Birth of the Song Of Stone; Iah Land of the Fallen Star
In the dawn of existence, when time was a fluid concept measured in the slow breath of nebulae, Vescrutia reigned. She was not merely a planet but the anchor of the cosmos, the heart around which all else pirouetted. Her gravity was a song, a deep, resonant hum that drew wanderers from the dark. She was a mother, and the void was her womb, birthing countless children of stone and fire.
She collected them with a gentle, inexorable pull. Passing comets, their tails of ice glittering like diamond dust, were slowed and captured. Minor stars, weary from their billion-year journeys, found rest in her orbit. In the chaotic ballet of her skies, these celestial bodies would often collide. Not in violence, but in a cosmic embrace, their forms yielding, their essences mingling. From this crucible of stardust and stone, a new child was born: Vescrutia’s third moon, Iah.
She was not like her hulking siblings, Kirin and Bako. Kirin was a giant of pocked grey stone, ancient and solemn. Bako was a furious sphere of volcanic glass, its surface a shifting landscape of obsidian seas. They were the firstborn, powerful and possessive. The third moon was different. She was a mosaic, a beautiful patchwork of all the things Vescrutia had collected. She had veins of frozen methane that shimmered blue, craters lined with crystalline silicates that caught the distant starlight, and a core that pulsed with the faint, captured warmth of a long-dead star. Vescrutia loved her fiercely, this youngest child, and bathed her in the soft light of her own atmosphere.
But this cosmic peace was as temporary as a meteor’s flash. The universe is a place of cycles, of alignments, and consequences. The First Astral Year arrived, a time of profound gravitational shift. Across the heavens, Krin and Bako began a slow, deliberate convergence. From the surface of Vescrutia, it would have looked like two great eyes narrowing in the sky, their jealous gaze fixed upon their smaller, more vibrant sibling.
Their orbits, usually so distinct, began to overlap in a celestial conspiracy. They did not collide with the third moon. Their assault was more insidious, a slow and terrible crushing. They flanked her. As they passed on either side, their immense gravitational fields pressed inwards, a vise of cosmic proportions. The beautiful mosaic moon, never designed for such a strain, began to groan. A silent scream echoed through the void as fractures spiderwebbed across her crystalline face. Her warm core faltered. The veins of blue methane vaporized into ghostly plumes.
Then, with a final, grinding shudder, she broke. The heavens, governed by the cold physics of the titans Krin and Bako, rejected her. Shattered and broken, the fragments of the third moon were flung from orbit, cast out from the sky that had been her home.
They fell.
The event, later to be known as the Moonfall, was a cataclysm that scarred Vescrutia to her very core. The fragments, no longer a gentle satellite but a barrage of celestial shrapnel, tore through her atmosphere. The sky bled crimson and gold as stone and ice ignited, painting trails of fire across the heavens. The most significant piece, the moon’s heartbroken core, struck the Big Blue.
The impact was a roar that was felt more than heard, a concussion that shook the planet’s tectonic plates. Mountains buckled continents away. The ocean boiled, turning to steam in an instant, and a tsunami of unimaginable scale washed over the virgin lands. For a generation of stars, Vescrutia was shrouded in dust and sorrow, a mother grieving the violent return of her child.
Yet, where the heavens had been cruel, the mother was kind. The flesh of her broken moon did not lie as dead rubble upon the seafloor. As the dust settled and the waters calmed, a miracle began. Vescrutia’s very essence, her planetary lifeblood, reached out to the fallen fragments. Her molten heart pulsed, and the seabed where the moon had struck began to soften and rise, accepting the celestial stone not as an invader but as a long-lost part of herself.
The moon’s alien rock, rich with minerals from a dozen star systems, began to assimilate. It merged with Vescrutia's own crust, its crystalline structures weaving into the basalt of the ocean floor. The seas, once a grave, became a womb. Over millennia, the waters receded, pulling back to reveal the result of this union.
A new continent had risen from the depths.
It was unlike any other land on Vescrutia. Its mountains, formed from the jagged edges of the moon’s largest fragments, held a faint, otherworldly luminescence on the darkest nights. Its earth was threaded with veins of strange, unearthly metals. The great central plains were the smooth, cratered remnants of the moon’s surface, now softened by wind and rain. Where the heavens had rejected this child, the mother welcomed it home, granting it a permanent place upon her body.
