More on Elyden

some more notes to try and solidify tone and setting:

• Elyden is a rotten place, ancient and decaying beneath the languid dreams of the Demiurges. Seas, already barren and polluted from millennia of industry, are in retreat. Empires are in decline. Corruption is the rule - governments struggle to maintain order as resources run out across the globe. Strife and rebellion are commonplace. In other places coups have already toppled the governments and nations lie sundered, their lands prizes over which rogue patricians and magnates fight, their previous loyalties discarded. Small towns are either cut off from the heartlands of their once-nations or lie dead, populated by dregs and wretches struggling to survive. Corpses litter a land that is increasingly unravelling, the laws of nature dissolving even as the Demiurges' dreams grow more despairing and bitter. Millions are dead, their bodies a feast to carrion-beasts, their bodies leading the way to the few cities that remain: shallow mockeries of the civilised order that once was, these city-states stand as bastions against the grotesqueries that threaten to drag the world deeper into chaos. The hinterlands between cities are a festering wasteland where the dual forces known as the Firmament and the Penumbra hold sway, altering the landscape in unimaginable ways that rend once-sane minds into madness. degenerates and grotesques haunt these lands, and where a semblance of society exists it does so in morbid tribes and archaic sects that serve as black echoes to the fragments of normalcy that struggle to survive.
• The laws of nature are uravelling. It has been a long slow process of decay that has brought the world to its knees. Elyden was crafted through the toil of the once deific Demiurges, though they have long since fallen from grace. embittered by the lofty rank they once held, many have fallen into despair, the powers that once helped them create continents and oceans now polluting their dreams, warping the natural world. For it is they who are at the root of all that ails the world.
• Elyden is an ancient place, covered in ruins and dozens of strata of mortal life, going back to the first ages, perhaps a billion years past. the place is rife with ruins and the eerie cyclopean monuments built by and in dedication of the Demiurges. That these monolithic structures remain in any form at all after the passing of so many years is testament to the artifice of the Demiurges and their followers. elsewhere, continental shelves, once submerged beneath coastal waters lie exposed, little more than deserts of salt and dessicated corals. Ancient machinery lie fossilised, their secrets impossible to decipher. Once-proud metropolises stand, half broken and abandoned, their people either died (genocide, starvation, ritual sacrifice, war...) or left to join other settlements.
• Despair and grotesqueries. the people of this world have lived this way for generations, and in some areas this has gone on for dozens if not hundreds of years. entire areas once devoted to industry lie abandoned, the earth a scar of open-caste mines and quarries. lakes and inland seas are either dried up or polluted by bright-coloured chemicals. Everywhere the signs of the inevitable end are increasing - stillbirths, deformities, hydrocephaly, cyclocephaly, aepathy... the list goes on. The mortals of Elyden know their world is ending. Customs have changed and adapted to this. Some regions cling to a semblance of normalcy though in this world, they are the strange ones, living in a world of distorted traditions and broken dreams, ignoring the realities of the world. what were once deities are either forgotten or reviled as the cause for this decay. once-immaculate tenets and dogma are recycled, polluted by new apocryphal texts and used as propaganda by warlords and crusaders hoping to gain followers for their own causes. most hope is extinguished and where it remains it is distorted, as sickened as the world is grey. The Demiurges care not for the mortal's struggles and observe the world unthinking as they slowly decay to their own despair.
• the legacy of the ancient demiurges can be felt everywhere - from ancient monuments to the corruption prevalent in the world, it is their actions that shape all. Though now rotten an forgotten by most, they are still central to the fate of the world and some hope against all the evidence that if awakened and elevated to a position of power, their thoughts might yet be turned from grim darkness to rebirth. It is a fleeting hop, though and most who know of them despise them for their langour and ignorance of the mortal race's struggling. most demiurges are recognised as 'dead', their bodies monolithic and fossilised, blighting the mortal realm with their presence. Despite this infamy, many regions now recognise them under corrupted forms, and might worship them under archaic guises, giving substance to entities they might not fully understand - or care for - their plight.

so, themes of Body Horror and Dying Earth, which are two of my favourite tropes and genres.

Chorhyst, Rising Hell

Chorhyst:

'Sailors' Bane', the 'Edge of Reason',’Ralhael Chthonis’, 'Rising Hell, 'Macerah'…

It has many names, most imaginative amongst them those bestowed by explorers and mariners, who are, thankfully for us, the only breed of man to have encountered this abomination with any regularity, if even that. Those scholars with leisure enough to examine and muse over the vagaries of this region from the safe distance of their libraries and reclusiae have granted it the name Chorhyst, which is the word most whispered by mortals around the Inner Sea.

