague in the city, their crowded nest became a vector of disease.

The women of the nest, the mothers, were struck the hardest. Nobody understood why. The disease made them shrivel and rot, losing weight while they vomited up their meals. It was rabidly infectious; a nest that caught the plague could be hollowed out in a matter of weeks. It killed fast, and that was the only mercy. The first to fall in Terilu's nest was an old woman he knew as Mother Deatta. As is Eratie custom, the nests' many children were brought in to see the body- to say their last goodbyes.

Little Terilu looked down at the Mother's corpse. Staring at this skull-like face, shrunken down to nothing by this starving, blind plague, the young child was struck with something. He was too young and not bright enough to articulate just what he was feeling, but suddenly he was aware that this is how all life ends. Plague or no plague. He was understanding for the first time, that this is what will eventually happen to the rest of his mothers, and to his fathers, and his friends, and then to him. They will all one day be like the body laying on the table.

Tears rolled down his face. They thought he was crying for Mother Deatta. He wasn't.

It was the next morning that he declared to everyone in the nest, with the confidence that only children have of the future, that he was going to become a powerful necromancer. This, he said, was his chosen path. The nests' elders did not much question it. Necromancy was indeed an acceptable profession for the Third Caste by the ancient laws of their people, and the child had certainly seen enough death in his life that it was no great mystery why his mind should be on this track. They assented. The lad was to be trained in the ways of undeath. When the disease had passed from the city, they assured him that they'd search for proper tutors and dig up the proper spellscrolls for his study.

But the plague, meanwhile, tore on through the nest like a flame through paper. Half of them died, especially the mothers. Terilu almost became numb to all the funerals, to watching his sisters and teachers and mothers pass away. Until six months later, he lost the one- Mother Terria.

Mother Terria was his birth-giver: the very one he came from. Unlike the other women of the nest, he came out of her. That made her death feel... different. When the messenger boy came sprinting through the narrow, long little stone halls of the nest to tell him that she'd died, he began to shout and scream. He isn't even sure if the shout was one of grief or anger. He could not distinguish which emotion this was. It was simply wrong: wrong for another one, and this one, of all, to be taken from him. He cursed and he spit, something that would've gotten him in real trouble if the wrong adult overheard. (The messenger boy, in sympathy, swore himself to silence.) He declared aloud to a room of fellow mourners, when they took him to see her body, that he'd see her rise again. By the necromantic power that he was going to learn. Nobody took it seriously- he hadn't even been trained yet- but the uncomfortable silence that followed was real enough.

It was later that afternoon when he found out that the nests' elders were having the corpse cremated. There would be no resurrecting her.

Little Terilu was heartbroken, and confused. He thought this move a random, mean injustice to him, and to his mother. Only later did one of the fathers sit him down and explain. There's no real bringing someone back from the dead, he told him. The dead rise when a necromancer tells them to, yes, but it's not the whole person. It's either just the body, hollow and rotting, or just the soul, ethereal and tormented. Either way, there is no having Mother Terria back, whole and healthy and herself. That time has now passed.

It nearly killed young Terilu's desire to become a necromancer, hearing that. But changing course is extraordinarily hard in the uncompromising Eratie culture. Already his name has been marked down as a future necromancer. Already, here come the tutors assigned to teach him this sacred art, and here are the relatives bringing gifts of dried bones for their favorite youngling to practice on. The many mothers and fathers of Terilu's nest forbid him from changing course. It would be embarrassing for the family. So he continued.

His first tutor in the art of necromancy was an old, wrinkled bat named Master Earídu, a fellow member of the Third Caste but who came from some far-off nest in a city that Terilu had never heard of.

The lad instantly disliked him. He never appreciated the young lad's jokes and jests, for one thing. Just looked at him with that ancient face. "He looks as much like a dead body as the ones he brings back," young Terilu said to his friends. It was funny, because resurrecting the dead seems to be the one thing the aged necromancer was unable to teach. Terilu has many blurry memories of long hours wasted listening to Master Earídu talk about the theory and philosophies behind necromancy. There was much he had to say about the symbolic meaning of a person who is kept both alive and dead, and why this is important to their culture. When he didn't feel like talking (that was rare, but did- occasionally- happen), he'd sentence Terilu to many long nights of drawing out body charts and complicated diagrams of rituals. He'd review the drawings, mark where Terilu had made a mistake, and send him back to rework the entire thing.

But only rarely would he let the young pupil put any of this into practice. Perhaps it was because of the Master's failing health: he was nearing sixty, an incredible age for an Eratie, and seemed to have no more energy for real spellcraft. The grave was drawing near to him. During a particularly dry lecture on the nature of arcane energies, he once lamented aloud that he wished he had learned more when he'd been Terilu's age. Then, maybe, he could've ascended into something like lichdom, and kept himself alive for centuries more, as some few of the greatest Third Caste necromancers indeed have.

Terilu whined to him that he wouldn't achieve lichdom either- or anything else- if he wasn't shown some real magic soon, but the master would not hear of it. When he predictably died of old age some five years later, Terilu felt more annoyed about it than anything else. This dotting academic had wasted his entire education! In a fit of irritation, he snuck into the Mausoleum with a necromantic spellbook snuck under his arm, and found where they had buried the master.

He probably would have failed if, ironically, it weren't for the excellent theory and form he'd learned from all those lessons. Dragging out the man's casket with both hands, he cast the most powerful Resurrection Spell he could find on Earídu's own corpse. And it rose to life as his slave. Laughing with genuine delight, he made Earidu's body dance and juggle for him. It was the first thing he'd ever brought to life bigger than a rabbit! It was the eve of his 13th birthday.

And that is, of course, the age of adulthood for Eratie.

He decided now that the Art of Necromancy really was the path for him. If, for no other reason, so that he could escape the fate of so many others in his young life: so that he could use this dark power to stop himself from dying. He wouldn't allow himself to just be another funeral. But he had also decided that his homeland was not the place to learn. The necromancers here were all like Earídu: academic scholars concerned with getting their names on books, not with achieving real things. He is utterly repulsed by them.

So it was that he had many tearful goodbyes with his family and friends. The now adult bat was going to venture out into the "Wilder World," as Eratie called the savage universe outside their safe little peninsula of culture and knowledge. His mothers were convinced he would get himself killed. There, they warned him, necromancy was hated as an evil and black art, and any who discovered what he was would murder him. But no, he reassured them: he would follow the rumors of wicked necromancers in distant lands until he came upon one himself, and there he would beg to be their apprentice. He would learn all they had to teach. If he came back, it would not be in a casket, but as a lord of the dead. Powerful, wise, and ascendent.

It took three years of hard, long travelling and searching, but he did find his teacher. She was an elven woman, Aryyna. Oh, he loved her. She was the opposite of the old bat. The image of a classic necromancer, complete with an undead army and plans to conquer the world. Sensing the presence of her many undead servants from afar off, he had tracked her to her hideout in an abandoned watchtower mounted just at the mouth of a bloody and forsaken old battlefield. Many wars were fought in that land in ages long past and, cleverly, she was raising the corpses that had fallen in battle to build an army of her very own. She was preparing herself for an all-out invasion against the local villages- there was some petty grievance that she had against them; Terilu didn't care what it was. When she saw that he was ready to serve her no matter the cost, Arynna gladly took him under her wing. It helped that he proved to be rather magically gifted. He learned from her how to raise skeletons and ghouls to follow one into battle, and how to seek wisdom from the spirits of those long gone. In time, he was the lieutenant of her dark forces. Just her, him, and a few hundred sword-wielding corpses.

He stayed with her for several more years. It was, he would have to say, the most valuable time of his life. There is nothing like being shown the tricks of the trade by a true expert. He never came close to her power, but she assisted him where he was lacking. She helped him create an undead slave to bathe him every morning and clothe him every night. She had the ghouls bring him wine on a platter. She showed him how one communicates with the undead telepathically, only thinking and having your will accomplished. He could soon sit on the balcony of the tower and watch the dead go out to war at his unspoken command, raiding the villages by night until the powerless peasants were forced to offer tribute. He and her took the very best of their goods: their wines and fabrics, clothes and foodstuffs, their gold and oil. He felt like a warlord.

He was lonely, that was the only thing. In his crowded nest back home, he never wanted for company, and so he never realized how much he relied on it. But now Terilu was beginning to know himself better. He looked back with fondness on the many hours of conversation that he had with his nest-siblings, and the ways that they laughed at his jokes. He tried conversing with Arynna, but she was cold. And her dead weren't for talking.

But he could have continued in this way. Being the second-in-command. He still could have kept on until they conquered a small kingdom's worth, gladly, even though the occasional bloodshed made him chafe. He did not know he could be a killer- but then, it wasn't him doing the killing, he told himself. And the villagers were only hurt if they fought back. Nobody made them fight back, he told himself. And his magic was growing so much! And so, still, he would have continued. But, alas.

He found Aryyna dead one night at the hands of an assassin. To this day, Terilu still doesn't know exactly who it was who did it, or how they got past her undead guards. The best guess: that someone from the villages climbed in through the window. The assassin killed her while she was in the bath, whoever it was. They got a knife in her throat before she could rise to throw a spell at him, or call for help. Even the greatest mage can be taken down by someone quick and suicidal enough.

The blood ran down her body turned the bathwaters red. It reminded Terilu, in a funny sort of way, like wine. It was a disgusting comparison, but that's what it looked like. He's not sure how long he spent looking at her body. He felt grief, of a kind, but it wasn't only that. His steady life here had just been pulled out from under him. Without her, he knew with a sinking feeling in his gut, he wasn't strong enough to keep command of the undead servants. He was not a true master, not yet. Most of the undead soldiers would just crumble apart, becoming immobile corpses again. But some of them, the ones who did not just return to the grave...

With only a few bags of needful things strapped around himself, he fled. He flew out the window, escaping from the old tower before the dead could realize that his magical hold on them was gone. He did not want to discover what kind of vengeance they could bring onto him. For all he knows, they still haunt that old battlefield, restless.

He joined the Caravan not long after. At first, it was just to lay low for a while. With the Caravan's endless roving, it's a place where anyone who knows his recent past as a necromancer's apprentice might have trouble finding him. But after only a few days aboard, he realized that he's going to stay. It's not just that it's the perfect hiding spot. It's that... well, he was lonely under Arynna, and the Caravan has many souls. He's dearly missed belonging to a nest.

Plus, its adventures give him many opportunities to practice his magic. If he is to be as accomplished as his beloved teacher one day, he needs practice.

Clothing among the Eratie is rather complex, dictated highly by class, sex and age, not to mention the natural limiting factors of one's Form, and it's shameful to deviate from the traditional style of dress.

