About this universe
Slip through soot and shadow to defile the Grand Executioner’s armor with immortal, forbidden words. The city above crushes hope with silence, but Oriel Drax plots beneath, tongue scarred and verses sharp. Every word risks death, and the Archives are a labyrinth of traps. The Blood-Tide procession awaits its first true stanza.
Tone
Bleak and oppressive, edged with desperate defiance. Every triumph tastes like blood.
Themes
resistance vs. oppression, memory, the power of words, survival in darkness
Protagonist
Oriel Drax
Oriel Drax moves with a survivor’s wariness, his emerald scales dulled by scars and grime. His narrow face is marked by ritual notches; a half-healed tongue wound makes his words rasp. He wears patchwork rags and a cloak stitched from torn banners, his gaze sharp and restless, poetry smoldering beneath caution.
Goal: To infiltrate the Archives of Hollow Echoes and inscribe a stanza of defiance onto the Grand Executioner's armor during the Blood-Tide procession.
How it begins
Oriel Drax squeezes through a breach in the sewer stone, clutching a fungus-wrapped scrap of charcoal. Filthy water sloshes around his ankles as he ducks beneath a web of leaking pipes. The tunnel stinks of rust and old blood. Heart hammering, he murmurs a stanza into his scales, the forbidden syllables barely louder than the drip-drip above. Pale lizard eyes flicker as a patrol’s torchlight dances at the far curve, boots squelching in the mire. Oriel presses himself against the slime-coated wall, breath shallow, as a pair of tongue-carvers trudge past, blades gleaming. One pauses, sniffing the air, then grunts and moves on. Oriel waits, body coiled, ready to slip deeper toward the vault where the regime’s secrets rot in the dark.
About this world
Karkassus is a decaying city where the sun barely pierces the haze. Above, a repressive regime crushes literacy and dissent, while below, the lizardfolk scavenge in fetid tunnels. Secrets, both human and monstrous, fester in the dark. Survival and rebellion are whispered in forbidden verse.
Karkassus squats beneath a choked, ember-red sky, its spires lost in perpetual sootfall. The upper city is ruled by the Iron Synod, a council of masked nobles who enforce the Silent Edicts with surgical cruelty. Their enforcers, the silver-masked Executioners, prowl the streets, hunting for any trace of forbidden script. The citizenry survives by rote, speaking only in preapproved phrases, eyes downcast, tongues fearful of betrayal.
Beneath this regime, the Drip-Tunnels writhe. Here the lizardfolk, exiled criminals, and the city’s refuse eke out lives among black-water streams and lichen-lit alcoves. The tunnels are humid, labyrinthine, and alive with rot. They echo with the drip of fetid water and the scrape of claws on stone. Fungi glow in sickly blues and greens; the air is thick with spores and the faint, sour tang of decay. Smugglers, forgotten scholars, and feral poets trade memories, secrets, and fungal bread below the nobles’ notice.
The Archives of Hollow Echoes, a fortress-vault of black glass and iron, rises at the city’s heart. It is both prison and shrine, where the regime’s victories are etched, and where the Grand Executioner’s armor is ritually inscribed before each Blood-Tide procession. The archives are death to trespassers: silent, maze-like, protected by arcane alarms and the tongue-carvers’ vigilance.
Karkassus is a world of secrets, rot, and rebellion. Against the regime’s silence, forbidden words are currency, curse, and hope.
