The Lost Kingdom is the ground where a Grand God died. The gods' retaliation for Tani's killing fell on this one coast for the better part of the Week of Crimson Rain, and the land has carried the blow for some two and a half thousand years.
Black sand hangs in the air over the whole country, fine as flour, and the sun stands in it like a copper coin behind a cloth. A few days a year the wind clears it; on the rest, a traveller sees ten paces by lantern and the wardens on the ridge see the edge and nothing past it.
The soil is black all the way down, and it takes no crop, no grass and no lichen. Moments repeat in pockets, a gust that blows twice, footsteps that land before the foot; other moments pool and hold a traveller in one second for what feels like an hour. The stone of the ruins reads newer than it should, clean-edged, as if it were cut last year. A constant pressure lies on the spell-sense of anyone trained to feel it; necromancers describe crossing the ridge as the background hum of the dead turned up. The living who stay too long come back changed in body. And the dead get up: the ground raises its own, with no hand needed.
Around the killing ground stands a ring of great stones, the Mugarri, set by the gods in the Week of Crimson Rain. Inside it lie the ruined city and the worst of everything above: the time-warps thickest, the raising strongest. The Adventurers' Guild counts every party that passes the Mugarri as lost from the moment it crosses.
Along the north-east border runs a dark ridge, and beyond it Galdua Jendea's pale band. Ghoran wardens keep watch along the ridge and post the warning-cairns travellers read; most outsiders come no farther.
The chronicles agree on the public part of the story. Tani, the Goddess of Time, was struck down here in her own domain, the first Grand God ever slain, and her death began the Week of Crimson Rain. The people who held this coast were annihilated by the gods in answer, and their great city lies in the west of the interior. The people of Ida call it Vardana, the city; its own name is lost.
Who the killers were is where the chronicles thin. Most call them the Old Race who killed Tani; some make them the Elden, some a mortal people of the Gods' Era who lived among the Elden's ruins and claimed their blood, some sorcerer-kings who pried open a secret meant for gods. The surviving record confirms only that their homeland was destroyed here, by the gods themselves.
The killers were the Storveldi Denbora: a mortal civilisation of the Gods' Era. Not the Elden, despite their claim to the contrary. They settled atop abandoned Elden ruins on this coast and built their own capital on those foundations; they claimed Elden descent for prestige and legitimacy, copying what they could understand of what their predecessors had left behind. The conflation of Storveldi Denbora with Elden is their own original lie, transmitted forward across millennia. Most modern mortals (including most Azarketi) do not know this.
What they actually achieved. Generations of selective practice, alchemical work, archaeology of the Elden ruins beneath them, and what we would today call divine engineering. They used the Wellspring/belief mechanic aggressively to lift their entire ruling class to Demi-God status. The far rarer achievement: they developed the integration procedure, the technique for imbuing a found shard of divinity into a mortal's own divine essence. With the procedure in hand, any recovered shard could be converted into actual ascension. The procedure was their true edge, not the shards themselves. Two of their most accomplished sovereigns went further and reached Minor God status by integrating recovered shards. See the-binding.html for cosmological context.
The God Killing Incident. The two Minor Gods of the Storveldi Denbora, supported by their Demi-God ruling class, attacked Tani in her own domain and killed her: the first Grand God ever slain. The retaliation was the Week of Crimson Rain; the centre of it was here. The capital was annihilated; the land around it was so deeply wounded that it has never healed. This is the cosmological reason the Blackened Lands exist.
One member of the ruling class survived. He used the integration procedure on himself in the aftermath, ascended to Minor God of Undeath, took the self-given name Betibizi ("eternal life"), and fled Talan for Abyss (Layer 3). He has not returned. He is the spiritual root of the Blackened Lands' ambient necromancy: the reason the cursed ground raises Skeletons without a necromancer's intervention, and the canonical source-god for the natural-born Skeleton ancestry. He is also the original holder of the integration procedure, the choke-point knowledge that could elevate other mortals past Demi-God status. Fragments of the procedure persist on Talan among Betibizi's cult and the descended Azarketi lineages; reconstructing the complete procedure from those fragments is the largest unsolved capability gap on Talan. The bound thirteen do not discuss whether they know its location.