And so the continent of Iah was formed—a land born of cosmic tragedy, a testament to a fallen moon, and an eternal reminder of a mother’s undying embrace.
Geology/Thinning Boundary
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The sky above Iah is forever dominated by its siblings. There is no harsh, direct sunlight here. Days are a short, silver twilight, and nights are a long, deeper, star-dusted dark. The landscape is a study in monochrome and luminescence; every inch of Iah is a form of conversation, language, and an ecosystem of various kinds of communications and melodies. The stone speaks to the plants, and the planet echoes the thoughts of the springs and rivers. Towering over the northern coast is The Shattered Crown, a jagged mountain range of crystalline rock that glitters with trapped moonlight, the very peaks where the moon first struck. From there, the terrain softens into rolling plains of fine, grey dust known as the Dust Sea of Somnus, where the slightest breeze creates shifting, whispering dunes.
Plant life has adapted to this eternal, gentle glow. There is no green. The great Veiled Woodland is composed of Sylverwood trees, their bark smooth and reflective as a polished mirror, their leaves a pale, translucent white. Ghostflowers, with petals like spun moonlight, track the twin moons across the sky. By the water, Hush-reeds grow in dense clusters; they are hollow, and the wind passing through them creates soft, melodic sighs that sound like hushed conversations. The ground is carpeted in Gloom-moss, a spongy, deep purple flora that pulses with a smooth light, creating moving constellations on the forest floor.
The waters of Iah are unnaturally still and clear, reflecting the heavens with perfect fidelity. There are five great lakes, each with its character:
The Mirror Mere: A vast, shallow lake so perfectly reflective that it’s said to show not just the sky above, but the sky as it was a thousand years ago.
Lake of Whispers: Nestled in a deep canyon, its waters carry echoes. On still nights, one can hear fragments of conversations spoken by its shores centuries ago.
The Lacrimosa: A saltwater lake in the heart of the continent, fed by underground springs. Its name means "The Weeping," and locals believe its water is the crystallized sorrow of the fallen moon itself.
Glimmerfen: Less a lake and more a sprawling, marshy wetland where bioluminescent algae and will-o'-wisps dance over the black water, making it impossible to tell where the ground ends and the spirits begin.
Starlit Cistern: A perfectly circular, impossibly deep lake within an impact crater. Its water is so dark and pure it seems to have swallowed the stars, which glitter within its depths even in the brightest twilight.
But Iah’s most defining feature is not its geology or its flora. The impact that created it tore more than just a hole in the planet; it tore a hole in reality. Here, the Boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead is thin, tattered like old lace. As the hole led to exposure to the Duat, the afterlife. Supernatural phenomena are not aberrations; they are a part of the ecosystem. Spectral Rifts are another phenomenon that occurs on Iah, where great emotion or the ambitions of the dead rub against the boundary rift, opening a passage to the entities of the Duat, not all of which are benevolent.
Here, phenomena known as Remnants exist. Not ghosts, precisely, but lingering imprints of emotion and memory left on the landscape. Those attuned to the Ishi no Uta can perceive these remnants. They could manifest as shimmering figures of children playing in long-ruined settlements, a spectral herd of six-legged moon-beasts galloping silently across the Dust Sea, a heartbroken woman weeping forever by the shores of the Lacrimosa. Most are harmless, looping fragments of time.
Then there are the "Aware", the newly deceased who are confused, lost between worlds. They are drawn to Iah, a natural gateway. If left untended, their confusion can curdle into fear or rage, creating a "Sorrow-Storm"—a localized disturbance where the veil rips open, causing the living and the dead to bleed into one another in chaotic, terrifying ways. Only an Uttakata possesses the gifts needed to quell spectral rifts and bring peace to the storms of the dead.
Plant life has adapted to this eternal, gentle glow. There is no green. The great Veiled Woodland is composed of Sylverwood trees, their bark smooth and reflective as a polished mirror, their leaves a pale, translucent white. Ghostflowers, with petals like spun moonlight, track the twin moons across the sky. By the water, Hush-reeds grow in dense clusters; they are hollow, and the wind passing through them creates soft, melodic sighs that sound like hushed conversations. The ground is carpeted in Gloom-moss, a spongy, deep purple flora that pulses with a smooth light, creating moving constellations on the forest floor.
The waters of Iah are unnaturally still and clear, reflecting the heavens with perfect fidelity. There are five great lakes, each with its character:
The Mirror Mere: A vast, shallow lake so perfectly reflective that it’s said to show not just the sky above, but the sky as it was a thousand years ago.