For one such as Terilu, expected clothing is an all-leather robe that flows long in the back, down to the ankles, but is cut short in the front, revealing trousers and black shoes. There's a high, stiff leather collar to the robe, giving the ensemble an official if slightly dramatic air. There are slits for ones wings.

Through the last two years of travelling, Terilu has refused to give up this manner of dress. He left home with several outfits of this kind, and has learned to mend them when they are damaged so that he can keep on rotating through them even as he travels through hot summers and freezing winters. It's become a point of pride that he still dresses like a proper Ascendent of the Third Caste. Even if, by now, the robes are both torn and beaten down by the weather, and his shoes worn as old rat's skin.

Born on the 13th of Uktar in a brothel, where her mother took shelter. Unfortunately she died shortly afterward, so nothing is known of her human father. She was raised by the the staff of her Aunt Pol and Uncle Glyberos' house, largely ignored by the family, including their eldest daughter Sylna and their youngest son Keras.

Many visitors assumed the young girl was a child of one of the staff, as she would be frequently seen doing various servant chores. But when Marquis Muleho, friend to the judge and frequent visitor, discovered she was their neice, her Aunt and Uncle, deeply embarrassed, moved her to a private room and forbade her from doing any more domestic work. They also hired a private tutor to address her neglected education.

Marquis Muleho showed up one day with a spell book that he brought for Aunt Pol to examine, leaving it in the library. Later, when it was discovered missing, her uncle, his face burning red, went to her room first and found the burned out cover in her fireplace. Keras, who'd been checking her chest of drawers, turned around and presented the jewels that had adorned the cover. Glyberos flogged her until she confessed to taking the spell book (she hadn't), then used his authority as a judge to have her branded and imprisoned for five years.

It was in prison that she learned how to be a thief, a necessary skill to survive in that place. During her third year, diseased ravaged the prison and she spent long hours tending to both guards and prisoners before finally succumbing to illness herself. While she couldn't say for sure, there were times afterward that guards and the other inmates gave her some grudging respect and the occasional blind eye.

On her release, now fully an adult, she was immediately pressganged into the Royal Navy as a sailor, handed over to the crew of galleon The Golden Falcon. The next four years were spent in hard labor. Crew were not permitted ashore except in the company of an officer, who was authorized to execute them on the spot should they attempt to desert.

Her five years in prison had already inured her to the lack of privacy under close quarters. When Ilyana slung her hammock, it was in the middle of the group, rather than on the edges. She also realized that the thief mark on her palm would make others reluctant to trust her, while others would use it as an excuse to rob her blind by claiming she stole their things. Ilyana therefore kept most of her money on the ship's books, avoided gambling, taking care to mark her few possessions and to keep careful receipts with witness signatures.

In her fourth year at sea, the Golden Falcon was one of a squadron of ships whose job was to blockade the harbor entrance to contain the ships of the Pretender. Under cover of darkness, the enemy launched some of their ships with skeleton crews to go out with the evening tide, creeping up unaware on the blockading ships before setting them alight before escaping as the fire ships, drawn out by the tide, smashed into the blockading ships. In the confusion, the Pretender and the remainder of his fleet made their escape. Ilyana was the only survivor from the Golden Falcon.

Desperate to pull some sign of victory from this disaster, Ilyana was hailed as a hero for her survival - but instead of being released from service, her wounds were treated and she was transferred aboard the galleon The West Wind. Because of her 'lucky' status, she was given the 'honor' of leading the boarding crews - which led to the loss of her left eye in battle. It was the first of many battle scars she'd earn aboard the West Wind.

An arrow wound messed up her stomach - and wasn't helped much by the diluted healing potions they'd been supplied with, which made her very queasy and sick all over the place at the least sign of stress. They finally decided to discharge her from service in the Royal Navy, giving her a handful of medals, her silvered cutlass and dagger, the scarred leather cuirass she'd wear in battle, and all of her back pay on the books.

Animal Handling - good with donkeys, ponies, horses.
Archer - average skill with shooting a bow and arrow. Works best with a bow and arrows.
First aid - experienced in the basic treatment of wounds and illness. Needs bandages and medicinal herbs.
Lockpicking - some experience in the opening of locks without using a key. Usually requires lock picks, although some tools can be improvised on the scene.
Navigation - sufficient ability to navigate using a map, compass, and/or sextant to get to their destination. Maps, compass, sextant required.
Rigger - Experienced with ropes, knots, blocks and tackle, and rigging. Requires rope, fid, sail twine, pully blocks, serving mallets, etc.
Sailing - experienced in the basics of sailing. Requires a boat with sails.
Sailmaking - skilled in the crafting of sails and other articles of canvas work. Requires canvas, sail twine, needles, and rope.
Swimming - allows them to cross bodies of water.
Swordswoman - above average skill with her cutlass, especially in close quarters. Requires a bladed weapon.

Animal handling - has a way with animals
Apothecary - Master in the art of combining various medical herbs into pills, powders, and tinctures.
Cooking - a five-star chef in the kitchen. Might be best to wait a few days before asking what it is you ate?
Fortune-telling - it's almost like she's got a direct line with Fate, with a very large collection of Tarot cards.
Herbology - knows many uses for many plants, always eager to examine new ones.
Knitting - it may not be the prettiest sweater or whatever it turns out to be, but it will be warm with room to grow.
Medicine - a master at the craft of tending to illness and injury, can perform surgery.
Mimicry - she can make realistic animal calls.
Needlework - keeps her fingers nimble.
Orphic Line of Ikalis - a master in the Orphic Laws of Sacrifice (these spells often have some nasty costs) - Automata, Dowsers, Elementalism, Familiars, Furies, Wyrd Tech, Poltergeists.
Orphic Line of Idaqiohne - a master in the Orphic Laws of Sympathy (like calls to like) - Basic, Battle Magic, Constructs, Golems, Magic Eyes, Rune Magic, Wards, Zombies.
Painting - Don't touch the paintings, sometimes they touch back....
Potion-making - a master in the creation of potions, explosions are rare.
Singing - good singer, knows a lot of songs.
Violin - very good musician with the violin.

Hunters and storytellers, Ainok are a canine beastrace indigenous to the savannahs and grasslands that form the borders of Dinnin lands. Ainoks are usually shorter than humans, with a typical specimen standing between 4’11” and 5’6”, they have tough and compact bodies covered in a heat-regulating layer of blotched and multi-hued fur that gives them the name ‘Painted Folk.’ No two Ainok have exactly the same pattern adorning their fur, and the colours can range from deep blacks to pale cream and sandy khaki to russet red, allowing them to blend in with tall grass and lightly dappled groves alike.

Ainoks bear litters of children that can include anywhere from two to eight pups, who grow and mature slightly faster than humans do – reaching physical maturity at fifteen and being culturally recognised as full adults at sixteen. Well-adapted to a fast-paced hunting lifestyle, Ainoks are natural born sprinters, but this same fast-paced lifestyle claims many of them before their time. An Ainok’s natural lifespan typically ends at around sixty years of age, but many fall before their fortieth birthday, and those who make it to fifty are considered unusually venerable.

The Ainok are, to the surprise of many, part of the loose confederation of peoples known as the Dinnin: self-declared ‘chosen people’ of the God known as the Light-and-Flame, who they believe manifests itself as the sun. The Ainok are the most heterodox of the Dinnin, having adapted their old beliefs into the framework gifted to them by Dinnin preachers in order to form a fusion where the stars are individual gods, yet still each a part of the Light-and-Flame whose worship can be the key to a higher understanding.

Unlike the settled Great Clans, the Painted Folk maintain a semi-nomadic lifestyle revolving around the savannah’s dry and wet seasons. During the former they range extensively in familial tribes or packs to hunt, while during the latter they encamp at regular gathering grounds, forming large communities that take advantage of regular animal migrations to swell their food stocks. A fractious people, the Ainok are prone to intra and exopack conflict that forms the backbone of their unique system of adoptive slavery. Because of this, Ainok packs often include non-Painted races who have become Dinnin.

The Ainok also have a unique relationship with magic. Having traditionally had no written language, they do not have wizards, but instead ‘star-speakers,’ shamanistic astrologers and storytellers who not only commune with their astral deities, but also pass down the history of the Ainok people through ancient oral traditions.

Ainok do not traditionally use last names, as by and large they stay within small familial groups, and even during interactions between groups, misunderstandings are easily avoided. 'Freepaw' is a rough translation of the Ainok term for a wanderer who has willingly left their family, distinguishing Malleck from a banished and disgraced Ainok.

Of all the groups that make up the Dinnin people, it is the Great Clans who are the best-known by outsiders.
Empire-builders, architects and warmongers, they are the most civilised and settled of any of the Dinnin groups.
Born not long after the first Dinnin formed the Covenant with the Light-and-Flame, the first of the Great Clans were nothing more than bands of conquered humans who converted to the faith and rose up in the standings of the nomadic desert tribes, but as their numbers grew and their lands became more and more inhospitable, they were forced to leave behind their Baraka brethren, striking out in search of fertile lands.

Large united migrations of these sun-worshipping peoples threatened those who had already been struggling against the mysterious desertification of their realm, and the nascent clans quickly found themselves embroiled in conflict as they tried to settle and grow their population. Clan founders – many of whom were direct descendants of the original Baraka, led their people in a serious of great wars, carving out city-states that would form the basis of the modern Great Clans.

Like all dwarves, Gadri is unusually magically resistant- both to the hostile effects of magic cast upon them, and for the purposes of channeling magic themselves. Dwarves are not immune from magical effects- a fireball still scorches them and some can indeed channel arcane power, but dwarves as a whole have instead developed their own system of bending the immaterial to their will- Scriptsmithing. Known by several other names- runesmithing, glyphcrafting, and so on and so forth, the core of scriptsmithing is the same. With strike of hammer and bloom of flame, dwarves can imbue items, thereafter elevated to 'artifacts' with potent magical power. Each scriptsmith goes through decades of their life training in scriptsmithing- from days as a journeyman apprentice, writing and reciting the words, to a proficient student, capable of wielding the hammer themselves, to finally a fully qualified smith, each hammerblow pulling from sources beyond to fill their crafts with power.

By now, Gadri is a more than competent scriptsmith, capable of forging great artifacts for others, should they have the time and ingredients to do so. The very finest of scriptsmith crafts are made from the legendary 'starmetal,' believed to be leftover fragments of ancient Gods that came before the Light. In its raw form, starmetal is fantastically magically unstable, throwing out wayward energies that sicken and even kill those handling it unprotected- but the dwarves, with their natural resistances, are able to forge and refine it, creating artifacts with a beautiful damascene finish. Fantastically rare, Gadri has only three precious artifacts made from this stuff- their hammer, chisel, and a single ring, each one with its script woven with their own hands.

