An ancient tomb, sealed in dust and shadow, littered with the vestiges of broken Vessels and livestock long dead. The air clings with the scent of rusted blood and bone-powder. Once, it thrummed with life—complex, choral, divine.
During its golden cycle, this place held the living heart of the Mother’s children—an advanced race who transcended mortality through spiritual science. They cultivated technologies woven with memory, bone, and song; they bore fruit to a race of timeless beings, preserved now in the cold embrace of stasis chambers, their dreams still echoing in the soft static of the tomb’s walls.
They toiled not just to exist, but to know. To understand. They ventured deep beneath the crust of R’aekkaton, seeking to make a spiritual nest atop the yawning void that trembled beneath them. The void—blacker than space, older than the stars that birthed them—was not meant to be understood. The Mother warned them. She whispered and wept. But her children grew arrogant. They thought their love of knowledge was sacred. They thought curiosity was a virtue.
But the void is not a thing to be studied. It is a wound.
When the new age came—burning, screaming, shattering—the empire shattered. Their enemies descended like wolves upon the carcass of ambition. Their machines failed. Their gods fled. The Mother—betrayed, broken—sought only to preserve what she could. In her grief, she took to sculpting new Vessels from the clay of R’aekkaton’s sands. Fragile, hollowed things, shaped with trembling hands.
When she sensed the rise of the Nomad’s kindling—something ancient reborn anew—she panicked. She screamed her bloodied tears into the red soil, her voice piercing down into the void. That scream, that desperate cry, became something other. It twisted.
The void answered.
In her despair, she turned not to the stars, nor to her gods, but to the earth—her earth—barren and cracked and tasting of salt and iron. She drove her fingers into its dust as if seeking marrow, and with a cry not meant for the living, she wept blood into the soil. That scream—it was no mere sound, but a rupture, a sundering of all things once sacred.
Her grief did not echo. It sank—slowly, deliberately—like a funeral barge sliding beneath still water. And beneath that water, where silence lies thick as oil and time forgets itself, the void listened.
It did not answer in words. It responded—like a parasite stirred by heat, or a wound recalling the knife that made it.
And so her spirit, fractured by loss and laced with the terrible clarity of love betrayed, became unmoored. It did not ascend. It did not vanish. It bled sideways, folding itself into the very fabric of the thing she once cursed. Twisting. Binding. Becoming not divine, but resonant. Her essence—once fertile, nurturing, whole—was now soaked through the void like ink in water, reanimating her children not as salvation, but as condemnation.
They rose as Golems—grotesque, slouched remnants of what once dreamed. Their flesh, clay and memory. Their breath, borrowed. Their minds, full of shadows and nothing else.## Setting
The Forgotten City lies in a basin shaped like an ancient wound—miles across, as if the very planet were once split open to bleed out its secrets. Buildings here twist and contort like fossilised beasts. Each structure is forged from the petrified remains of colossal fauna—tusks and ribs interwoven, limbs arranged into arches, flesh long since consumed by the sands.
Houses lean unnaturally, with bone-thin spires and convex forms that defy geometry, designed not by hands, but by dreams corrupted. The city breathes. The palace—if it can be called that—is the hollowed tailbone of some ancient leviathan, a whale that never swam but flew once across the sand seas. Its bones ring when the wind howls—a low, grieving hum like a throat clearing sorrow.
Wind tunnels through empty avenues and bone halls, reviving the agonised screams of the buildings’ source-bodies. The sounds never stop. Even silence here groans.
The remaining populace—twisted, clay-cladded echoes—wander endlessly. Their eyes are shallow dents. Their voices, wind-chimes in a sandstorm. They gather at the palace each dusk, drawn by instinct or some residual prayer, and perform fragmented rituals they no longer understand—gestures in the dust, half-formed chants, a name they can’t recall but feel in their baked, crumbling marrow.
In some forgotten corner of this city, a VESSEL still sleeps—untouched by the Mother’s grief, untainted by the void.
And it dreams of waking.
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