Lake of Whispers: Nestled in a deep canyon, its waters carry echoes. On still nights, one can hear fragments of conversations spoken by its shores centuries ago.
The Lacrimosa: A saltwater lake in the heart of the continent, fed by underground springs. Its name means "The Weeping," and locals believe its water is the crystallized sorrow of the fallen moon itself.
Glimmerfen: Less a lake and more a sprawling, marshy wetland where bioluminescent algae and will-o'-wisps dance over the black water, making it impossible to tell where the ground ends and the spirits begin.
Starlit Cistern: A perfectly circular, impossibly deep lake within an impact crater. Its water is so dark and pure it seems to have swallowed the stars, which glitter within its depths even in the brightest twilight.
But Iah’s most defining feature is not its geology or its flora. The impact that created it tore more than just a hole in the planet; it tore a hole in reality. Here, the Boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead is thin, tattered like old lace. As the hole led to exposure to the Duat, the afterlife. Supernatural phenomena are not aberrations; they are a part of the ecosystem. Spectral Rifts are another phenomenon that occurs on Iah, where great emotion or the ambitions of the dead rub against the boundary rift, opening a passage to the entities of the Duat, not all of which are benevolent.
Here, phenomena known as Remnants exist. Not ghosts, precisely, but lingering imprints of emotion and memory left on the landscape. Those attuned to the Ishi no Uta can perceive these remnants. They could manifest as shimmering figures of children playing in long-ruined settlements, a spectral herd of six-legged moon-beasts galloping silently across the Dust Sea, a heartbroken woman weeping forever by the shores of the Lacrimosa. Most are harmless, looping fragments of time.
Then there are the "Aware", the newly deceased who are confused, lost between worlds. They are drawn to Iah, a natural gateway. If left untended, their confusion can curdle into fear or rage, creating a "Sorrow-Storm"—a localized disturbance where the veil rips open, causing the living and the dead to bleed into one another in chaotic, terrifying ways. Only an Uttakata possesses the gifts needed to quell spectral rifts and bring peace to the storms of the dead.
Native Species
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Eons folded into themselves. Time, once fluid, began to harden, its currents carving channels through the cosmos. On Vescrutia, the dust settled, the skies cleared, and the violent oceans calmed into a rhythmic pulse against new shores. The continent of Iah, born of the Moonfall, was no longer a raw wound but a landscape of breathtaking, sorrowful beauty.
Life, tenacious and inevitable, found purchase in Iah's alien soil. Evolution gave rise to several species that adapted to the moon-saturated landscape. Many of them are nocturnal.
Glimmer-Stags: They moved through the petrified, silver-barked forests like living constellations. Their bodies were sleek and grey, but their antlers had grown from the very earthen essence of the fallen moon. They absorbed the faint, ambient light of the shattered celestial body hanging in Vescrutia's sky and pulsed with a soft, internal luminescence. They drink from streams whose waters run clear over glowing geodes, their antlers casting shifting, milky patterns on the surface. They were the perfect embodiment of Iah: breathtakingly beautiful, yet tinged with a silent, radiant sorrow.
Whisper-Moths: Their vast, powdery wings didn't reflect light, but seemed to swallow it, along with all sound. A swarm of them could pass a hand's breadth from your ear and you'd hear nothing, only feel a faint, cool stir in the air. They were the quiet heart of Iah's perpetual twilight, a necessary part of its floral wealth, and their wings carried pollen across the continent, encouraging the growth of fauna. Although males typically do not exceed 2 inches in length, queens are known to grow to human sizes. Though largely peaceful, if threatened, they produce a potent disorienting dust that places other creatures in a dream-like stupor.
Shroud-Cat: A predator evolved to hunt the Glimmer-Stags, its coat was a patch of absolute void, a living hole in reality that absorbed all light. You didn't see it so much as notice its absence. Only the keen tend to become aware of one stalking them as the forest ahead of them simply… ended. A patch of starless night on the forest floor, from which two hungry, yellow eyes blinked open. Tiheri claws carry traces of star metal, able to store moonlight into them to increase their lethality.
Echo-Bats are commonly larger than most terrestrial bats known, with leathery wings that hummed at a subsonic frequency. Their echolocation was so advanced that they could map the neurological activity of their prey, homing in on the flicker of a moth's simple mind from a kilometer away. Their series of clicks was one of the few sharp, defined sounds in the Iah night.
