"Surviving" the Underworld

No one remembers what being dead used to be like.

Maybe a stoic old god once presided over the souls of the restful dead in a great hall.

Maybe there was simply nothing, and no one to experience it.

The only thing that is certain is that most theories are far better than the current reality.

When a living thing dies, its soul–or shade, or copy, or some other facet of its being–is taken somewhere else. That somewhere else is a never-ending prison of pain, misery, and psychological torment, at least when things are operating smoothly. This underworld for lack of a better name is presided over by a seemingly infinite assortment of malicious entities whose greatest–but not sole–calling is mortal suffering.

If a new arrival is scooped up into their shadowy yet too-real clutches, they quickly learn that all the awfulness of life was just a prelude to this. Pains new and familiar are visited upon them ad nauseum until they become numbed to them. The torturers switch their cruelties up regularly, many specializing in different forms of pain. This continues until the very fabric of the shade's being unravels, and they cease to be. This unraveling is only a temporary reprieve, however. Soon the shade coalesces together again, fresh and ready for new agonies.

This is not a punishment for anything. This underworld is not a place where transgressions are paid for. Everything–saintly, sinful, and standard–comes here to suffer. It is suffering for its own sake, and the shade is nothing more than a conduit through which suffering may flow.

This only happens if the shade is captured, of course.

The underworld is a vast, ever-changing place, with many nooks and crannies in which to hide. All of it is hostile and unwelcoming, but not all of it is beyond the means of the dead to resist and overcome- especially when they work together.

At some point in the murky past, a resistance movement of sorts formed. United by common cause and a general aversion of infinite torture, mortal shades started to band together on the desolate fringes of the underworld, scraping an existence out of the rocks and launching guerrilla raids on their jailers, whom they have given many names to in an attempt to better understand and confront with them. Every soul they find, whether newly died or wrested from the clutches of the torturers, is another particle of spit in the eye of the underworld.

Being a Shade

Your body, if it can be called that, looks like an unusually dense cloud of shadows and dust in its natural state. It is highly mutable and morphic. Your torturers use this to their advantage when they have you at their (lack of) mercy- most of the deformed, tortured-looking edifices and objects you find dotting the underworld were once (or rather, still are) other shades.

But you can also exert control over yourself. This provides a number of unexpected benefits. You may appear in any way that you please, and you may change that as often as you wish. You may look as you did in life, or as you always wished you had looked, or as whatever essential 'true' self you think you have, or something entirely different- age, species, gender, and all other permutations of being have little bearing down here.

You may even take the form of an inanimate object, in case your friend needs a weapon in a pinch, or you simply always wanted to be a fancy bauble.

Other shades will always be able to perceive you as 'you', just as you can recognize them. Call it a familiar aura, if you want.

You sense and perceive things in the manner that you are used to, albeit in ways that are either dulled and muted, or too painfully acute. You don't need to eat, drink, or sleep, but you still suffer from hunger, thirst, and fatigue. You can shrug off a remarkable amount of damage, but the pain lingers for ages.

Even without infernal tormentors, existence down here is an endless, inconvenient chore.

Just like home, right?

Hellscapes

On the topic of your new home, there is much to say- infinitely much, in fact. Shades before you have tried, but none have ever found the full extent of the underworld, nor have they been able to extract information on the subject from captured demons. You will probably be no different.

But your kind are not wholly ignorant of this new, unwelcoming world that you find yourselves in. 

Some things are tried and true.

The underworld seems laterally infinite, but only occupies a vertical space a little larger than its largest mountain chains. Admittedly that is not saying much because even the smallest of the underworld's hooked peaks is several times larger than anything you ever saw in life. But there is a top, and it's rumored that shades have even seen what occupies the vaulted ceiling, high above the roiling neon clouds.

Apparently the revelation was worse than a thousand simultaneous unravelings, and their screams are still carried on the acrid wind to this day.

The underworld is constantly changing to make itself more hostile to anything passing through it. Within a matter of hours a small, dry cave entrance used as shelter can warp into the dead center of an enormous, thorny labyrinth.

Two things can temporarily fix a point; observation, and anguish.

By being present and cognizant in an area, you and other shades can slow or halt the landscape's changing. In this way, you can carve out and maintain territory long enough for it to feel familiar. This is how cells of free shades tend to operate. You cannot shape the land as you wish- that is a privilege enjoyed only by very powerful or very numerous evil spirits.

