Also called "The Ruinlands", and mocked in the Grey Cities as "The Futile Frontier”, the Blackriver Plain is made up of twinned plateaus spreading north and south from the Rusted Road that links Declension to the easternmost peak of the Mountains of Reality.
The Plains have no walls against the Waste but distance itself. No part of Blackwater has a less stable boundary. Yet, for any year, or any generation, it does not seem so. The border can remain stable for, in mortal terms, a long time.
This is the frontier. There are no megastructures, no emperors, no queens, no law, no safety, no surety, and no stability. It is ungoverned land, survivable only so long as the Waste is kind.
LIFE
The washing of the Waste and the strange alterations it works has left the land unreal, not ground down to grey dust like the deep waste, but warped. Life, often altered and mysterious, has found a way to survive on the plains. Life endures, and as the Waste recedes and the power of entropy fails, it quickly re-grows, colonizing the vacant land with vigor.
The plants, the trees, the beasts, even the rivers of the plains, are said to have a little of the Waste within them. The rivers have shadows beneath their surface. Birds sing unearthly keening tones. Petals are blazoned like eyes and tree trunks are shaped like men. Deer and wolves have mask-patterned markings overlaying their animal features and opal eyes; the grey of the wastes crystallizing with life to produce a strange iridescence, as if the dawn stayed too long or evening lingered into night.
Eerie, but still somehow vibrant, it is a land of ruins, walled micro-townships, re-grown wilderness and waste-altered forests, salt-lakes and glaring flamingo flocks, caverns, tunnels, mines, cities lost and re-populated a hundred times. A land of danger and the rumor of gold where a hidden doorway or collapsed dome might lead the way to old forgotten wealth.
And a land of monsters, true monsters, not just Her children. They are everywhere. With almost no large-scale organized society of any kind, it can be said that here, perhaps, the monsters truly rule.
THE RUST ROAD
The Grey Cities have a handful of mines and the Mountains have their crafts, but in large part, metal comes from the mountains and goes to the cities to be changed, beaten, forged, and molded into shape. A small trickle goes back to the Mountains as manufactured goods.
This exchange takes place at a low level all across the Blackriver Plains, often following the various waterways in their semi-unnatural east-west flow patterns from the Mountains, over the plains, and down to the Cities. But the safest, oldest, and shortest path between the Mountains and the Grey Cities is the Rust Red Road between Declension and the easternmost peak.
At points, the road itself is truly, actually rusted; stained with dropped fragments of iron scrap and sometimes with huge rusting piles of iron abandoned on the roadside when news of a shift in the markets suddenly made them unprofitable mid-journey. This road also carries armies, spies, traders, adventurers, ambassadors, and a thousand other kinds of travelers.
IRON
At the mid-point between Declension and the easternmost peak, at the center of the Rust Red Road, is the town-fort of 'Iron', the closest thing the plains have to a capital.
This Deoth-run Super fort looks like nothing else in Blackwater. Its steep-sided walls clad in rusted metal, rise out of the arterial worm of the Rusted Road. But long before the sight of Iron, Iron can be heard, this place is LOUD; feet, hooves and iron-rimmed wagon wheels sounding on iron-clad streets and echoing through low, cubic, right-angled buildings.
Iron is big, rust-red, clamorous, and stinks of mingled humanity and pack animals. The water always tastes of rust. It's one of the few 'safe' places on the Blackriver Plain. Here you can be reasonably sure you won't be attacked by bandits or eaten by a monster in the night.
The lords of Iron live beyond the rule of city, queen, or state, owing fealty to none they keep the Rust Red Road open and claim the Waste has never taken Iron.
This is not true, as the rulers of Declension and the queens of the easternmost peak know all too well. Iron has fallen three times in recorded history, at those dark periods when the Waste closed in and it seemed the End was truly here. Each of those times Iron had to be re-taken by the armies of humanity as the Waste fell back. At enormous cost, a city fallen to horror -given over to Her children.
SETTLERS
Settled life on the plains is like living inside a strange bubble of thought. Life has a kind of feverish, impulsive intensity - driven perhaps by the inherent contradiction of the place. Like farmers planting crops on the flanks of a volcano, people know it can't last. They believe, and do not believe, that they are safe, that this time, the Waste will be merciful, or that its power now is truly fading, that reality is victorious.
This is a lie, but you can live on a lie, if it is sturdy enough.
Everyone settling on the plains has this dual vision on their minds - of hope, freedom, and success, and of terror, loss, and death, all of the time.
It takes a hard mind to thrive and survive, as well as a complete inability to get along in the cities or queendoms, and perhaps a touch of madness. Cultures tend to be driven by dominant personalities; people with the intense charisma, intelligence, independence, violence, and drive to make an insane dream live and breathe.