Scriptsmithing's potential, in the hands of a master smith, is almost unlimited. So long as one knows the words with which to express their intent, a scriptsmith can create anything from wondrous automata to staves capable of stopping a rampaging oliphaunt dead in its tracks. Alas, such a thing requires a dwarf far more ancient and far more competent than Gadri, whose crafts, while still potent, are greatly limited by not only their resources but also their age. One simply does not become a master scriptsmith in a century or two.

Trist is an old, forgetful land, somewhere to the west and somewhere to the north, not terribly far from the Old Marshes. It is a land of stone, earth, and bones, tilled and toiled upon by peasants, ridden hard upon by nobles, and settled extensively by wave after wave of migrant, invader and coloniser. Out in the oldest of its places, villages that once proudly stood for generations have been covered by the silt of time, and in their place are barrows and tombs... Yet in its beating heart stand proud citadels of heavy stone and sloped roofs, gutters near-overspilling from the rain that frequently drizzles down.

The earth of Trist is fertile and rich, fine fodder for the peasant folk to divide into hedgerow-split fields or to allow sheep and cattle to ramble over. Although few would call it the most blessed place on Alwyne, only a fool would deny that the people of Trist feast more often than they experience famine.

This was the land where Madame Morvanne was born to, as wind and rain crashed against sturdy stone walls, where the cries of her mother were drowned out by the crack of lightning and boom of thunder. She had a first name, once, of that she is sure, but she has found that whatever it was has become quite superfluous now.

In fact, many things about Madame Morvanne have turned out to be quite irrelevant over the years. Even to herself, her life is a patchwork thing, stitched together from threads of recollection around memories who have found new uses. Yet just because she does not remember them does not mean they never happened.

A child to a family of burghers - those who learn crafts like the peasantry yet live behind high stone walls, she was raised to be a lady-in-waiting, as it is the custom in Trist for wealthy women to have a learned assistant to help with managing their house in ways mere servants cannot. She learned to read, to write, to stitch together flesh so a doctor might not be needed, to count coins and tighten a purse, and to dress and undress another faster than they could do so themselves.

She was apprenticed to a family of minor nobility, but she quickly learnt that little was well within her new home. Her mistress was a weak-willed woman and she had a husband who used this against her and the rest of his household, heavy with his hand, harsh with his tongue, and prone to strong wine that made him all the worse for it. Morvanne learnt quickly that the one place her master rarely bothered to tread was the library of the house - a marvellous thing, but left neglected in the basement, where it secrets had been forgotten beneath the slowly gathering dust.

As she spent her time down there, blowing away cobwebs and parting parchment that had not seen candlelight in far too long, she began to read of things that perhaps ought to have been forgotten. She read of the Sun, and the splendour it once had. She learnt of the Flame, the Tenfold Essences of the soul, of how autumn did not lead to winter, but instead the Silence, and then she learnt of the Threshold, and she began to understand enough.

One day, her mistress noticed that she had not seen the young madame Morvanne around for an unusual while. Nor had her servants, and the master of the house could not remember a young woman by the surname Morvanne having ever worked at their estate before. Soon enough, the servants could no longer remember a madame Morvanne either. When the master of the house passed away - a tragedy for a sleeping sickness to strike like that, it truly was, all memories of Morvanne had left the house entirely, along with the quiet library buried in the earth.

But not all are as susceptible to such things as unwitting nobles, and not all are pleased by the twisting of shoulds and should-nots. Among Trist's people are those wise to the ways of ancient memories, and Movanne, with no tutor to guide her beyond the books, was not terribly apt at disguising the profession in which she found herself. When Wych-Finders came to her new abode she was forced to flee, and then flee again, until at last she realised that, for now, Trist was unsafe for her to say in. The Pilgrim's Caravan came at an apt time to allow her to quietly slip away, but she knew more than most that Trist is an old, forgetful land. She will return there, one day. Of this she is certain.

In plain English, Morvanne is a spellcaster dedicated to the various powers who those in the know refer to as the Oblitarchy, and the Tenfold Essences that Obliturges categorise. Morvanne in particular found herself predisposed to the Oblitarch known as the Threshold, associated with the essence of Hypist. This is the essence of the sleeping mind - where experiences become memory and memory engrained, and thus the Threshold is a peculiar thing - gifting and taking away knowledge in equal parts, and reigning over all that has been murmured in twilight.

Because of this, Morvanne is unusually well-educated considering her age in matters both of and not of this world, but this comes with it not only a forgetfulness of her own past, but also with remembering things that are not true, at least not within this Time. Outside of the Threshold, she also dabbles in the essences of Syis and Senopy: Change and Silence. Her lucky escapes and the sudden sickness that took her employer have not been entirely happenstance or accident.

To call upon these powers Morvanne must conduct rituals: long-winded things requiring careful preparation, the right ingredients, and potentially hours of tongue-twisting work to complete. Calling upon an essence requires items, people, times or places strong in that essence: A bloody knife for Ravume, a lover’s assistance for Percus or the deep midwinter for Senopy. For more complex rituals other, occasionally conflicting essences must be called upon and the more powerful the ritual, the more intense the essences going into it must be. A small Hypist ritual might only require twilight, but for the greater rituals… Well, a city on wheels is rather liminal, is it not?

The ‘Gods Before Gods,’ the Oblitarchy are a lost pantheon of deities who have, according to their believers, existed before anything else. Before there was Alwyne there were two of them: The Nowhere and The Glory, consisting of existence and everything outside of it, locked in an eternal dance which neither could overcome. The Nothing however, begot The Sunderer, and living up to their name they slew The The Glory and usurped The Nowhere, and from this calamitous beginning, all other Oblitarchs would rise, each one domineering an aspect of the mortal world that had formed with their struggles.



The Ten Oblitarchs and their Essences are typically depicted around a ten-pointed star, showing their relation to the other Oblitarchs. Clockwise, from the top:

The Sun Divided is the truest form of the slain Glory, heading the triarchy known as the Gods ex Solari. It is the rising sun – a peerless, wrathful, and unforgiving deity that seeks to bring forth the hours of The Glory once again and to gather all other essences within itself, to remake the universe as it once was. Its essence is Ejas, and it consists of the waking mind – higher intelligence, the drive of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and the unrelenting progress of mortals.

The Chalice is the second of the Gods ex Solari: Once the warmth and comfort of the sun that nurtured life, the Chalice still holds that benevolent spirit. Its essence, Prist, is the only of the ten essences that can be physically touched, for it consists of the physical body – bones, muscle, sinew and blood.

The Threshold heads the diarchy of the Gods Obsucras. The Threshold is twilight – it is soft and dimly lit, existing between day and night, and holds dominion over all that is liminal. Its essence is Hypist, and where Ejas is the waking mind, Hypist is the dreaming mind. It is a master of irrationality and illogic. It holds memories and recognition, half-truths and lies, and shares freely, although not without cost.

The Prism is the other of the Gods Obscuras and one of the more esoteric of an already esoteric lot. Shunning one form, the Prism is ever-changing and ever-formless, refusing to be neatly categorised or pinned down. Much like itself, its essence, Syis, is the constant drive for change and evolution, although it cares little for the direction that this change takes.

The Nowhere is the oldest of the Gods ex Nihi, and is the only of the Oblitarchs to have lasted unchanged from the dawn of nothingness. If the Oblitarchs can indeed dwell in our reality, The Nowhere holds itself somewhere far beyond the comfort of Alwyn, out in the unforgiving darkness where nothing dwells and nothing can ever dwell. It exists in contrary to anything else, and has created only once – its greatest mistake. The Nowhere’s essence is Nihi, and it is true illogicality. Things which must not be known and cannot be known, places where life itself has been banished, never to return, - these are where Nihi is strongest. Those few mortals brave enough to try to master Nihi are known as apocalypsists and almost inevitably meet untimely demises.

The Sunderer heads the Gods ex Nihi, having overthrown its parent and shattered the Glory. It measures itself not on its own merits, but on how effectively it contrasts the Sun Divided, the pair locked in eternal enmity just as the Glory and the Nowhere once were, long ago. The Sunderer’s essence is Ravume, and although often categorised as nothing more than hatred, jealousy, ego and anarchic rage, is far more about contest and competition, thriving where there is conflict, and quick to raise a blade when offended or challenged.

The Silence is an oft-forgotten member of the Gods ex Nihi, which is ironic, for it is the ultimate fate of all mortal life. The Silence reigns in the ice of deepest winter, at the bottom of the darkest caves and in the endless abyss deep beneath the ocean’s surface. Its essence, Senopy, is the quiet death that comes to all mortals not slain in piques of Ravume – old age, sickness, cancer and frailty, those things that linger deep within the bones of mortals that comes out one day to claim them – this is Senopy.

The Constant is the lesser of the diarchy known as the Gods Exertus, and is as much a contrast of the Prism as the Sunderer is the Sun Divided. It not static, but instead driving ever-forward, an unrelenting force that refuses to allow others to slow or divert it. Its essence, Effiv, is willpower and fortitude, and sheer dogged determination – the drive to climb the highest peaks and cross the deepest valleys for no other reason than that they are there, and therefore should be conquered.

The Flame heads the diarchy of the Gods Exertus, and is one of the most intimately mortal of all the Oblitarchs. The Flame is ingenuity and skill, progress not for progress’ sake, but for improvement and inspiration. Its essence, Emiv, was there when mortalkind first learnt to make sparks to tame the flames, and has been there for every subsequent step of the way. It is technology, learned skills and craftwork, and it will only grow stronger.

The Delight is the last of the Gods Ex Solari, and is the rawest form of the Glory – its explosive force, its pulsing rhythm, its undulating colours. Its essence, Percus, is lust and gluttony, sloth and pride, but also delight, love, happiness and all the other of the myriad emotions that swell a mortal’s heart.

An Ancient Whisper: It is said that once upon a time there was a winter that refused to end. At the ends of Alwyne, where the temperature never goes above freezing, there is water that has never known a form other than ice. Now it refuses to melt even when thrown into fire. A gemstone-sized piece of this ancient whisper resides in a small dish atop Morvanne’s hearth.

A Bell-Jar of Moths: On hazy nights, when the sky is dark and the air is fresh and clear, moths are irresistibly drawn to the small drop of incense left at the bottom of the bell jar. They always find their way home, in the end.

A Hand of Glory: Stolen from a gibbet, prepared in a mixture of nitre, salt, ashes and incense, dried in the days where the red star hangs low in the sky, hung from an oak tree to see three nights, then impaled to a temple to a false deity for a day. It takes a ritual to make such a powerful tool.