Pain also fixes a point in space. The biggest and most hideous bastions of your tormentors have stood unchanging for eons, maintained by the incalculable suffering that goes on within.

You will probably be driven out of any area before you can call it home. Fortunately, you probably don't have a lot you have to carry around with you.

Grave Goods

Death, it turns out, is not a perfect equalizer. Sure, you're all shadows and dust flung into the maw of evil, but some start off better equipped than others.

You begin play with a small assortment of items copied from the objects surrounding you at the time of death and/or burial. This may include the clothes and tools you were buried with, food that was burned with you, or even a living thing that was sacrificed to honor you- generally an animal like a horse or domestic cat. Or perhaps you were sacrificed in honor of someone else, who was quickly carried away by demons, leaving you to carry away their grave goods.

You can only bring as many facsimiles as you can carry on your person, or else coax along with you. If you were buried with all of your material wealth, it turns out you really can't take it with you. Fortunately, money is worthless down here unless it's forged from another tortured soul.

Echoes of Before

You may remember your entire life, fragmentary pieces, or nothing at all. Each brings you great pain and regret. But it can also bring you strength.

Despite lacking muscles, you have a kind of psychic muscle memory of your past skills and abilities. You may have had great strength of arm, quick wit and skill, arcane power, or some other cliché categorization of capabilities. If you somehow survive the cruelties of the underworld without unraveling and losing almost all of yourself, you might be able to plumb the depths of your past a little deeper, and tease out more of that ability dormant deep within your anguished psyche. Or, you can forsake the past, and follow a new past entirely. Thus may you specialize, or branch out.

Take heart and choose as you will. There are no right or wrong answers. Only slower or faster routes to failure.

Unraveling

And when you do fail, it will hurt. Whether you are defeated in battle, or ensorcelled, or betrayed, you will eventually wind up in the clutches of your tormentors. With luck, your comrades in arms may break you out of whatever hellish holdfast you've been hidden in before it's too late.

Luck is rare. Most likely, you'll unravel at least once in your time away.

When you do, you lose bits of yourself. First your most recently acquired skill go, followed by, memories, and finally the fundaments of your being. Eventually all that will be left is your capacity to register and feel pain.

But each time you unravel, you slip your bonds by dint of vanishing into whimpers and smoke. You'll reappear somewhere close by, but not so close that you won't have a head start running away from your captors before they catch you again. Until next time.

The Tormentors

Demons, evil spirits, torturers, "the neighbors"; all are popular terms that refer to your enemy. Your foe is infinite in shape, number, and depth of sadism, and seemingly unstoppable in the long term. Every loathsome monster you can imagine and many more that you cannot has its place in these hellish ranks.

 Still, they are not invulnerable. They are made of the same wispy stuff that you are, and can thus be disrupted and even 'killed'. Unlike a shade who unravels for a time, most slain demons rejoin with the underworld itself, their essence recycled into some new nightmare, sometimes with lingering memories and abilities, sometimes without. Don't dwell overlong on the implications this has for you shades.

They start off simple-minded and weak, but quickly develop skill, cunning, and individual personality as they express themselves through the suffering of shades. They know how to communicate with you, and will do so mostly to mock or deceive you. They seem to have their own ranks and hierarchies, but who or what is at the top is a mystery.

Your Nemesis

Far more immediate a threat than some unknown dark lord is the demon you know all too well. Perhaps it was your first torturer, or your first 'kill'. Maybe you barely eluded it, enticing it to start the chase. This creature is your Nemesis. You are as free to decide what it looks like as you are to shape your own shade, because it always embodies what you personally find most awful and revolting.

It has no unique power save for its unnerving, intimate familiarity with you. It cannot sense you by some supernatural means, yet it will always find you, sooner or later. It is like a second shadow, always trying to latch onto you. But this familiarity goes both ways. Over time your fear and hate for it will crystallize into wisdom, and the power to exploit its weaknesses.

It would like nothing more than to break you. Break it back.

An End

There is no escaping the underworld- dead is dead. Likewise, you can never defeat your tormentors.

But you can spite them. You can deny them their sadistic purpose and evade capture indefinitely. Alongside your fellow shades, you can create a community and carve out a 'living' for lack of a better word. You can even dare to feel more positive emotions.

There is a legend--probably made up by demons just to give your kind false hope--that one form of escape is possible.

By breaking all fetters and facing one's nemesis with all fear, misery, and even malice scoured from their soul, a shade might collide with it in a manner not unlike matter meeting antimatter. Complete, mutual annihilation ensues. This grants the shade sweet, restful oblivion, but it also forever deprives the underworld of one of its jailers.