The Azarketi connection. Not every Storveldi Denbora citizen was at the capital when the gods came. A scattered population of survivors (descendants of those who had been experimented upon, or who carried the inherited results of generations of self-experiment, but who were never themselves elevated) persists today as the Azarketi. Their inherited "Elden blood" claim is the Storveldi Denbora's original lie passed down in a form that none of the modern claimants recognise. They descend from the people who imitated the Elden, not from the Elden themselves.
"Who are you?"
"We live here."
The ground has raised its dead since the Rain, and for most of that time the aware ones rose and drifted away into a world that hunted them. In the Dark Era, when the world hunted everything strange, they began to come back, and on the south coast, outside the Mugarri, where the sea air thins the haze and the curse runs weakest, they built Ida.
Three kinds of people live in it. The risen are Skeletons, old bones that got up with someone new inside; they are half the city. The warped are Fleshwarps, born living and reshaped by the ground, each the only one of their kind. The kept are the living who came to the edge and stayed: Duskwalkers born in the cursed land, exiles, pilgrims who never went home. About 15,000 live in Ida and as many again in holds among the coastal ruins, inside the wards or close to them; the rest of the country holds no one.
The ground feeds no one, and the sea feeds the city. The kept and the warped fish the Hafra at first light and gather kelp and shellfish along the shore; the risen do not eat. The water comes from the old cisterns under the town, sunk deep. Ida is walled on the landward side, and along the wall run the wards.
Everyone in Ida, living or risen, has flashes of the kingdom that stood here: a street, a smell of roasting meat, a procession, sometimes a face. In Hizva a flash is a marthra, and the first thing anyone asks after one is whose was it? Each comes from one place: from a soul's own past, from the bones' own life, or from the ground, which keeps its moments. A flash comes from only one of the three, and whose a given flash was is a guess the whole city argues over. The old tongue comes back the same way, a word at a time, and Ida speaks it.
Every body that falls in or near the cursed ground is broken and buried before the ground can raise it: an enemy's, a friend's, an outsider's, one of the risen whose soul has gone. Nothing is left whole for what comes out of the Dakhma. A body's own people see to it where they can, and anyone does where they cannot, with a few words to Tani.
"Ask the wall who rules. It has been asked before, and it answered."
Ida is ruled by whoever has done the greatest holding: held the wall, burned a captain of the dead, sealed a gate. That person is the Daraya. Rule passes when someone holds against something greater, in the open, before witnesses, and the city acclaims it; or when the Daraya dies or fails at the wall.
Rauca Urvan has been Daraya since 2524. She is risen, a divine caster of Tani, and when the Dakhma broke open that year she sealed its gate, and the city has acclaimed no greater holding since. Under her the pathra hold the wall, each a stretch of it and the wards along it, and a warden's stretch is their standing in the city. The strong come from every kind of casting: arcane, primal, occult and divine all count, as long as they hold. At dusk each of the pathra lights their stretch, and the city glances up to count the lights.
The Daraya calls anyone to the wall, commands the pathra and the wards, deals with the outsiders who come to the landward gate, and names a steward. The steward, Utana Zam, one of the kept, runs the fishing, the stores, the cisterns and the trade at the cairns. The Daraya may not keep the seat once a greater holding has been acclaimed. What counts as greater, and how the city acclaims it, is written nowhere.
The strongest arcane caster in Ida is Vindafarna Ast Arshama, a risen of the old way: the way the bones remember, of study and working, and of what the strong of Vardana once made of themselves. He holds the longest stretch of the wall, and in 2531 he came out of the haze with Hutaosa Zam and the Fleshwarp Taxma Ast and burned a captain of the legions to save a Guild party. Betibizi's priests hold their stretches too, and say the people of Ida are their god's, since his resonance raised them.