Settlements take on the qualities of those personalities, making them often cultic, intense, and very seductive. These cultures are driven by great dreams, visions of the future beyond a corrupt and suffocating society. They also tend to fight a lot.
HORSE CULTURE
Outside these settlements, roads are rough, if they even exist at all. There are no inns, no temples, and no law. Travellers must sustain and protect themselves. On the Plains, those who walk are often considered as good as dead and especially in the deep Plains. To the far North or South, stealing someone’s transport animal is viewed as murder.
Everyone has a horse, or if not a horse themselves, a wagon pulled by horses, Stickerpickers, or Ramblymen. Tame terror birds are ridden by a few, and a handful of radicals ride goats.
TYPES OF SETTLEMENT
Though both plains are different, and become more different the deeper in you go, they both have a handful of highly similar settlement patterns; the shadow towns, grey villages and the ghost kingdoms.
THE SHADOW TOWNS
To either side of the rust road are those lands 'safest'; last and least likely to be swept by the Waste and first to be re-populated once it recedes.
There are relatively few really good places to build; locations that combine water, transport, agricultural land, and defensibility. Long-lasting building materials like worked stone can be tough to find and hard to carry, so many of the prime spots have been occupied and built over multiple times.
This effect is more evident the closer you get to the road. There are rings of ruins, towns built on towns, empty cities built on cities built on cities, and pared settlements, one living, one dead, facing each other across a river or ancient roadway.
Here, the present lives directly in the dark shadow of what was, and what will be.
THE GREY VILLAGES
Some survive the Waste, or claim to have done so. But none survive unchanged. Always Yggsrathaal leaves some mark or sign, mutation or alteration.
There are places on the Plains, it is rumoured, where those who would never be accepted in human lands, perhaps not even in notoriously permissive Yga, gather together and live as men do, even living in peaceful contact with humanity.
No one is absolutely certain these places exist; they are deep inside a land of rumour and legend, but even the very concept of them is hated and crusaded against by puritans, monodominant theists and those who just loathe the Waste itself. And perhaps sought out by others, for exactly opposite reasons.
GHOST KINGDOMS
Before the fall of Esh, and its collapse into Uud, there were people on the Plains. Plains-Lords ruled the last nations, the last whole cultures that dated from a pre-fall, untouched Esh.
They were backwaters then, passed over and not settled by the tide of refugees that created the Grey Cities and spread themselves over the mountains. But here, if anywhere, the old spirit, the old magic of Esh might survive.
Of course, they are almost certainly lost and destroyed, but the imagined memory of them, the idea of them, lives on in the thoughts of humanity; relics of the high past, pure and unsullied, like gems abandoned in the sand, sunken realms existing on the borders between imagination and the real.
Are they real? Reason would suggest not, but rumor, or delusion, persists. Stories of cities of pale towers seen through eternal mist, lost lands of ancient magic surviving through purity alone, legends of prelapsarian greatness, hidden by spells and labyrinths of illusion that even the Yggsrathaal could not unravel.
NORTH AND SOUTH
From the Rust Red Road, the plains spread north and south, widening and changing.
The southern plain becomes grassland, sierra and desert cut by hills of red stone. A place of grand mesas and lost valleys, lightning-stalked forest and plains of burning grass, the clear air haunted by condor, vulture, and immortal spirits of pale fire. At its shifting border with the Waste are vast dune deserts of ash, colonized by reeds that bloom in bright flowers, chewed on by ruminative goats.
The Northern plain fades into pine forests and steep-sloped troll-haunted fell country, sliced by vertical valleys holding cold black lakes, then to taiga and tundra, snow mixing with the ash of the northern Waste. Here breed witches and coal-hearted beasts that drink only blood. Its borders with the Waste are said to be forests of petrified trees, the silver birch frozen to pale lifeless ghosts for mile upon mile.
LEGENDS OF THE SOUTHERN PLAIN
- THE EMUS OF THE MOON
A flock of Emus sacred to the Moon Goddess of a forgotten story-cycle fled the Waste and died tragically. They were so beloved by her that she returned them to a kind of existence, making them immortal, imperishable, and invulnerable to the Waste.
They still feed on the silver plains under the clear moonlight. To eat the flesh of an Emu of the Moon can grant strange powers of Augury. To eat a silver egg is said to cure any disease or Waste-born curse.
The Emus are guarded by the Comancheros de Luna - silver men with silver ropes, riding silver steeds, and in the moon-shadow beneath their wide-brimmed moon-blue hats, with terrible skeletal faces. These guardians are as swift on their horses as the clouds across the moons face.