A meaningless feat on its own in the face of infinity, but with enough repetition over time...

Possible Origins of the Underworld

The other gods, jealous of the size of the kingdom of the dead, usurped the god of the dead. Your agony is a reagent in the spell used to keep it imprisoned.

Suffering is the fuel for all existence. If the underworld stopped its hellish work, the universe would collapse.

God was pandeistic, and the underworld is a particularly large, rotten piece of its corpse. Tormentors are its maggots.

Some cosmic force is desperately searching for someone special. Only an eon of unraveling will reveal the chosen one.

This is all the nightmare of some fitfully slumbering god.

The underworld is alien in origin. Its creators use it to experiment and collect data on you.

With enough torture, every shade becomes a demon. The denizens of the underworld need you in order to reproduce.

Somewhere deep in the underworld, tortured souls are being forged into an impossibly huge machine of unknown purpose.

This really is a place of punishment. Your unforgivable sin was existing.

This is the real world. You were just dreaming before.

Riverine Despotism in the Ersuunian & Early Haraalian Periods.

As we pass farther away from the cesspits downhill from the alehouse, my mind relaxes as chances of some strange tricks on the part of Elrusyo diminish down to the minimum level of risk one always runs when consorting with herb-hermits.

In place of that mental exertion, I'm able to appreciate the river, now broadening and clarifying steadily, for what it is. It, like so many other bodies of running water across the Basin, is a vein of life running through the heartland of so many former states.

And, like real arteries, one need only apply a little pressure to them in order to affect change in the body at large.

The Ersuunians, and the people of Haraal who would eventually subsume or supplant them, are famed in written history as well as modern popular culture for their vast forces of cavalry, able to wash over any opposition like crashing waves. They conquered their enemies and then held onto their winnings through the threat and force of that mounted elite, which would grow increasingly landed and powerful as time went on. They remained the focus of warfare and political might until the appropriation of dry-stone building from Esgodarran architecture eventually met with mortar and resulted in the first fortified and stone-walled cities, which complicated the art of the siege and seriously hampered a cavalry focus.

But an equally important component of control was water access. As mixed and settled Esgodarran-Ersuunian petty-kingdoms formed, pastoralists and montane herders alike became more and more discouraged from true nomadism, and the ability for them together with their entirely agricultural neighbors to move to a new area in the event of drought became practically nonexistent. Recognizing this, chieftain-kings along the Basin's periphery exercised control over the wealthier heartlands by building the most elaborate series of earth dams the world has ever known- excepting the irrigation systems of inland Nambar of course. By limiting or allowing the flow of water into a particular region, the rulers of the northeastern reaches (where the highest percentage of rivers have their source) were able to exert formal or de facto control over groups who were downstream of them and had no way to rectify the issue or displace some other tribe in a better position.

We know this because the descendants of Haraal utilized the exact same methods of control centuries later, as evidenced by one passage offered by our ever-present friend Yashka the Sage, in which "the sons of the conqueror restored to use the old choke points of the rivers."¹ Opposition to this view traditionally argues that the dams must have been an invention of Haraal himself, and the restoration was by many later generations of his descendants whose forebears had let them fall into disrepair. I would argue against that by pointing toward the trend in existing literature of painstakingly and in excruciating detail exulting all of the achievements and creations of Haraal or his known lieutenants. Nowhere within that swollen body of chronicles can be found mention of the river controls. I know- every sophomore-level student at the ITU is expected to have them memorized.²

Today, the majority of the dams and other earthworks are lost along with much of the rest of the architecture present during the height of the Haraalians. Those that remain have been converted from weapons of war to tools of commerce, being used to aid river navigation or at times irrigation. If we are fortunate enough to develop a funded archaeological community in the near future however, I do not doubt that many spectacular artifacts of that bygone age could be found.

It could even shine light on--or put to rest for good--the notion that once upon a time, up until the migrations of the Ersuunians through the eastern highlands, the River Khesh flowed not south into what would become the Deltas region, but east into what we now know to be foreboding wastelands.

What cataclysmic event could have caused that? Had there once been a green east?



