Everything is the maw slashed into existence.

Existence is nothing except the maw, this endless chasm with no terminus; endlessly extending, splintering; endlessly long, endlessly plunging into the darkest depths, reaching endlessly upward with its bleakly striated walls towards the thin wan slit of pale-ghost light scavengers and exiles, bone-wings and darkcrawlers, hermits and exultants call the sky.

Try not to fall.

The darkness below croons a melody in the heart; ripples now and then with motion, dark on dark.

Try not to fall.

Winding up and down the chasm’s fissured faces, like the tiniest ants, look there: thin tracks carved into the cliff-face, splitting and meeting, hugging the wall, at times hemmed in with flimsy fencing, most times open to the air and the maw below, leading to tiny pockets of ruby-green, coiling weedery; or to larger, spiral-carved ledges and rough-hewn uneven cells stacked upon each other, like clinging growths emerging from the dusty sooty stone before burrowing deeper within its face. And within those cells, light flickers and furtive figures flit.

Penitents find their way here, and exiles, and those who know no other way, seeking release. None trust the strangers who seek to mine the maw’s splintered faces, nor the fools seeking the melodious dark.

And here, and there, strange luminous spars — like green-white glass, like smoky ghost-amber — reach fitfully across the maddening gulf. Creeping, inching, a hair at a time, tiny ripples of new growth stretching across the darkness. Sometimes they even meet. More often they shatter, and the denizens of the cells scavenge what they may.

Do not answer the melody.

Try not to fall further.

* isolation * unbalance * loss * bleakness * privation * penitence * abyss *

Welcome to the void, traveller — a void lit by a softly pastel, softly golden, softly bloody numen that never relieves the velvet lack-of-colour of the plane’s black emptiness.

But you are not alone, not at all, here within. You stand — as all things must — on bone dense as ivory, pale and tawny, indigo and maroon, golden and splintered, waxy and sporting strange patterns and ripples beneath it ancient cracked skin, like ripples in sand, like the dapples of a rice pudding, like a spiderweb of maddeningly intricate lace.

The soft faint light registers from that bone. The bony remains of some great unknowable — sage-beast, demon-saint, fell-angel, dead-god — immense, incalculable, spanning from horizon to horizon, as far as senses grant you. Twisted limbs, arms, wings, stranger things yet, arc upwards, downwards, skew-wards, framing the velvet of the void. Shattered fragments drift and return, swaying in place gently. So many limbs. So many ribs, curves of vertebrae, beyond comprehension. So many blank bony visages, looming, crowned with shattered osseus glory.

From these remains spring life-giving rivers, nurtured crops beyond imagining. And carved from the fallen — in wide shallow pits like open sores, in twisting tunnels — are bone-brick complexes, towered and domed, of lacy wonder; cysts of that numinous power, soft osseus jewels pastel and sanguine, murmuring spars of bone-amber thick with ancient faith and archaic enlightenment.

All worthy of the the great bone-ships that fly to war to spill ichor and blood across the remains of deific death. All worthy of the mighty powers that come to prowl and glide and slowly trail along the great bones, from across the realms entire, to seek greater power yet — or to humble themselves, to be humbled, by what they find.

All desire the light of divinity lost.

* revelation * mortality * covetousness * reincarnation * tranquility * parasitism * hubris *

Behold, a place unfolding before one that could near-belong within the Corerealms: snowy mountains, rolling plains, deep forests of mystery and ancient growth, stony badlands and foam-lashed coasts.

Here countless freeholds and kingdoms, petty baronies and free cities — and, yes, many proud duchies — wheel and strive, bicker and war and trade and draw up great binding oaths between them, sealed by the acknowledgement and kiss of one or more of the Great Elder Suzerains who speak with commoners and kings alike between their deep and unpierceable slumbers, deep within their puzzle-box domains high in the peaks and far below the soil.

Oh, they farm and joust, craft and ornament and dedicate and trade — trade in such lovely things as silvery moon-lace and a dizzying array of blossoms of all hues and patterns, tastes and scents, prized enough to send wise rulers to war and worse.

But then, but then: there is the sky, as dark as gore; and the sun, like an orb the colour of a dragon’s-blood ruby. And the ivory claws, the moon-shine eyes, of the Suzerains. And, above all, the great rivers and delicate springs and blessed pools alike, that run not crystal clear — though there do be those — but with a sweet-salt live-giving liquid far thicker, and more ruddy, than water or wine.

Those who come to the Duchies are often shocked to their marrow.

Those who leave the Duchies behind find themselves shocked to require more lively sources to quench their thirst.

* cultivation * bonds * sanguinity * courtliness * beauty * genealogy * the great game *