A Conclave of Candles: Each one embraced in its own case, each one a different peculiar colour. They smell of old books and fresh blood, of newly minted coins and fresh flowers. Morvanne lights them sparingly and always burns them to completion when she does.

A Lethey Concoction: Anaesthetic and amnesiac both, the waters of the Lethe are found best in one’s deepest slumber. Only a drop must be stolen from a dream to brew a full pot of sweet-smelling oblivion.

Knossos is a man who was born to a small village family in the humble farming village of Aktí within the Kingdom of Ordos, a coastal nation with a large eastern coastline and access to the sea since seemingly time immemorial. A kingdom that had little access to the outside by land, save for a pair of crucial northern and western mountain passes respectively dubbed the "Chióni" (Greek for "ice", aka the 'northern pass' out from the nation's northern border) and the "Fiume" (Italian for "river", named such due to the great river flowing alongside the pass down a steep cliff as one passes through it), it had been in the middle of various issues or conflicts over the years as well as notably involved at sea. Yet even with having the sea so accessible, the growing of crops and rearing of livestock was still very much important. Indeed, this would be the task the family of young Knossos had taken up for many generations within the inner land region of the kingdom proper.

At birth Knossos's surname, as was his family's already, continued on in the same old local tradition of one's surname being taken from the work and job they had. A simple enough matter, as it were, for the region and culture in which he lived. Meanwhile, Knossos' first name was actually somewhat abnormal for common folk.

Whilst the first names of children would originate from anything ranging from figures in legend, to places they were born, to those who the family or parents wished to honor in their lives or pay respects to, and so forth, trends in this naming structure trended toward certain lines of things depending on one's place and status of birth. Farmers and Woodcutters and such would usually use more land and terrain-focused names, whilst those such as scholars and magic users might get names based on famous authors or constellations or other phenomena that sounded fancy and sophisticated to use as a name, etc. So in this vein Knossos' own name was something of an oddity, only chosen when a passing magic scholar was hosted by the family on a journey to the north and assisted in his birth when one of the local midwives or the village doctor would not be able to make it in time.

So grateful were Knossos' parents for the help that the traveling magic scholar was given the chance to name him out of respect. No small honor to be sure, no matter one's class! Thus the newborn was named for the constellation locals called 'Knossos', which looked like a king sitting on a throne, named for the great and wise legendary king who once ruled the region in legend. Though the last of said king’s bloodline had long been assimilated by successors who conquered the area later on, forming the “Kingdom of Ordos” itself that still ruled the land even by the time Knossos was born.

With all of this in mind, Knossos still simply seemed poised merely to inherit the family farm and land in life. He had nothing going for him otherwise, and while pushed to learn to till the land and learn how it worked he still seemed to feel a restlessness within him from a young age. Indeed his young mind would wander to things greater than himself and the old stories of kings and legends long gone, and his parents were often sore with him or given myriad headaches simply trying to deal with him at times. In the end they would not need to worry in perhaps the worst of ways, however, as the new ‘village doctor’ assigned to the village by the crown when Knossos was just five would begin to influence the boy in a different direction.

Secretly a member of a cult dedicated to an alien being from a far-flung dimension/plane dubbed "iL'Thris the Deep Lord". Said cult would influence and draw in the young Knossos (among others) until he was ten, after which he in particular had his death faked in the nearby woods before being spirited off to the cult’s epicenter in the now-former capital of the Kingdom of Ordos proper (Cretia). Here the cult prepared him more rigorously for adulthood and joining their higher ranks, until eventually by the age of twenty one Knossos had grown to become somewhat of a rather adept learner. He had learned all the magic of the cult that he could absorb (acquired from iL'Thris), and reached the upper ranks of the cult as its youngest member. As was fitting for one of his new higher-up station within the cult’s ranks, if not unique to it, he would then be infused with part of the very flesh of iL'Thris as other upper-ranks had received as a ‘gift’ as well before him. All likewise seemed to be going according to plan, though, at least until the time when the long-foretold "Day of Summoning" came along.

The ritual kicked off, and disaster came, but a brave band of heroes formed in those days before the ritual (due to being affected by the cult in one way or another) and began to rise up to combat the cult most heartily as soon as things hit the fan. Not seen as a big threat before, these heroes received the blessings of the local gods and gathered resistance forces together under one banner to inspire and act as their spearhead before destroying the cult in a climactic final battle within the ruins of Cretia. Neighbors of the Kingdom of Ordos had even been about to send in reinforcements to take local lands under the justification of containing the threat, though with the passing of the threat it would lead to other issues in the following decades.

In the end, the leading hero of the group of heroes married the kingdom's princess, who was about his age, after having saved her from being trapped in a magic crystal deep within the ruins of the former royal castle. Such was the reward the old king, whose sons had been lost to the cult’s ritual and ensuing chaos, gave to the younger man in order to establish a successor of sorts. A heroic and popular one at that. Among the scant few people of the cult who managed to escape the bloody final battle somehow, all of such being able to be counted on one hand at the very most, Knossos sought to flee the land rather than stay around for the following years likewise bloody purges of cult sympathizers and members from within the kingdom’s lands the general population was rallied around. Somehow, despite the odds, the man would escape the kingdom’s borders.…and did so questioning everything he had ever known. He had lived and survived another day, but everyone else he’d known and grown up around since being taken to Cretia hadn’t.

But what of the enlightenment the cult had promised? What of the power, the truth, everything? Something like the cult, yes, it had to be true. But if this route to truth did not manifest for them, perhaps the next would? Yes! Another had to work! It had to. There was no other way, it was all he'd ever known. So he would have to find another route! Yes! Truth itself lied beyond the veil of any of this, it had to, and he would find it for the benefit of all this time! He couldn’t give up yet!

Thus Knossos would desperately claw his way to a land far away from his own, that being of the desert Kingdom of Khamsin in the vast and expensive Khamsin Desert. Here a new cult was found by Knossos several years later, being a group dedicating themselves to an Ancient Great Demon Lord named Ashtara who sought to take the region and transform it into a microcosm of where she had come from: A ravaged, dark, horrid demonic plane of sorts that she promised to her followers would be a paradise. A paradise free of struggle, war, and turmoil. Nothing but the best pleasures of life and beyond, and for all eternity. Despite his former affiliation, he did join the cult and manage to rise the ranks to an extent once more as he pursued things with a new zeal for years to come.

From Ashtara, he as well as other mid-rank members would be granted to drink some of her blood to receive part of her power and gain new magics. Meanwhile the higher-ups were turned into mostly demons themselves by also being merged with her flesh. Conjuring/summoning demons, making use of curses, casting red energy attacks of tainted demonic magical energy, and conducting blood rituals would become the things Knossos found he could do using this new 'gift'. Things again seemed to be going on the right track, and if lucky the man felt he could finally manage to see the sort of ‘paradise’ he had been promised for so long. Finally, maybe, the dreams of the sleeping dead could finally be achieved somewhere in the world.

Yet it would be when this cult tried to rise up and cast their big 'summoning ritual' to bring forth their patron that things would eventually turn. Having been stirring up more and more active and open trouble in the desert kingdom leading up to the ritual itself, the local lords and ruler had brought in their own forces to deal with a conflict on the southern border to avoid an attempted annexation of part of its territory…..in that vein, not many were left to help keep order. Thus some adventurers, and even mercenaries, would be hired on to try to help quell the trouble and help with local monster issues as the area dealt with its other major problem simultaneously. Indeed, among these hired swords a plucky band of mixed-bag-mercenaries-turned-good-guy-heroes would eventually stand out among them in rising up to help lead the charge against the cult as it tried to summon its ‘goddess’ into the mortal plane. Barely manifesting an arm of their patron at most to try to crush the heroes, and unable to complete it despite sowing chaos around the ancient ruins the cult had set up in out in the desert, it became clear this cult too was going to lose. Ashtara could see the writing on the wall, and merely withdrew after it was clear the cult could not keep it up, dragging the higher-ups who had been bonded to her flesh and most of the surviving mid-level hierarchy away into her home plane as ‘reparations’ for her failed summoning and leaving the rest of them (Knossos among them) to die or the like without a care in the world for them afterward.

Those living members left behind by Ashtara’s cult, Knossos included, were pursued and killed and slain and put to the sword as they scattered to the four winds. Knossos was only thirty five years old at the time, and barely scraped through the desert with his life before collapsing at an oasis. From here, he would subsist for several months before fleeing the desert altogether by hitching a ride with an outbound but small merchant caravan after hiding or storing away his old cultish clothing and gear. Yet it was also here he began to waver once more, leaning more into desperation to find ‘something that mattered’ and see it through. Two cults were all he had known, and there had to be something….anything to prove that everything he had learned and come to know wasn’t a lie. That such a method to bring peace and paradise to the world was worth it, that it was true, that it meant something! He just had to look again. Such a thing seemed so incredibly rare to run into, so hard to find, and yet he had to just look for the signs. The threads. The traces of something that he could use to find another home, one that perhaps this time he could help ensure would succeed this time.

His journeys would bring him to a land far in the northern hemisphere, farther north than he'd ever been in his life before, to a place filled with verdant pine forests and icy pale wastes that could easily kill one who didn’t come prepared. It was here Knossos came across a group seeking the power of an ancient civilization called the Vilkyn, a grand civilization that had once owned the whole of this particular continent’s far northern reaches and taken tribute from places even far away due to their might. A series of disasters, internal and external and manmade and natural alike, had brought the Vilkyn down into ruin eventually. Yet within those taboo ruins of their, as those peoples who had moved into the area in the passing centuries to live there had deemed them to be, a new operation had been set up by a noble from a nearby kingdom to the east.

Having gotten ahold of some old Vilkyn old records, said noble (whose territory was on the border with this area) discovered there was something of great value that lied where the civilization’s old capitol had once been. He had funded an expedition, began skimming money to help fund it in part, and brought in materials and ‘experts’ to help him seek it out. Knossos, as it were, had a sort of expertise that the noble desired before hiring him on. Even so the operation itself became more and more cult-like over the years despite how it had been set up at first, this being mostly due to the promises of power and eternal life that the ancient Vilkyn ruins and texts promised to grant and showed great promise for. This in and of itself was learned more about as the operation dug up Vilkyn ruins and texts on the occult arts they’d clung to and made use of in their heyday. The use of necromancy had a fine art for them, putting the risen undead to use, alongside their creation and implementation of peculiar magic constructs making use of ‘crystallized mana gems’. Said ‘gems’ were a unique creation of the Vilkyn, solidifying mana itself and shaping it into abnormally ‘mana-dense’ gems that could be used to power a wide array of devices depending on their form. In fact, these occult power sources seemed to almost be ‘alive’ as they doubled likewise as ‘programmable cores’ to imbue with controls and commands etched into them in some form long-lost magical scrawl and arcane occult scripting. Such magic was far from a standard magical practice, or had yet to be developed anywhere else or adopted by them….and why? None could tell, but those delving into the Vilkyn’s secrets did not pay such heed to the signs in any case.