¹ Verse 28,441, line 8 of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

² And while it is officially attributed to Haraal's spontaneous knowledge and intuitive battle-prowess, I would argue that a broad, inherited cultural knowledge of the Ersuunian Basin's waterways from preceding generations played a large role in his conquest of the western reaches. This was one of his last campaigns, which culminated in the battle at the Masib River, south of the Oron'er Mountains. The river's original name is unknown, but today it bears the name of the Masibi people, apparently a distant offshoot of one of the mountain tribes, who believed that the river was the gateway into the afterlife, and as such traditionally set their dead adrift on rafts down its current. Haraal demonstrated that he was no stranger to dramatic irony when he first ordered the flow of the river to be cut to a trickle,  then released it in a flood that swept away the surviving Masibs who hadn't been pinned and cut down upon its banks by his army.

Ekundayo (3/3).

Click here for Ekundayo 2/3.



The pale blue lights cast long, wavering shadows across the cemetery grounds. The grass was shortened but not removed from the earth, and many graves farther back in the lopsided rows were slowly, gently being overtaken by nature. Most mounds did not possess a significant marker beyond an erected piece of wood or stone, but several off to the left were highly conspicuous in this regard.

Four oblong rises of soil in the earth were quite fresh, as were the offerings arranged around them as a group. Several sticks of resin incense still smoked, and the melted , slowly solidifying wax rivers of a few candles stood out against the dark earth. Bundles of fruit, spices, and salt were wrapped in scraps of decorated cloth, each marked by a piece of bark carved with some personal identifier of giver or goodwill, in place of an entire written message. The visual arts of the village were more robust than their textual.

Abeni looked upon these mounds with quiet, somewhat confused respect. Why was she being brought to see the dead first? Once more seeking the old man's odd-hued eyes, she looked up toward him.

Grandfather Corpse was already looking back down at her, his smile lessened somewhat. But it did not vanish.

"They been missin' you terrible since the fiah. Ya maam, pah, little Dayo too." He spoke of the girl's baby brother, no older than four years by now.

The confusion intensified, and then turned to worry, as she looked back and forth between the mounds and the old man. The corpses backed off respectfully, as if they knew that they would be intruding upon a very personal conversation.

Joints creaked and groaned as the old man set his staff down, altering the angles of the shadows again dramatically. He set his flat hands with long, steady fingers upon the girl's shoulders, and he exhaled. Just as it always did, his breath smelled faintly of smoked taba leaves. He seemed to be waiting for the girl to speak first. When she didn't, he nodded his head and glanced aside once more, as if he were seeing and listening to something which she could not detect. He nodded his head upon that thin neck of his.

"Ya gotta go to 'em, Abeni. Me know it be frightenin', we awl do. But it time." With that, his hands reached past her shoulders, and he pulled the girl in lightly. One hand patted against her back as he embraced her, and then in the next moment he was twisting away on his long, scrawny legs and standing back up, staff in hand.

Abeni lingered on the three mounds for a time. She approached them slowly. She looked over the fourth, nestled between the third and the soil heaped up against the base of the fence.

She turned back to the man, tears reflecting the light beneath her eyes.

"Please... tell yuh wife me said hello, one las' time?"

"Course, sweet'aat."

"Tenkya."

Before she went and laid down upon the loamy soil, she snapped a piece of red-colored sugar candy from one of the offering baskets and popped it into her mouth. It clicked against her teeth, and the wind rustled the scorched hem of her dress one last time. It wasn't as soft as her bed, but it was close. She felt tired finally.

The old man sighed, and canted his head at an odd angle to listen again. The smile renewed itself, and he turned away. Knocking his hickory staff upon the nearest hard surface, he brought the still and silent bodies back to attention. They lined up like soldiers at attention, and then shambled forward on his instruction, clamoring through the place of restful death until they found emptied mounds of their own. The old man followed after each, packing the earth down tightly once they had clawed it back over themselves, all to the rhythmic chants of joro, jara, and joro.

Once the last particles of dirt were settled back down, he ambled over toward the gap in the fence once more. The staff extinguished itself with an almost imperceptible sizzle. With his free hand, he lifted up a length of hemp rope which tethered one end of an ancient wooden box, long and narrow, with one end wider than the other. He shouldered it upon one sagging side with a soft grunt, and then he trudged forward, back out into the mist once more.

"Ya 'erd awl dat, lub?"

The coffin knocked once in response.



((Ending this messy little amalgamation of ideas, I hope that the end of the last month and the beginning of the new has left you each with an affirmation of life. You can't have one side without the other. Happy Día de los Difuntos.))

Ergil-Who-Is-Death.

"He does not punish. He does not reward. He doesn't judge at all. He simply is; a withered hand to hold on the last, long journey."
- A literal translation out of Esgodarran prose taken from Nares Saton's Elegies.