The Daraya means to kill the Rot-Tyrant herself. Whoever does it does the greatest holding there is, and rules after; she cannot do it alone, and every helper is a possible successor.
In Ida the faithful say that Rauca Urvan's flashes come from Tani herself, the last things the goddess saw on the day she fell here, and that this is why the gate held under the Daraya's hand in 2524. The Daraya has never said what her marthras show.
Vindafarna's bones were one of the Storveldi ruling class: a Demi-God who died at Vardana in the retaliation. His marthras carry true pieces of the integration procedure, which canon says survives on Talan only in fragments; one of the fragments walks Ida's wall. That is his might, and why the ascension-cultists court the cairns, and why the old way in Ida is more than a memory. The bound thirteen suppress integration work wherever they find it, and would care very much who rules Ida if they knew.
It is not a drum. It is feet. A great many, in step, slow, iron on bone and bone on stone, from somewhere inside the haze.
Under Vardana the old kingdom laid its dead in great bone-halls, the Dakhma. In 2524, when the Nine Dungeons broke open across Talan, the Rot-Tyrant, the corpse-warlord in rusted armour, came up beneath them, and raised the dead of the Dakhma as its legions. Rauca Urvan sealed the main gate that year. The legions still come up through the lesser ways under the ruins, captains in rusted armour ahead of them, and range out across the pale band into Galdua Jendea, where they hold the lost rock of Tazrut.
The legions march in step. The risen walk out of step, each as the person it is, and that is how Ida tells its own from the enemy in the haze. The legions' bones are the same old bones the risen got up in: one people's dead, on both sides of the wall.
The Daraya means to, and needs help to do it. Vindafarna Ast Arshama holds the longest stretch of the wall and has burned a captain already. Guild parties out of Tassast and the Whalehall come for the second General ever felled, and if one of them lands the blow, Ida has no rule for who holds the seat after. Betibizi's priests hold their stretches and wait. Across the ridge, Tassast wants Tazrut back.
The ground twists living flesh into irregular bodies: the children of survivors, of trespassers who lingered, and of the kept, worked on slowly by the land. Each is unique, and the Lost Kingdom is the one place on Talan where a Fleshwarp is ordinary. Elsewhere a Fleshwarp of the Blackened Lands is rare and pitied, and few can tell one from the Red Empire's made fleshwarps on sight.
The wound pulls the dead back into motion with no necromancer's hand. Some rise with nothing in them; those are the dead the city sees to. The aware ones are the risen, and most of them live in Ida. Elsewhere on Talan a Skeleton is almost always a Blackened Lands émigré, refused entry by many kingdoms and watched, in some charters hunted, by the Voroir Daua.
The Lost Kingdom is the largest source of the Duskwalker heritage on Talan. A Duskwalker manifests as a mortal child where death runs close to the surface, and here it runs closest; the same ground that raises the dead seeds the children around whom the dead lie down. In Ida they are among the kept, and the city needs no word for what they are.
Few outsiders cross the ridge. Most of the dealing between Ida and the world is done at the cairns: the people of Ida leave what the ruins give on a warden's cairn and take what was left in exchange, so no one has to stand face to face. The Ghoran wardens see it and let it be. What goes out is bronze and worked glass of the old kingdom's make, tools of a dead people, and rarest, an object that holds a moment, sold carefully and refused to the ascension-cultists unless someone is desperate. What comes in is cloth and metal for the living, gloves, masks and hoods for the leaving, books, and grain in a lean year. Most of it goes on through Tassast, Galdua Jendea's frontier rock, and some reaches the Brokers' Walk on Anzar at one remove.
The Adventurers' Guild posts a permanent warning over the Blackened Lands, the only one of its kind on Talan, signed from the desk of Valreka's Guild Sovereign. A standing Guildhall instruction keeps every party below Platinum away from the cursed ground, and any party that passes the Mugarri is entered as missing, presumed lost; no recovery is sent. The Guild publishes no map of the interior.