Having joined on at first as a simple 'expert in obscure magical arts', Knossos would rise in the ranks of the expedition-turning-cult as he eventually became the operation’s resident expert in Vilkyn texts and magic over time. Then as the group became more obsessed and cultic, driven by a desire for power and made promises by the noble of becoming immortal ‘living gods’ now, Knossos would hold back and retain his powerful but key position as he watched on this time from within. He would gain the magical knowledge the group sought in full, at least, before things this time went awry as the operation tried to boot up a ‘eternal life machine’ powered by a vast amount of the race’s trademark ‘gems’ in the ruins of the former Vilkyn capital.

No interruptions. No discovery. And yet it all still went horribly, horribly wrong in the end. What was a machine meant to make the living Vilkyn nobility immortal and maintain that, the machine had been shut down by rebels through damaging it enough during the last civil war that saw the Vilkyn Empire of ancient times finally be destroyed. The noble-led operation-cult would work to restore the device, hoping to bind themselves to it, but upon doing this and activating the machine something different happened than they had expected. Originally the souls of those to be made ‘immortal’ had been imbued into the original ‘gems’ used to power the machine, and the ‘gems’ had been modified to encase their souls as ‘phylacteries’ to root them into the mortal plane. What the group had done was miss that step, and instead repaired it and put in standard-type ‘gems’ they had produced into the machine before activating it once more.

As Knossos discovered this facet of things in his latest research, he ran toward the site of the device below the ground in a hurry-....but was too late to stop the repaired machine’s activation. Having been left to monitor research and operations above-ground while the machine was activated, but having been intimately involved in the repair and restoration of the machine itself, Knossos still hadn’t volunteered to be among the first ‘immortals’ to be created by using it. He wanted to see how things went at first in this case, maybe provide help in case things went awry, etc. Meanwhile those who had assembled to ‘test the machine first’ had decided, right before activating it, to be greedy and not let anyone else become immortal by using it. Rather, they thought to kill all above the ground and live as immortal kings and queens over a vast realm of undead. At the same time, the machine had no proper vessel for the souls of those who had newly bound themselves to it….and it was still bound to many of those former Vilkyn nobility who were long dead by now as well.

Knossos arrived to witness those using the machine, the noble included, have their souls sucked out and sent to the afterlife after having nowhere to go. Meanwhile the bodies of these people were left as walking, lifelike-looking immortal undead without minds of their own. Likewise, all across the northern wastes and former Vilkyn ruins, former Vilkyn nobility would ‘rise’ in a way not intended by the machine when it had been originally created. Their bodies were recreated as rotted, angry, and wandering undead whose souls were trapped hopelessly still in the remaining original ‘gems’ of the machine and who bodies were magically-infused and even stronger ancient undead who clung to the ruins or even wandered the open frozen wastes (where ruins did not remain anymore, but where they’d died anyway) to kill any unsuspecting fools who sought to travel off of the beaten path. It was as much as Knossos could do to try to evacuate the remaining cultists above, and then grab and bag all the information on the Vilkyn the cult/operation had before things went wrong.

Soon after, royal forces from the nearby kingdom arrived hoping to arrest the cult members and take them en-masse and by surprise. Because the kingdom the noble had come from did manage to figure out something was going on…..and the noble’s own son and heir had helped them to boot behind the scenes. Instead they captured or killed fleeing cultists, though, the force (including the noble’s son and the kingdom’s crown prince at their helm) would be forced to retreat from the area as the undead appeared before them and around them seemingly out of the blue. From these people Knossos would manage to flee in the opposite direction, albeit not intentionally as much as having done so by sheer chance, managing to escape into the icy freezing cold with what little he had and the clothes on his back once more. Again. For the seemingly impossible third time in his life.

Even so, the thrice-over cultist would only get so far. Through weather and struggle, constantly-returning undead and lack of resources, he would push through until he collapsed on the ground a bit after he entered the first bit of greenery his by-then frostbitten and starving and very weakened body managed to come across. Being near a forest path to the far southwest, away from where the group had finally set up at the old Vilkyn capital's ruins at least, as infused occult flesh and magical power sought to keep him alive somehow. Yet where he was wasn’t really the most used route either. It was well-trod, but as of recent years had seen little traffic at all. Someone collapsed off in a bush just a bit off the side of the road had little to no chances at being found, much less find help. It was thus here that his vision blurred, his wounds continued to worsen, and he would pass out expecting to finally die.

His resolve to find 'truth' in the only way he'd known how, so indoctrinated into it he had become blind, would too finally break as his body seemingly did. Truth? He sought truth, but this path was not it. This way was not the one. None of them had been, in the end, anything but misery and death and woe. And what had he done? Run about seeking all of this like a fool for decades of life? He, a fifty-four year old idiot and murderer and thrice-former cultist, was going to die and be damned for it. He would not see the power of the Deep Lord transform a kingdom into an oceanic utopia of peace. He would not see a glorious paradise of another plane form around him as Ashtara had promised. He would not see the common man gain immortality and power and riches and glory either, as promised by the third and final cult (actually operation-turned-cult) he'd joined. Nothing. And so as he felt himself drift, the aging man would scoff at himself and allow himself to drift away.

….But this was not to be his fate, it seemed.

Waking up, the man found himself in peasant’s clothes and lying in a warm bed. A warm bed located in a northern town farther to the south than where he’d been, and in particular within a shrine to the local god Drothur (God of Travelers, Merchants, Wanderers, Transients, Homeless, and Foreigners). It was here Knossos’ first reaction was to panic, then manage to relax, and then simply and finally laugh aloud like a madman without a care in the world. Alive. He was alive, still, by some impossibility even he couldn’t help but laugh aloud about in this case.

As it were, a passing cleric of Drothur had found him, the clothes on his back, and his magical satchel containing all his things, and brought him to the shrine for care before giving the unconscious and nearly-dead man a change of clothes and getting him in a warm bed. Walking in with a raised eyebrow and small smile on his face, the cleric who had saved Knossos would come into the room and lean against the doorframe until the other man had calmed back down again. As Knossos soon after seemed to drop into a depressed state, though, the cleric began to speak up in turn to explain things.

This cleric had been guided by a dream to take that road, in particular even seeing the location they had found Knossos in, and had felt the hand of their patron deity upon him. But why? Knossos would wonder this and ask as he was forced to heal up for some time at the shrine, talking about everything to the cleric as he tended to him personally after that point. The same cleric who had helped him would leave, returning to travel as was their calling to do again, but would leave him with a parting message when he asked one last time the question that burned so brightly in his mind: "Why?" "Why save me? Why would even a deity care for me despite all the things I've done?". The cleric merely responded, with a smile, that-



And so the cleric left….and Knossos would as well some days later as well.

The occult-learned man would in the end find himself joining the Pilgrim's Caravan as it was passing through the same region. Claiming to be a hands-on magical scholar of sorts, he would take his occult expertise and magic and skills and set about to make the world a better place in any way he could. He would also seek to gather knowledge along the way to this end, to keep it safe, and to keep it hidden from unsafe hands. Not that he could do all of this for free, but the funds went into keeping his trade and business alive from stop to stop if nothing else. Allowed him to help others one way or another, even if it meant taking payment in coin or in gems or frankly in crops if it came down to it for his clients. Etc.

Ultimately on the road, and for the next seventeen years, Knossos would peddle his knowledge to assist others as an 'occult expert'. He would care for those dealing with haunted places or cursed items. He would be hired by nobles to investigate ruins, examine eclectic and rather niche 'magic items' for them, or try to assist with afflictions and issues caused by non-standard magical sources or origins. Such was his purpose. He would even buy up cursed items or such to 'contain' them safely, and for that he gained some reputation of a good but also wary sort. He even assisted areas with more 'zealous' beliefs to investigate certain matters relating to his expertise and skills, if only to work with the law and try to form an amicable relationship with such groups to avoid trouble on his part. At the same time, however, it isn't as if he is without potential to get into trouble due to what he is skilled in dealing with. His skills have been of use to the Pilgrim's Caravan itself at times as well, making him a staple of the last decade and a half in regards to certain matters if nothing else, and yet to date he knows the danger never goes away. The next plot, the next oddity, the next obscure magical issue, the next place that could potentially be where he runs into his past again, whatever it may be...

...but he will see his new chosen path to the end, no matter what!

Lore section 1 - "Naming Practices Within the Kingdom of Ordos/Knossos' Family History/Ancestor Stones and a Legend"

Knossos' original surname was "Faermer", but was not without an origin of its own to boot. Farmers would add differentiating spellings or emphasis in their surname to separate themselves, or even use different words related to their occupation that by tradition made their heritage and familial ties clear, meaning the 'simplest' surnames usually are the oldest ones due to being claimed first. Likewise, this has made record keeping in the kingdom easier and more accessible as it has developed over the centuries, though it also brought about legal cases of 'who claimed what surname idea first' at times as well (inevitably) that usually more wealthy families are able to win when brought before one's local nobles (or the local council of ruling elders in ancient times) or such. In the case of Knossos' family of birth, Faermer (a corruption of "farmer") was their particular surname. It is also among one of the oldest family surnames in the Kingdom, and the oldest among farming families who live in their area near the center of the rocky and verdant-valley-filled part of the inland territory of the Kingdom of Ordos. They are a family that, indeed, has stuck about stubbornly as mules and long tilled the land and lived in the same spot in the central region of the kingdom since long before the kingdom itself had even been born into existence.

So long have they been around they are among those in the kingdom's population who still possess what is called an "Ancestor Stone".

An Ancestor stone is a practice and relic from distantly pre-kingdom times, even before the 'legendary king' Knossos was named after, that saw family members were buried around or underneath a great stone or boulder rolled down from the mountains to one's home. Such a stone marked one's place of settlement and the center of their property as well, and the effort of getting one was seen as a labor that showed respect to one's ancestors and the land itself. It also acted as a place where the souls of dead family could watch over their descndants during a certain holiday held around the time of harvesting crops, which is still celebrated today even, called "The ____". The larger an Ancestor Stone was, though, the more awe-inspiring and respectable it was seen to be in the eyes of locals. In that vein the Faermer Family was known more notably in their local area by having the largest one in their region of the kingdom, rumored to have been brought down by an ancestor granted strength by some wild spirit or animistic deity living within the boulder to help him on his way after observing his plight to get such a stone. From this, it is said the Faermer were ever bound to this spirit that in turn still helped their dead watch over the bodies of their dead and the lives/land of their descendants.