"Don't fear Death- fear where he's taking you."
- A prominent graffito scrawled over the threshold of a funerary home in the Lower-East Tier of Deneroth.

"Relish the sting! It means the Horned One hasn't yet claimed you."
- Hital, elated as always to be performing burn debridement without any anesthesia handy.



When death comes, not everyone has a tribe to cut them apart, or a bird-spirit to whisk them away to the sky. For many, the only company to be had in death is silent and solitary Ergil.

As his epithet "Ergil-Who-Is-Death" suggests, Ergil is the state of death, and everything which is dead is entered into his being, at least temporarily. He is not a god, at least not the kind which needs worship and sacrifice, though he does receive both on occasion. He is somewhat closer to a force of nature, in a restrained and creeping sort of fashion. But he is also an individual, acting separate from or within himself in a manner surprisingly personal to each lost soul.

Upon death, the individual is commonly believed to be lost for a time without time ranging from hours to years, in which the soul is tossed back and forth upon the currents of some roiling sea of unbeing. But this transient phase ends, and then the dead "wakes up". They are greeted with a place not too vastly different from the location in which they died, with certain marked differences. In some stories this is a pallid mirror of the world of the living, while others hold it to be the actual, physical world through different means of seeing. Without the veil of mortal eyes, the spirit can see the world quite differently- perhaps, as it truly is.

Regardless of what the nature of this place is where the dead find themselves, it is somewhat of a dreary place. The sky remains perpetually overcast, and though the constant wind can feel quite damp, no rain ever falls. The world stretches out in all directions, silent and dead but for the wind in the grass or the flowing of stagnant-smelling water. Geography wears thin the farther away from one's site of death one goes, and beyond that, space itself begins to deteriorate, until a truly alien landscape stretches out before one's unveiled eyes. If this is the land of the dead, it can give the impression that one is the only dead thing anywhere, ever, for not a single other soul is ever to be seen. Black-feathered birds or small flies can occasionally be seen, as well as brief and distant views of dark shapes shifting about, but nothing pays the dead any heed. None but Ergil.

He appears sometime after the dead's wakening, typically from a great distance at first, no different from the other furtive black spots on the horizon. But though he moves slowly, he advances inexorably toward the spirit. Some flee what they see as this approaching apparition of doom, and beat a hasty retreat through the weird land which now keeps them. And because the spirit needs no sleep, nor food or water, the chase can last indefinitely. But Ergil's slow and steady approach never leaves him farther away than the horizon, a constant reminder of the inevitability of death.

Some remain quite ignorant of their own death, while others refuse acceptance, traveling through as many stages of grief as the living they left behind might feel. Though countless ages and trackless wastes may separate the dead soul from where they began, the time always comes when they stand in silent acceptance, and the master of that self-same domain comes to rest before them.

The avatar of death is quite featureless. He stands immensely tall, twelve feet or more at times, perpetually enveloped by a cloak of frayed black feathers and scraps of fur. His arms and legs, when visible, are as black as his garment, long and gangling, and terminating in gnarled claws. Contrasting with these dark hues is the dingy whiteness of bandages wrapped haphazardly around his body, stained with blood or antiseptic here and there- some believe these to be the remnants of dressings stripped from the bodies of those who died in agony under the ministrations of physicians, who finally came to know release from Najis the Healer. A more bleached shade of white is his head. Or, what passes for one.

Ergil has no visible face, for the head which caps his eerily long neck is mounted by the immense skull of a bovid shaped into a mask. Because of this, plus the large wooden staff or crook he is sometimes depicted with, he is known as the Horned One, or the Moldering Shepherd. His gender is inferred as male only due to the large and impressive horns which adorn the skull, suggesting that it had once belonged to a great steer. Either Death cannot speak, or he does not care how any including his newest guests refer to him. All he will do, is extend his hand.

He does not force the spirit to take his gesture, and will even continue to follow the dead on their aimless journey across the vast and empty vistas of that place, ever a silent companion walking a few paces behind and beside, as tireless as his charge.

When the hand is at last taken, he will not take initiative even then. Rather, the land seems to reorient itself and regain some measure of coherence around the two, and the correct path reveals itself. And so it is that Ergil and the spirit walk together, hand in hand, neither leading the other, until the destination is reached. Other times, if in life one was too young or old to walk, or some disability gripped them, Ergil effortlessly carries them in his musty yet gentle embrace, going where the dead would go as if they themselves were walking that way.