Who comes. Tani-mourning sects come on pilgrimage to the edge and leave offerings at the Mugarri; the city leaves the offerings where they lie. Necromancers come for the resonance, and ascension-cultists for whatever the ruins might still hold of the old road. Guild parties come for recoveries, for the watch-works at Tassast, and since 2524 for the war.
The leaving. Few of Ida's people leave, and those who do go hooded and masked, with papers and a borrowed name: over the ridge to Tassast and its sandsails, which take in anyone before the sun, or by night in a smuggler's boat from the little harbour below the town. The Voroir Daua watch for them.
The oldest horror told of the Old Race is that they ate the flesh of mortals as everyday food, meat on a stick from the street vendors; mothers frighten children with it, and sermons against the killers open with it. To most of Talan the dead are the dead, and over the centuries the tale has moved to whoever lives in the killers' ground: travellers say the dead of the Lost Kingdom eat the living. A party back from the edge will swear the wind off certain ruins smells of woodsmoke and roasting meat.
Under the haze, day and night barely differ, and Ida keeps time by the watch on the wall. The kept and the warped fish at first light and work the cisterns and the stores; the risen work the wall, the salvage and the long hours. There is black sand in everything, in the bread of the living and the joints of the risen, and the sea is the one clean smell. Some nights the legions can be heard walking somewhere out in the haze, and the whole city goes quiet to hear which way.
Ida speaks Talanese with an old shape to it, and Hizva coming back through the marthras. To an outsider who asks what they are, the people of Ida say we live here, and say no more.
Going in. Some go inside the Mugarri, nearer Vardana, to have more marthras: to live a few hours in the old kingdom their bones remember. They come back quieter, and some come back wanting the old way.
Everyone in Ida knows of one flash and fears it: the day the goddess fell, seen from the ground where it happened. Folk say those who come back from going in having had it are quieter than the rest; some never go in again, and some go in every month after. Whose memory it is, bones, soul or ground, is the oldest argument in the city.
The people of Ida go out to the ruins in salvage parties, always with a caster, roped together so no one is lost in the haze, a ward-light carried at the head.
A visitor sees the dead and draws steel. A visitor cannot tell a citizen from a legion soldier in the haze, and a native can, by the step. A visitor takes the masks for shame; at home in Ida a face of bone is a face, and masks are for going out.
The risen have no childhood, but every one was new once. A living or warped child of Ida comes of age at the first watch on the wall; a risen at the first marthra they can read, when they can say whose and be believed, and that is when a risen takes a name. The young walk up the ridge to look at the living world from the cairns and come back before they are missed, and the pathra pretend not to know until someone does not come back.
Tani is Ida's goddess, and the elder face is the one the city keeps, the one who remembers. The seeing-to is done in her name, and the pathra light the wards each dusk with a word to her. Betibizi's priests keep their own rites and their stretches of the wall.
A name in Ida is a given name and the source of the first marthra its bearer could read: Ast for the bones, Urvan for the soul, Zam for the ground. It is taken when its bearer can first say whose and be believed, living or risen, and it records the guess the city accepted: Rauca Urvan, Hutaosa Zam. Many add a remembered name, a name out of the marthras that they feel bound to, never certain whether it is theirs: Vindafarna Ast Arshama. Outsiders call the people of Ida the cursed-born.
Given
Remembered
Whole names
The Daraya: risen, a divine caster of Tani; sealed the Dakhma's gate in 2524.
: risen, the strongest arcane caster in Ida; holds the longest stretch of the wall; the Skeleton in the lantern.
: one of the kept, a Duskwalker; the woman in the lantern.
: one of the warped; the Fleshwarp in the lantern.
: one of the kept; the steward of Ida.
A relic ledger of the Whalehall vault under Anzar: the lantern a Roll party carried out of the Lost Kingdom in 2531 MR, and the moment it holds.