- THE WASTE-HEARTED WOMAN
A witch, or sorceress, who escaped the Waste and survived in it by accepting its power into her heart. She can only continue to survive by, once a year at least, opening her heart to another, who opens theirs to her. Her victim is consumed utterly. Any wind-carried weeping distant from the hearer is said to be that of the Waste-Hearted Woman.
- THE PIG WITH THE EMERALD EYE
The most feared legend of the southern plains. An incalculably evil, immortal, unkillable, and manipulative pig. The pig is bright green all over but it rolls in mud and dust to hide its colour. Nevertheless, it cannot disguise the colour of its green tongue, or its one Emerald eye.
Many travellers have found the other eye. Some legends say the Pig is looking for it, and will perform a boon for its return. In truth, the pig simply leaves the Emerald Eye as a trap for the unwitting. The fulfilment of all its boons leads the holder of the eye deeper and deeper into their own personal, moral, and spiritual destruction. Only when they have finally died, usually of suicide, will the pig return to reclaim its Emerald Eye, and begin its schemes anew with another victim.
- THE RIVER OF FALLEN LEAVES
This sacred river is said to flow out from a hidden queendom where it is always autumn. The rivers surface is continually gold with imperishable fallen leaves. If you can find the river, and pass through its surface of leaves, you can travel to a land in which the souls of the dead can be bargained for, at enormous cost.
- THE CLAY STYLITES
This tale tells of golem-stylites made from clay who survive the advance of the Waste from atop their needle-like perches. As each golem begins to decay, they shape themselves a replacement, educating them in their sacred knowledge before falling to pieces themselves. These are said to descend from a monastery of living men who began the process to preserve their gnostic illumination through the fall of Esh.
- THE PLAIN OF GLASS
A wind-blasted plain of cracked grey class where a mighty city of Esh once stood. Legends say that beneath the plain the ancient underworld of that city, its sewers, cellars, under-roads, and interconnected weavings, still remains, but has been colonised from below by utterly unknown forms of life. To seek its treasures and knowledge you must first find the plain, then break through the glass. And then survive whatever lies below.
LEGENDS OF THE NORTHERN PLAIN
- THE ANTHRACITE BEAR
This legendary treasure is a single coal, polished and carved into the shape of a mighty rearing bear. The bear gives greater power to its holder the greater they become, so their deeds become an exponential curve of glory and power, rising ever higher.
But the possession of the bear breeds black nemesis, creatures of a thousand faces, born in a thousand shadows, which, formless and nameless, invisibly pursues the holder, waiting for them to slip.
If the holder of the bear commits even one act of weakness, for whatever reason, this nemesis is born into being with as much power as they themselves now hold. In the mighty conflict between the two, all of their great deeds are burnt to ash, leaving nothing but corpses, ash, and pain.
The bear itself survives every disaster and once left among the ruins of the dreams it promised to fulfil, digs its own tomb on the site where it was lost, to await whomever seeks to recover it, so the cycle may begin anew.
- THE KNIGHTS OF BLACK PINE
A city of the dead formed from the huge petrified logs of long-felled gigantic trees sits on the isle of an impassable lake of poisoned silver water. In winter, when the silver poison of the lake freezes over, the city sends forth undead knights to ravage the surrounding land in vengeance for an unpayable debt.
- THE LAND OF SILVER BIRCH
This legend enraptures and captivates Aeth in particular. It tells of a paradise land in the birch forests of the northern taiga, a place where all is beauty and ugliness can never enter and everything is perfect, all of the time. Belief in, or even interest in the Land of Silver Birch, is considered a form of mental illness amongst the Aeth. Many have died; starved, frozen, and alone, trying to find it.
- THE CITY OF THE LOST MOMENT
A city seen in the distance, whole, perfect and unruined, seemingly preserved from the Waste. Brightly coloured kites fly from its roofs and walls, dashing back and forth in the wind. Within, everything seems abandoned only a moment ago, as is a living population stepped away the second before you arrived. Whispers, slight shifting noises and a terrible feeling of presence follow you everywhere.
- THE MINDWOLVES
Where hunters and travellers gather together in isolated forts and fur trading stations, they speak of a tribe of rough, but hearty and friendly canoe-hunters who traverse the lakes and rivers of the northern plain. These people speak little of the Waste but claim they escaped its influence by hiding their souls within the memories of animals.
They lie. In fact, they change shape to become the MindWolves, creatures who hunt upon the air, moving as hallucinations and grey blurs seen from the corners of the eye, spilling like mist evaporating from pools, boggy ground, and melting ice, silencing the roaring wind with their terrible howls.
Comments