Upon Ancestor stones the names of the dead ancestors would be etched and carved, and burials would continue to radiate out from the stone at the 'center' of this impromptu graveyard but would always remain pointed back at it...to point the dead back to those who came before so their spirits may join them in the afterlife and be able to help or watch over their descendants in turn. However, it is also of note that to bring an Ancestor Stone down was once a way of someone 'cutting off' from their parents and starting their own family. Starting anew. Starting fresh. Children of criminals in those rather ancient times would usually be expected to do this before the local community would see them as someone else who wasn't tied to a criminal as well, though one local tale tells of a child who refused to do this and cared for his family's ancestor stone after burying his criminal mother and father underneath it. The locals plagued this person with bad looks, ill-treatment, hiked-up prices for goods, refusing to trade with them, and the like, though when the village where this legend took place in was invaded it would be the ancestors of this child of a criminal who helped them fight back the party of raiding bandits who attacked and tried to destroy the village for loot and plunder. Said child then died after the battle was won, and the locals of this still small and mostly isolated village have continued to revere this 'child of a criminal' and said person's Ancestor Stone (cared foor by the child's descendants and relatives) as some form of locally-revered protectors ever since.

Lore section 2 - "How The Legendary King Knossos Earned His Kingship"

A great warlord of the Minotaur species, an army in tow, arrived from across the sea and balked at the strength of the inhabitants of the region that would eventually become the Kingdom of Ordos. The future king of the region, then but a young common man, approached him boldly despite others holding back in fear as the enemy had already been raiding the coast. The young man said that, "what we have not in strength of arms, we have yet in wisdom". Amused at this claim, the monster challenged this young man to a game. Three divine riddles, handed down by the gods of the warlord's homeland, would be given to the young man. None had ever solved them, but any who did would be granted great fortune and blessing on their bloodline forever for their wit and wisdom.

...Safe to say, the future king would win this contest and a divine revelation would come down upon the assembled group present at the contest. It was such that the warlord would withdraw from the region to attack another place out of respect for the gods of his own people. This future king would then become a greater leader, possessing almost supernatural wisdom and gifts in whatever he put his mind to. He would thus be named the "many-gifted", or "Knossos" in the local tongue, and eventually gain enough influence and power to found a capital in the same place on the coast he'd won the contest with the warlord.

Lore section 3 - "Cretia/Knossos' Throne"

It would be in this same place he solved the riddles, right there on the coast, the legendary king Knossos would found a new city of his own. It would also be on that same location the man placed the throne of his future palace, and this throne would come to be the throne of all future kings that would rise after him over the land after this Knossos united this coastal part of the area under his rule in a sort of city-state. Even when other invaders eventually came and took over and captured the rest of the region proper, and the Kingdom of Ordos formed from this, the same throne would remain in place and be used by the new royal line as a means to integrate with and gain more of the loyalty of the locals of the area even as bloodlines changed. Yet despite the fact the current Kingdom of Ordos' line was once invaders who have eventtually blended in with locals, they would outright forcibly marry into them the last of the old king's bloodline and keep the tradition in order to help that transition of power go over more smoothly. Not to mention, Cretia itself was a prominent coastal trade area where much wealth came in and out to boot alongside its advantageous position military-speaking.

After the disaster that saw Cretia destroyed, the former and ancient capital of the Kingdom of Ordos remains an accursed set of ruins and death that no one dares enter. Some of the cult magic still lingers there, with some aberrant creatures having made the ruins and nearby coast their home over the last fifty years. It is, however, a place to which access is blocked and monitored by constant watch patrols and a literal wall that blocks the rocky and only viable path down into the ruined city from inland. The Kingdom of Ordos' new capital is the city of Budino, a land-locked city but a surviving one close enough to the coast that it has thrived as a new trade hub. In fact, the Kingdom is now ruled by the hero who led his friends and party to defeat the Cult of iL'Thris' ritual and saved the kingdom from certain destruction, who along with his friends and wife and children watches over the land and seeks to keep it safe to this day.

Knossos' Throne, within the Palace of Cretia, sits directly under where the constellation of Knossos, said to be the legandary king's immortalized spirit in the stars, watches over and grants wisdom to rulers of the land from that place and position. This throne, however, was left within the ruins of what is now called the Old Palace of Cretia, sitting deep within the ruins and half-submerged in water and filled with emptiness, scars of the past, crawling creatures, growing algae, erosion due to time, and the like. It is a seemingly legendary relic and artifact by now that is said to still be sitting there....waiting for one to sit upon it and gain supernatural wisdom from that legendary king once more. Such has led a number of overly-reckless adventurers and criminals to their death, to the point it led to the ruins of Cretia being blocked off and kept on constant watch. Not to mention a royal decree from the current king that likewise mandates a punishment of death for any who enter that accursed place for any reason even these days...

Lore section 4 - "Home Plane of iL'Thris/Its Cult's Founding/iL'Thris' Motivations/Reasons"

A warped and corrupted ocean that spanned seemingly across infinity and whose true form was imperceptible to mortals and caused them to descend into madness.

The cult's founder was the one mortal the Deep Lord had shown its true and aberrant form to, being curious about mortals after a one in a billion chance it would ever take notice of another dimension/plane at all, but the chain reaction resulting from this had led the maddened cult leader to form and cult and begin spreading it in secret. Indeed the leader of the cult came about with maddened plans to one day overthrow the kingdom and summon a great monster to ravage the land. This cult's founder was the one mortal the Deep Lord had shown its true and aberrant form to, being curious about mortals after a one in a billion chance it would ever take notice of another dimension/plane at all, but the chain reaction resulting from this had led the maddened cult leader to form and cult and begin spreading it in secret...with maddened plans to one day overthrow the kingdom and summon a great monster to ravage the land.

To iL'Thris, it simply saw that the mortals seemed happy and so it was generally pleased as a result. It was an utterly alien being mortal minds could not wholly or safely percieve, but the actions it took and what it gave to the cult was out of a sort of confusion and compassion. Because while it couldn't grasp mortals' minds and most things, it could understand their emotions and responded based off of that alone. A very peculiar situations, as it were.

Lore section 5 - "iL'Thris' reason for imbuing higher-ranking cult members with part of its flesh"

iL'Thris was taking pity on their 'fragile mortal lives', thinking this was their request for help in that sense and it seeking to be merciful to help the seemingly 'good friends' of the one it had made contact with

Lore section 6 - "The History of Realm Between the Rivers, Surrouinded by The Scorching Deserts/Kingdom of Khamsin General Info"

An ancient land on the Theseoran Continent that had begun as a cradle of civilization on the far southwestern region of its home continent, placed right on the equator, it had been inhabited at first only by the ancient Iwiw (a jackal-like canine beastman race) who had built up the original Kingdom of Uat there between the fertile Nilei and Ma'at rivers coming in from the northwestern coast to build up a civilization of their own. The Uat civilization lasted over three and a half thousand years before it would be broken and put under the yoke, though some such foreign-conquering rulers would maintain some of the land's practices and such to help maintain power, and the land saw civilization there going from fledgling kingdom in super ancient times to ancient empire to being subjugated by others and breaking free each a few times over each. Yet ultimately the Khamsin region itself would go about being shattered quite catastrophically into fragments and five centuries of disasterous chaos by a short-term but vast expanding empire from the far north (as punishment for involvement in a certain foreign war). It saw the region vastly depopulated (but not entirely, mind) of its usual natives, scattered in multiple diasporas due to disaster or slavery or the like, many sub-races go literally extinct, and then eventually a group who had controlled areas of land around the capital rising back up to found the new "Kingdom of Khasmin" after 250 years ago shaking off the yoke of the "Taurian Empire". Since then the Kingdom of Khamsin has persisted until now as a modest but notable kingdom by current times, a growing power with a great strength in its wealth and trade without a doubt. A kingdom known for its mix of ancient ways and modern innovations and so forth, and a melting pot of trade and harsh landscape and so forth, the Kingdom of Khasmin was a pale call of the original Kingdom of Uat in ways to be sure. Even so, it was more stable, advanced, and enduring than it had ever been before as a former 'breadbasket territory' of past nations.

The Kingdom of Khamsin itself is a place that currently hosts a number of influences, but unlike its ancient glories it is but a modest kingdom and unlike its days as a mere territory of other nations it is an independent power these days. Its capital city of '____ ____' lies in the fertile land between the Nilei and Ma'at Rivers, being a 'scorched paradise' that sits at the epicenter of land trade in the region as it passes north or south to bypass the rest of the immense deserts surrounding the fertile areas between or otherwise hugging the shores of the rivers.

The kingdom's fertile river lands have mostly been agricultural by nature for all of its history, though foreign conquest and attempts to boost this food production one way or another have reduced the useable land of this former 'breadbasket' of ancient times in a general sense. What remains of farmable land has been more than enough to feed its people, build up large food stores for times of occasional famine or war or other such disasters, and even export a fair bit of food to the outside world in order to build up a more than sizeable amount of wealth. Ancient cermanic pipes once also carried water from the rivers to locations farther into the desert, creating ancient 'lost towns' and even a few 'lost cities' buried in the sands after the Kingdom of Uat came crashing down. None have bothered to replicate these feats for mostly practical reasons ever since, as there's always been other matters at hand to deal with. Even after the "Ashtara Disaster", or what is locally called "The Great Isfet" by the remaining descandants of the Iwiw, these areas have mostly gone abandoned or only taken up in by temporary graverobbers or desperate criminals or bandits fleeing into the deserts. There is a reason these areas out in the middle of the hot desert were left abandoned in the first place!

Even the particular spot "The Great Isfet" took palce in has frankly been abandoned by now once more, left riddled with ancient tombs (both robbed and untouched), collapsed or buried or sun-baked ruins, and ancient burial protective magics and now occasional wandering demons who still exist there by current times.

The Kingdom of Khamsin has very few who even attempt to speak some changed or culture-and-time-warped form of the old Iwiw tongue these days amindst the race's descendants, as it has become a language mostly used in studies by scholars of history who learn to at least read or decipher it to some extent or another or want to sound fancy speaking it. Taurian is the common language of the land, and that is only because it has become so by being the common tongue of the Kingdom's surrounding neighbors after its enforced introduction as a 'common tongue for trade and politics' in particular. Minotaur, who brought in the language with them, are also consequently the large-standing species who form another just over a third of the population of the Kingdom of Khamsin and form either a sizeable part of or a majority of the populations of the kingdom's neighbors as well. The languyage and Minotaur themselves were introducted latest into the region, brought in by the "Taurian Empire", and forced on locals to try to wipe out the local languages that had settled there over the millenia. Tehse efforts were generally sucessful, even if not fully so, though even now the descendants of the Iwiw who remain living in the region form a sizeable third of the population with species-related relatives scattered on the four winds. The only ones who speak a descendant of that original language of the Iwiw are usually very rural places, some of them almost isolated from the outside world, but which have still been well-affected by the changing times over and over again in some capacity. It is also in these most rural of these areas at that where one can potentially find some traditions or ideas that hail back to the time of the Iwiw still, more or less distantly, at that.