It is a place seemingly forgotten by the laws of the natural world, designed as though the creators were under the effects of a fever-dream or delirium, the resultant aberration of nature a colossal monument to their antediluvian dementia. Colossal without compare, few of the worlds’ other abnormalities – the Boiling Sea of Khamid, the writhing plains of the Flæschus, the rusted badlands of the Anomoferroh – compare to the mind-numbing enormity and the sheer… impossibility of the Chorhyst. Perhaps it is true, what the doomsayer preach; that our world is unravelling, that the laws that once maintained its natural state are decaying. Perhaps we really have reached the a time of fading, a precursor to chaotic oblivion.

The approach is not easy. Not with the strongest of imperial dreadnoughts and behemoth-class tanker can one navigate the roiling seas beneath that great expanse. The best most people manage is a distant glimpse; more than enough to take in its enormity. Those approaching it say is truly like a dream, a thing of wonder that begins as a stark mountainous shadow in the grey haze of distance, steadily gaining corporeal form as it moves slowly into view, its cyclopean form slashing through fog and cloud, revealing the immensity of its wretched form. It is only then, once the eyes have seen the totality of that aberrant form, that the mind begins the fruitless attempt to wrap itself around the concept, that there, before you, stark as the air you are breathing, the deck beneath your feet, an entire continent hangs suspended, as though an unseen divinity were lifting at one side, the heavens beckoning it to dizzying heights. Water trickles down its fractured skin, deceptively serene, belying the ferocity and weight of the mass of liquid - largely condensed air from the penetrated clouds - that gushes down the void before slamming against the misshapen meniscus of ocean roiling at its base, lave thrashing and steaming wildly about it, vaporizing water.

The thing moves, inching upwards slowly even as we look upon it, eyes disbelieving. It is inexorably pulled upwards, at a rate of as much of a dozen-or-so yards a year, or so the loremasters would have us believe, for who in their right mind would travel up that thing, taking the treacherous journey through tectonically belligerent lands to reach a peak from which observations can be made? Indeed, who can say what other laws of nature are broken around its summit or along its treacherous ascent. It is rumoured that the rocks themselves sense those treading upon them with a grotesque sentience. Some say that the dead rest uneasily there, stirring in their graves, even as the living find their sleep fitfully broken, their bodies unable to rest beneath the palpable shifting of stone. Dreams dreamt under its influence are broken, echoing an ancient pain and anger that reverberates across time and space. And amongst such sleepless murmurs come the ancient whispers of long-dead Demiurges, hanging heavily in the air; warnings to any vestige of sanity that yet remains there to leave that place or risk corruption.

That is the Chorhyst, and the madness that surrounds it.


Chorhyst (pronounced core - heist), one of many regions I’m detailing at the moment cataloguing the dementia of the Demiurges as translated to ‘natural’ phenomena and effects. Commonly-known as the floating continent, it is found to the east of the populated regions, across from Tethysia and the Sea of Myrmarea, close to the so-called meniscus of the Firmament. A huge chunk of continent, perhaps 700,000 square miles in all, like the corner of a page being slowly peeled upwards. Earthquakes and tremors are common around the base as the stresses and fractures give wayto the slow inexorable movements of thFe continent. Though few know this, the reason for this is the general messed-up-edness of gravity here; a result of the Demiurges’ deaths and the unravelling of the natural laws outside their influence. Similarly, water is messed up here too, with various currents and maelstroms subjected to the whims of the impossibly chaotic gravity here. Due to surface tension the majority of the waters’ surface remains intact, though bulges upwards with seemingly-random swells of up to a half-mile in height, the peaks of which find rivulets of water sucked upwards, sometimes in the form of reverse rain or even waterfalls that strike the embryonic cliffs and jagged rocks of the continents’ underbelly, pooling thee in eerie meres and lakes straggled by vines and roots and strange mosses that have since taken hold. Beneath these gigantic watery swells are vacuums and air pockets that can collapse at any time, spelling doom to any vessels foolish enough to venture there. Indeed,  wrecks and shattered hulks of ancient ships caught in that maelstrom 'hang' from the cliffs of the rising continent; victims of the chaos in the region.

Lava is an all-too-common phenomenon along the base of this continent, where metamorphic rock meets water that eons ago spilled into the raw hollow left by the regions upheaval. Now magma pumps out of the earths’ flesh like an oozing wound, creating oddly-shaped landmasses that cool and solidify under the vaporous protests of the boiling water around it.

All the effects of an intricate machine that is decaying and malfunctioning without the supervision of its machinists and technologists. It is only so-long before the amchie breaks down completely. Who knows what will happen then?