The Doug Alone

"The Bleak" (in this case, using the term to mean the remains of the Barthic Empire that have been attacked and absorbed by "The Bleak," folks in Grunce use the word to mean roughly eighteen different things at the same time) is the large scale corpse of a once thriving empire built upon the back of an even more Ancient empire whose technology once dominated the world even beyond the late . Though the spread of The Bleak took decades, that was relatively abrupt for an empire stretching back two millennia. Even a hundred years into Bleak's spread, several of the great Houses and Cities attempted to hold fast, gathering up their people and their treasure into a open air grave.  Now those many, many last stands are abandoned or their new residents no longer remember what it was like to be human. Strange misshapen things wandering through halls full of gold and silk crying out in a voice of a language that no sane throat could make.  For those brave enough to travel

On Being and Becoming and the Fall of the Ancients In the language of the ancients the names of the twin islands were Artuunila and Siluutila: the place of being ( siluut ) and the place of becoming ( artuun ). There were not mere philosophical notions, but a way to describe the great immanent energy in these lands. Artuun warped and changed those exposed to it. Siluut reinforced the nature of things but in doing so made things outsized. Artuun turned a mountain into a magical plateau of strange fay magic. Siluut turned a mountain into a huge monolith beyond comprehension.  Both took time. The creatures and plants on Artuunila shifted and merged in strange ways. The creatures and plants on Siluutila grew large and strong and severe. Neither was a place for civilization, both would inherently destroy any attempt to tame the land. Until the Ancients did just that by discovering uuxa: a form of energy generated by the tension where the two forced clashed.  Uuxa is the same energy that Jon