Mostly Minotaur have places among the nobility and within the local 'governance', which has left a somewhat shrinking bad taste in the mouth of a number of other local species who have begun to forget the old status quo more and more, but it is also something to note that a minority of Iwiw-descendant noble-bloods have remained stubbornly in place as well as part of the politics that led the Kingdom of Khamsin to break free and become indpendent in the first place. The remaining 'third' of the local population of the Kingdom of Khamsin is generally mixed from different species and places, who either migrated there, took over at some point and sent a lot of their people in to settle the area, or the like over time and led to some kind of assimilation there.

The Kingdom of Khamsin has a ruler and royal family, who especially culturally are still prominent in the local mindset and generally rules. However, outside of certain matters and edicts most laws are passe by the monarch convening with the "Council of Nobles" where the nobility help manage the kingdom proper and have a say of sorts. The council is a sort of medieval 'legislature' in that sense, not having full powers but certinaly taking part in thins and reducing royal power in return for having supported the orignial rebellion that saw the region freed over two centuries ago from the control of the collapsing Taurian Empire. The politics of the Kingdom of Khamsin certinaly are heated at times, though have generally remained stable enough to keep things running and not go into more than one civil war since its independence by now at least. What the future holds for the area, though, only time can tell.

The Stone Clans -
They are giant clans which resides on the tallest mountains in the North. Each clans is made up of 6 tribes that have their own leadership. The clans are all specialized in different crafts and trades. Some are great Earth magic users. Some are miners. Some are traders.
The Clans are lead by the Giant King, a legendary being that is 20 metres tall and it's said to be older than most races. The tribes are all lead individually by tribe chieftains but all answer to one Clan Chief which is chosen from within the tribes that make up the Clan.

Q&A
1. What are the names of the six tribes within each clan, and what are their distinct specialties or crafts?

The Clans are as follows:

The Stoneclaw Clan - They are all warriors of high demand. Some join up as mercenaries while others serve as the military arm of the Clans.
The Stoneheart Clan - They're the miner of the Clans. They live deep within mountains mining different minerals or making space for other giants.
The Stonehand Clan - The Earth Magic masters of the clans.
The Stonefeet Clan - This Clan is composed of smaller giants. They're the trading arm of the Clans.
The Stonemind Clan - They are the thinkers, the inventors, the smart giants.
The Stonemouth Clan- They are the farmers, the caretakers of the Clans. Great Yao Guai sheep and Yao Guai goats are being herded, bred, milked and slaughtered for the clans.

2. How do the clans interact with one another? Are there any alliances or conflicts between specific clans?

The clans all answer to the King and his laws. If there's a dispute between tribes, the Clan leader can be petitioned to resolve the issue. If there is an issue between Clans, it'll be up to the King.

3. Tell me about the unique Earth magic abilities of some clans. What can they do with this magic?

The Stone Shapers model mountains to fit their needs. Rituals lasting decades can be done to raise new mountains or rocks can be shaped in any form they wish.

4. How do the clans obtain the resources they need, considering some are miners and traders? Do they trade with outsiders?

Everything done by the Clans is meant to be used by all clans. The traders only deal with their own unless caravans from the other races reach their lands.

5. What's the history behind the origin of the Stone Clans, and why do they live in isolation?

Ancient Conflict: Many centuries ago, the Stone Clans faced a devastating conflict with a powerful neighbouring civilization. This conflict, known as the "War of the Peaks," led to immense loss of life and resources. This combined with their size made them to be seen with suspicion and fear.

6. How do outsiders view the Stone Clans, and do they have any interactions with smaller communities?

Most nations don't know about the existence of the Stone Clans as they live far from most nations. Those that know of them, prefer to let them be than face their wrath.

Mycomancy
Gru isn’t just a businessman. He’s also a practitioner of a dark school of magic that manipulates fungi, especially mold–a fact he’s gone to great lengths to hide. He only ever practices it in the privacy of the Chuck Wagon’s interior, and even then in very small scale, manipulating mold to make cheese and the yeast that ferments wine to speed up the processes. In his time with the Caravan to date, he’s never needed to resort to using it for combat in front of the others, instead relying on his rats for self-defense. However, it’s possible for him to infest living things with mold that corrupt and weaken them from within, reducing their speed and defense so much that even he can kill them easily, let alone his rats. This mold can also be used to break down and dispose of dead organic matter, and create mold creatures under his control

Gru also owns four cheese-making tools that he keeps in his Chuck Wagon which happen to be usable as weapons. This includes:

• Two cheese knives the size of scimitars, curved and with double-pointed tips
• A cheese fork with a shaft so long it functions as a bident
• A spico, a kind of curd-cutting tool about the size and shape of a large mace, but with a head shaped like a round cage of blades
• A curd harp, essentially a shovel where the head is a square array of cutting blades

He could try fighting with these if he wanted, but they're mostly wielded by his favorite rats when they become Rat Kings. This is when Gru commands them to use swarms of their fellow rats to create large, bear-shaped rat masses that Pepper, Rick, Wensley, and Reggie 'pilot'. These Rat Kings are very strong, but since at least a few rats die whenever the Rat Kings take a hit, they'll typically fall back to regroup if threatened with serious losses

Greatest Desire: To never face the consequences of his actions

Alignment: Lawful Evil

Three Likes: His rats, his cheese, and his trade

Three Dislikes: Nosy people, unreasonable people, unmanageable people

Driving Organ: After seeing where his mind got him, Gru decided to follow his heart

Worst Fear: His secret getting out

Favorite Color: Wine red

Most Like The Animal: It’s hard to say

Favorite Time of Day: Dinnertime

Style of Dress: Gru dresses in the style of early industrialists, like the archetypal oil baron, with a rough, outdoorsy sort of formal wear. He’s given to large, heavy, long coats, expensive but still highly functional, worn over a pinstriped suit vest and pants with accompanying tie, ascot, or bow tie (his favorite). He prefers dark, desaturated colors, including black, brown, gray, and red. Most often he wears gray, accentuated by wine red. He’s seldom seen without gloves or boots, a mix of function and (perhaps questionable) fashion that nevertheless form a iconic aesthetic. Most iconic of all are his very small dark spectacles and his 'mad hatter' top hat. That hat's brim has upward-turned side flaps that are much larger and rounder than usual which together with its pink underside give the impression of big, floppy ears. One other thing to note is that all of his coats seemingly have a big gray fur collar. On closer inspection, this collar is actually a mass of live rats, so he literally has rats on him at all times (when possible, anyway). He also keeps one of his four favorite rats under his hat at all times, which itself wears a hat while doing so

Favorite Season: Spring, the best season for farm animals to feed on fresh growth, and thus the best season for cheese

Beliefs: That everybody deserves a second chance

Vitae, also known as the energy of life is a universal force that dwells within every living being. To use it and train in it, you need to unlock it via meditation, training, and often a life-altering event. In general, the use of Vitae is simple, it enhances the body. Be that it's agility, strength, recovery speed or train of thought. It might make you jump higher, run faster, think faster or recover faster. As a source, it is not unlimited and should not be used for prolonged periods of time, if a being fully runs out of Vitae, they cannot access it for at the very least a month.

The way one trains Vitae is mostly by meditation, by transferring and absorbing the Vitae in the surrounding area one's source can grow. However if one kills a being by draining it's Vitae, the energy gets corrupted, turning poisonous unless repelled or extracted.

In simpler terms, think of it as the classic Murim cultivation without it being bound to weaponry.

What They Most Want:
A purpose in life, enjoyment, and time to hone his skills

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be:

Chaotic Neutral
Three Likes:

Martial Arts, Learning new things, and Herbology
Three Dislikes:

People asking him about magic, boredom, and people claiming Vitae is magic.

Ivraan genuinely hates it when people claim Vitae is magic, it is far beyond a pet peeve and more closely an obsession to prove people wrong.

Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?:

Their Heart, the reason to join the Caravan was a spontaneous one and ever since Ivraan has been following his heart.

Worst Fear:

Killing someone by absorbing their Vitae.

Favorite Color: Red
Most Like The Animal:

Leopard Seal, cute and bubbly until he needs to hunt or protect.

Favorite Time of Day:

The evening.

How They Dress:

Mostly seen in either his tailor-fit leather armor or in common travelers' clothing.

Favorite Season:

Spring

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):

Gaia, or something that resembles the Earth Mother as this belief is closely linked to Vitae.

Lynn was once young. She once lived a modest but happy life in the countryside, surrounded by those who loved her. And she once saw the smoke rising from her neighbor's homes, and the warlord's army descending. As a child, Lynn saw her village razed, her parents murdered, and her friends taken away to become slaves, like her. Barely a teenager and now a slave, Lynn was shipped across seas and carted across plains for more than a year, traded between the hands of merchants who dealt with humans like livestock. At the end of the journey was a city that seemed like paradise--the city of Liva.

Ah, Liva! City of color and light, city of smells and tastes and sights so wonderous one might even call it gaudy! Here, the women dress up for breakfast, then change their outfits at lunchtime, and then again for dinner, evening, and bed. Here, the men parade the streets on majestic black steeds, armor gleaming, glittering, blinding. Here, the children light firecrackers in the streets at dusk, their shouts of joy mixing with the sounds of the city--half melody, half cacophony. In Liva, festivals are held almost every day, and the people are permanently drunk with wild joy, or maybe just drunk.

In loud, blinding Liva, Lynn found herself.

Liva was lively. Yes, even beautiful; but even the most beautiful city has its flaws, and Lynn saw most of them up close. The love of beauty became vanity, the love of celebration became frenzy, and the love of love became lust. And for a city whose appetite for the beautiful, shiny, and spectacular is unending, the supply must be also be unending. With her golden curls and rapidly developing figure--a non-issue to the Lynn Protected, but a dangerous, unnerving thing to the Lynn Captured--Lynn was the perfect product. The madam of the Blue Rose, a well-to-do brothel, immediately recognized the value in the young girl, and purchased her on the spot.

She was sold at the age of 14. By 15, she was a favorite of many patrons across Liva, both important and unimportant, and Madam Rose could not be more proud of her top earner.