Whalehall · the vault under Anzar · relic ledger
Item: a lantern of bronze, Storveldi make, its glass intact; cold to the touch whatever the room.
Recovered by: a Roll party of four, Platinum, contract out of Tassast's watch-works. Three returned: Amayas n Tassast, of six, Aroha Hinekura Ngaiti, Brin Twicefallen. The party's leader, Idir Skjol Anzar, did not; body not recovered.
Commission: a recovery for a collector on the Brokers' Walk. The client handled the item once and declined delivery. Held in the vault at the party's request; not for sale.
Property: the lantern holds a moment. Whoever takes it by the handle sees and hears what its carrier saw and heard on the day, start to finish, about the length of a long breath, and then it begins again if the hand stays. The moment is the same every time. Holders report that the last sound stays in the ears for a day or more.
Handling: by the ring only. Do not take the handle.
Transcribed by: Dihya Ardats Anzar, appraiser, the Brokers' Walk, 2531 MR.
The transcription follows as the moment plays: what is seen, what is heard, what is said. Nothing else carries.
Haze. Black sand in the air, fine as flour, and the sun up there somewhere, a copper coin behind a cloth. The lantern swings in the carrier's hand and lights ten paces of it.
A street. Walls of dressed stone, clean-edged, as if they were cut last year. Then the walls go on and there are bones in the sand along them, a great many, and then the bones are standing up.
"Back to back." That is Idir Skjol Anzar. "Back to back and walk."
They come out of the sand in their dozens with no sound but the sand running off them. Steel on bone. Brin Twicefallen counting them aloud and losing count. Aroha Hinekura Ngaiti saying a word and the haze lighting white, and the street full of falling bones. The lantern swings. Twenty paces. Thirty. The party walks backward through a square with a dry fountain in it, and the dead keep getting up.
Then they stop getting up. All of them at once. They stand where they are and turn their skulls the same way, up the street, and wait.
Something comes down the street in armour. Rust from the helm to the feet, and taller than anyone the carrier has stood beside, and under the rust the armour is very old. It walks without hurrying. The standing dead step aside for it.
"Behind me," Idir Skjol Anzar says, and goes to meet it.
It is quick, after that. One blow turned. One blow that is not. Idir Skjol Anzar goes down on the stones of the square and does not move, and the rusted thing lifts its blade again, and the carrier is running at it, and the lantern is swinging wild.
A voice in the haze, speaking words the living do not know: old words, slow, with a weight on every one.
The rust on the armour catches fire. Blue fire, from the inside, and the thing turns toward the voice. Out of the haze comes a Skeleton in a long dark robe, a staff in both hands, and behind it two more: a big shape, wrong in its limbs, a Fleshwarp, who puts both hands into the black sand and drags it up into a wall; and a woman, living, plain-faced, who walks into the square, and every standing bone in it lies down. They lie down like dogs. They do not get up again.
The rusted thing burns. It fights in the fire for a long time, and the Skeleton's voice never stops, and then the armour is empty and falls apart on the stones.
Quiet. Sand settling.
Brin Twicefallen, breathing hard: "Who are you?"
The Skeleton, in Talanese with an old shape to it: "We live here."
Aroha Hinekura Ngaiti, kneeling by Idir Skjol Anzar. Then not kneeling, standing up. Shaking the head.
The woman, gently: "You cannot leave him in this ground."
Brin Twicefallen: "We'll carry him."
The woman: "You will not carry him past the ridge before he gets up. He will march with them by morning."
"With who?"
Nobody answers. The Fleshwarp has lifted its head and is listening, and the Skeleton has turned its skull the way the dead turned theirs, up the street.
It is not a drum. It is feet. A great many, in step, slow, iron on bone and bone on stone, from somewhere inside the haze, and it is not getting louder fast. It does not have to.
The Skeleton: "Go. Now. We will see to him."
The lantern swings toward the haze, and the sound goes on.
I held it twice. I will not hold it again.