The final destination may be an opening into a vault in the earth. It may be a craggy pinnacle enveloped in a shaft of light piercing the ever-present clouds. Whatever it is, the immediate and profound sense of belonging which takes over the wandering spirit ends all travel. Ergil acts as final witness to the departed and their departure, and then he vanishes again over the horizon.

Ergil-Who-Is-Death has accumulated a great deal of frightening iconography over the ages, making him appear sinister and even violent in nature. The addition of a cruel-looking harvesting scythe in some depictions contaminated by a certain grain-god has not helped matters. But to those who pray to him and officiate funerary rites and interment, his even-handedness and gentleness are emphasized.

He is no one's enemy. Only another step to be taken.

Fokari Burial Practices.

"What was given is now returned. The dead wing their way to the ancestors beneath the Eagle's shade."
- Rohat Barza-parh, Speaker of the Hishar Tribe.



Death is inevitable, as well as quite common to the daily life of the Fokari, given the difficult nature of existence on the wastes' edges. It is also considered to be as natural as life. It is not an aberrant state, and so it is nothing to be feared- at least, ideally. When death claims the member of a tribe, the ceremonies which follow are cause for the entire community to come together. All but the most vital tasks are set aside for a few hours in which the dead Fokar is eulogized and offerings are burned in the tribal brazier to placate the right spirits for the event and attract the attention of the highest beings which transcend the status of spirit and become full-fledged gods. Chief among them are creatures often represented as birds, and among them the Eagle sits above all else as a sort of cosmic arbiter and judge of the dead.

Because the Eagle performs this function, there is no need for Ergil-Who-Is-Death, and thus he is not a being normally treated with by the Fokari despite his existence within their vast pantheon. This suggests that at some point in the past there was some form of contact between their tribes and the outside world extensive enough that a deity was shared in the exchange. But the fact remains that despite a small cycle of stories relating to him, the Moldering Shepherd has no role in the movement of the souls or equivalent spiritual stuffs of the deceased down into their appropriate niche in the underworld.

The dead are not buried, after all. Burning is not an option either, for though fire has a high position in their worldview, the Fokari simply would not have access to enough wood or other plant matter to use as fuel for every single funeral pyre. A fire fueled by collected and dried yuum dung would be more practical, but not exactly respectful of the dead.*

Once mourning has been completed and every family in the tribe--even and especially enemies--has come together, the body is carried away from the main village by a small procession of the closest family members of the dead, as well as the Speaker and Seer. The officiator says a few last words on the subject, and then the shaman ritually strips the corpse of all clothing and adornments. Then a dance is performed and maintained in order to call to the scene the spirits of nature which will bring to its rightful destination body and soul each. The rest of the group members use knives to cut the body into pieces, and then the butchered and dressed carcass is left to nature.

The first carrion bird observed to land upon the body and peck at it is believed to be the psychopomp who accompanies the spirit of the dead Fokar through astral projection. Specialized prayers of thanks are said to the bird according to its exact species, for the scavengers of the Wastes are many and varied. As the circling birds grow large in number overhead, the party retreats and returns to the rest of the village to resume daily activities while the body is picked clean and given back to nature. The tribe is expected to move on from this, for their part in that person's story has now ended. The deceased are said to have a long journey ahead of them yet, however. And though the journey of the dead is a treacherous one, they will live on forever in the patchwork ceilings of their descendants.

There are of course exceptions to this rule of ritual, though little in the way of explanation can be found. There are along the edges as well as the interior of the wastelands many cairn-grounds which dot the harsh landscape. They are known to the Fokari, and in fact are well-known enough among the tribes to be used as widely-recognizable landmarks to aid in navigation during migration. But all of these sites are given a wide berth by the Fokari, who do not actively speak of or even look at them. Most often, euphemism and vague gesture accomplish this.

Within the cairn sites are, of course, cairns. But they are of a curious design which are either deliberately open-aired or partially unfinished, each lacking a top so that something may peek out from it. These withered little glimpses are the heads of Fokari corpses crumpled up within, mummified by the ages of exposure to the elements, yet quite untouched by animal life.

How or why these bodies came to be here is a vexing mystery even among the tribes. The rare whisper suggests that the mummies may once have been great shamans or terrible magicians, but this raises more questions than answers.



* This is not to say that the Fokari hold the body of the deceased in reverence entirely or in perpetuity. Once the soul has left the vessel, it is nothing more than decaying matter to be discarded in the fashion most respectful of the land.