Those years were the hardest for Lynn. The people of Liva did everything so loudly, and she struggled to learn their flowery language and extravagant customs. And while not every client of hers was a depraved beast, all were faceless, unfeeling. She grew used to being used. Her blonde curls, once the pride of the village, were now just another reminder of the vanity of Livans. Her body was a nothing more than an encouragement to insult, to catcall, to touch, to judge, to use. She was always being touched, everywhere. Some men would hurt her. Others would barely look at her.

By the time she was 18, though, things had begun to change. Madam Rose and the Blue Rose had prospered, and the prostitutes of the brothel were treated well. Lynn ate well; she was warm and well-groomed. Her beauty had fully blossomed, and she knew how to reel in the customers with a gentle and kind demeanor. The other prostitutes knew her, and while some were jealous, others offered her advice and wisdom. She learned how to navigate Liva, learned how to speak their language like she was born there, learned to love, in least in some small part of her, their festivals, their fashion, their songs.

It was then that she was introduced to the loom. The craft of weaving captured Lynn's heart and mind. The weavers of Liva were proud and skilled craftswomen, and Lynn admired their dedication and their stern countenances--traits so not like Livans, and yet these weavers were behind all the most beautiful outfits in the city. It took time to learn the craft, and longer to convince the weavers to teach her, but soon enough Lynn had a small loom in her room, where she would weave for hours. The detailed, repetitive work soothed her; feeling the threads grounded her mind in the present, the painful memories of the last decade melted away into nothingness, and Lynn could believe she was almost happy.

Things continued like that for years. Lynn continued her work at the loom and at the brothel, dreaming of the day she could sell her work, leave the Blue Rose, and maybe even go home. The turning point came when she met Valentin.

Tall, handsome, and gentlemanly, Valentin was her client only once. Captured by Lynn's beauty and intrigued by what might lie behind her gentle persona, he returned to the Blue Rose again and again, just to catch a glimpse of the "true Lynn." Lynn was struck by Valentin's unbothered manner, his oddly modest dress, and the way he seemed to really care about her. What began as curiosity grew into a friendship, and then, eventually, a romantic relationship. For the first time in more than a decade, Lynn felt respected and loved. For the first time in years, she had hope for a better future.

At 22, Lynn gave birth to her third child, a son.

Finally. A chance at a happy life, a normal life. Away from the Blue Rose, away from Madam Rose, away from her past life. Valentin had wealth, but he was also private; with him, Lynn could spend her days weaving and caring for her son, unbothered by the judgement of society. Just them three, a happy family.

Imagine her surprise, then, when Lynn discovered that Valentin had a wife. Heartbroken and furious, she confronted Valentin, only for him to dismiss, berate, and insult her. It was when he raised his hand against her that she understood: Valentin was not going to give her the happy life she wanted. She returned to her loom in tears, her hopes and spirit crushed.

Yet, when she looked at her newborn son, she couldn't stand the idea of staying in Liva a second longer. Her son deserved better than this vapid, soulless city that had used and abused her for so long. It was clear Valentin didn't care about them and wouldn’t lift a finger to help, and Madam Rose was bound to be just as (or more) merciless.

It was decided, then: She would have to do this herself.

Lynn's departure was as unassuming as her entrance. No Livan paid mind to the woman with a baby boy in her arms, her precious loom strapped to her back, and her curls chopped off. She boarded the caravan without a second thought, refusing to look back at the city she had called home for decades. The Lynn of Liva was no more. And good riddance!

What She Most Wants: for Pio to be happy.

If She Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be: True Neutral

Three Likes: Weaving, Pietro, a long nap

Three Dislikes: Being touched, being stared at, liars

Does She Follow Her Heart or Their Mind?: Heart

Worst Fear: Losing Pietro

Favorite Color: Royal Purple

Favorite Food: Tomato Sandwich.

Favorite Time of Day: Sunset.

Favorite Season: Autumn.

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers She Worships: Lynn has prayed to them all, and none of them have answered.

Other: Lynn has had two other children in her youth, both daughters, that were taken from her soon after birth. She aches for them.

What They Most Want:

To find their library or rebuild it.

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be:

True Neutral

Three Likes:

Knowledge, people asking for books, learning new things.

Three Dislikes:

People disrespecting books, people hoarding knowledge and his past.

Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?:

Their mind, for Vorex has no heart

Worst Fear:

Being unable to rebuild the grand library.

Favorite Color:

None, Vorex was not given one.

Most Like The Animal:

A crow? Since it's linked to knowledge and wisdom.

Favorite Time of Day:

Night.

How They Dress:

Always seen in what seems to be the same jute coat.

Favorite Season:

None, Vorex was not given one.

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):

None.

Her real talent is the magical gift she's worked to nurture throughout her career. Her chosen name of "Scrapblast" reflects her chosen arcane art: the manipulation of magnetic fields. She naturally manipulates objects to her will, pulling them closer to her or launching them away. In combat she makes use of this by disarming opponents and using their own weapons against them, ripping swords out of the enemy's hands before plunging them into their necks.

While such magic isn't strictly limited to ferrous metals that sort of material is much easier to work with. She can lift a few hundred pounds of steel or pig iron without much difficulty and could conceivably lift up a couple tons of the same (provided it was all one solid object, and with great strain) but her capacity is limited with non-magnetic metals such as lead or copper. Scrapblast can even shift non-metal or even organic objects as all things have a magnetic field, but she can only move a tenth of what she could a ferrous metal.

-Armor and Shield: She doesn't actually adorn herself with grisly trophies...usually.
-Weapons: Has her axe and a variety of knives for skinning people and animals alike. In addition to proper blades, she likes to carry a grab bag of metal shards and a pair of solid iron ingots to pelt the enemy with.
-Net: A blanket of steel rings that she can launch at someone to disable them, now more commonly used for mundane fishing.
-Bedding
-Mess Kit
-Money: A variety of coins, most of them looted or stolen.
-Moron: A riding moose, a magically-produced breed originating with the druids of the Tildretti forest. At twenty hands tall he's pretty much the only thing big enough for Scrapblast to ride and he's as smart as any donkey. The problem is that he's just as stubborn to boot, thus the name.

Reliquary: A small box of lacquered wood, lined with lead and treated with magic so that it's stronger than steel. The container itself is purely functional, but the shards of bone and scale within carry personal and religious significance for Thozna. They're pieces of an Ashvenkal dragon, extremely rare and extremely dangerous. Just looking at them can cause those unfamiliar to suffer nausea and a lingering, almost nihilistic dread as the alien energies still suffusing the remains leak into the world. Thozna mediates with these pieces clenched in her hands and jaws, working to overcome the weakness of her current self by communing with the echoes of the now-dead beast.

The reliquary can be used as a focus for her magic and in doing so changes the nature of it from focusing on magnetism to decay. Scrapblast drains the soul from her foes, feeding off their strength to revitalize herself. However, this is an extremely risky maneuver as trying to harness the Dragon's remains can backfire. If she's not careful she'll end up being consumed from the inside out.

It is chained to her at all times.

The druid-in-training can't perform much in the way of big, showy spells yet, instead relying on more mundane but still useful magic tricks. With a little bit of focus he can restore life to failing crops or sick creatures, giving them some extra strength with which to fight on. Small cuts and gashes can be healed with a quiet song, and he knows how to produce a number of useful tinctures and tonics.

In dangerous situations he can instinctively call upon nature to defend him, although he has little control over the shape it takes. A cloud of flies might suddenly buzz out of nowhere to blind an attack, a shower of sparks might singe their hair or they might find the solid ground they walk on is now a quagmire.

And while he's not hurling around armored knights like Ol' Scrapblast he is really good at skipping rocks. Like, magically good. Sometimes he can bounce one ten times in a row. That counts for something, right?

-Buford: Ryt's pet and almost-familiar, a very friendly and slightly stupid dog. Buford is still a bit too obstinate to be an assistant but his connection with Ryt does make the boy's magic a little more potent when he's around.
-Knife: Designed for pruning plants and sawing through small branches as opposed to fighting but Thozna makes him wear it on his belt anyway.
-Druid's Kit: Put together by Miss Moi as a parting gift. Contains a mortar, pestle, measuring spoons, vials for samples, seeds and various other bits and pieces.
-Money: Thozna gives him a little pocket change here and there.
-Trelawney: Thozna's giant horse-moose thing is too smart and stubborn to pull the cart so it falls on the smaller, stupider mule to do so. Sometimes carries Ryt in addition to a million other bits and pieces.

A race of humanoid, and indeed human-derived, people from a planet far, far away. Best described as animistic spirits, or ‘Kaisa’ in their own language, controlling empty human bodies that shift and alter their physical makeup to match the spirit controlling them. Visually, they look almost like humans - but sport unnatural eye colors, foxlike feet, long claws, large canine teeth, large fox-like ears, and large fox tails. They reproduce normally, and reproduction with humans will produce a Kitsutamin offspring. There are two notable attributes of the people that set them apart from the norm. First is their ability to adapt to new environments over a period of some years, adapting resistance or immunity to any injurious traits of the environment. Second is their lifespans - utterly random, utterly unpredictable. Go to sleep every night, not knowing if this will be the last one. The connection of spirit and host body is a tenuous one that can break easily. Some among them have nine tails, a part of a long and arduous process towards some sort of immortality and gaining immense power along the way. Others, like Fumiko, born to these individuals, do not possess any remarkable powers - but are notably more stable in their spiritual connection to the body, granting them the opportunity to some day gain power like their parents. How humans evolved on another planet, however, is another matter entirely…

The ruffling of a sheet of paper fills the air as the strangely clad woman sets herself down with a slight grunt, followed by the dim sound of a sword scabbard thumping against the floor. The cracking of someone’s mouth opening, then closing, then opening again. “And you are wanting to ask me questions why, again?”

Her words come slowly, and are stilted, thickly accented, as though only just recently learned and poorly practiced. Certainly, she is not from here. Not from *anywhere* near here. The strange black material in her face and adorning small parts of her body, the contraption strapped securely to a strange pouch on her thigh, the sword and scabbard made of materials wholly unrecognizeable. That enough was sufficient to mark her as an anomaly - but the two large, white, foxlike ears that protruded from the top of her head, and the nine large white fox tails that trailed behind her, unlike anything else seen before, only added further mystery to her origins. She looked almost human, were it not for those ears, those tails, the odd color of her eyes…

“I had questions for you, newcomer.” Comes another voice, and the sound of shuffling paper fills the room again. “You’re clearly not from here. If what I’ve heard is to be believed, not from this world. So what are you? Where are you from? Why are you here?”

The woman sighs, “Hoshitsune Fumiko, Commander, Yatovinan Aerospace Forces, serial number 5-81- [UNTRANSLATEABLE]. Look, I do not know, yes? I am just as confused as you. Can I go?”