Stone-Shelled Grokkers: also called living mountains. Immense, six-legged grazers that move with geological patience. Their carapaces were mottled grey and white, patterned like the shattered moon itself, offering near-perfect camouflage amongst the rocks. They scraped lichens from the canyon walls with raspy, powerful tongues. These massive herbivores, though very intelligent, are largely passive, viewing most creatures as insignificant as a shifting pebble. They can hibernate for centuries, often mistaken for hills, and in grand cases, mountains.
Rift-Crawlers: Horrifying, centipede-like scavengers with dozens of hooked legs and clusters of crystalline eyes that could see in absolute darkness. They cleaned the bones of Shroud-Cat kills, their chitinous bodies clicking and scraping in the deep dark where no light reached. They are highly territorial and often battle Shroud Cats for their meals and dwellings.
Sorrow-Swans: Graceful, long-necked avians with feathers of pure, pearlescent white, they are shy creatures that sang only when the moon was highest. It is said they were the first to know the song of the Fallen Star, even before the Moon-Forged. They mated for life, and it was said that when one died, the other would sing until its own heart gave out. They tend to stay close to lakes as their diet is primarily fish and insects.
Tide-Drifters: Bioluminescent, jellyfish-like organisms that pulsed with soft blue and green light, their tentacles gather ambient energy from the water. They were devious creatures who appeared to be harmless but possessed the ability to adopt the visage of trees, casting illusions over their tentacles to appear as harmless roots when in truth they paralyze and consume anything unlucky enough to fall for their trick.
Murmuring Choir: It isn't a single species, but a symbiotic colony of fungus and insectoid creatures that covers entire groves. By day, they were inert, resembling mossy growths. But by night, they awoke. Millions of tiny lights would begin to pulse in unison, accompanied by a low, resonant hum that vibrated through the soil. It felt like standing inside the mind of the forest, a collective consciousness communicating in a language of light and sound. It was ancient, alien, and utterly hypnotic, mirroring the star that gave rise to their birth. Often described as the “Will of Iah”
Kanoloa. A colossal, gas-filled organism that lives its entire life in the upper atmosphere. It moves with impossible grace, a sky-whale swimming through the currents of the air, filtering airborne microbes for sustenance. Its underbelly shimmered with captured moonlight, a slow-moving god against the backdrop of the stars. It is a creature born not of the land, but of the space between the land and the broken moon, a testament to life's utter refusal to be constrained. It is thought that the Kanoloa is the embodiment of the Fallen Star’s lamentation of being thrust from the heavens long ago.
Life, tenacious and inevitable, found purchase in Iah's alien soil. Evolution gave rise to several species that adapted to the moon-saturated landscape. Many of them are nocturnal.
Glimmer-Stags: They moved through the petrified, silver-barked forests like living constellations. Their bodies were sleek and grey, but their antlers had grown from the very earthen essence of the fallen moon. They absorbed the faint, ambient light of the shattered celestial body hanging in Vescrutia's sky and pulsed with a soft, internal luminescence. They drink from streams whose waters run clear over glowing geodes, their antlers casting shifting, milky patterns on the surface. They were the perfect embodiment of Iah: breathtakingly beautiful, yet tinged with a silent, radiant sorrow.
Whisper-Moths: Their vast, powdery wings didn't reflect light, but seemed to swallow it, along with all sound. A swarm of them could pass a hand's breadth from your ear and you'd hear nothing, only feel a faint, cool stir in the air. They were the quiet heart of Iah's perpetual twilight, a necessary part of its floral wealth, and their wings carried pollen across the continent, encouraging the growth of fauna. Although males typically do not exceed 2 inches in length, queens are known to grow to human sizes. Though largely peaceful, if threatened, they produce a potent disorienting dust that places other creatures in a dream-like stupor.
Shroud-Cat: A predator evolved to hunt the Glimmer-Stags, its coat was a patch of absolute void, a living hole in reality that absorbed all light. You didn't see it so much as notice its absence. Only the keen tend to become aware of one stalking them as the forest ahead of them simply… ended. A patch of starless night on the forest floor, from which two hungry, yellow eyes blinked open. Tiheri claws carry traces of star metal, able to store moonlight into them to increase their lethality.
Echo-Bats are commonly larger than most terrestrial bats known, with leathery wings that hummed at a subsonic frequency. Their echolocation was so advanced that they could map the neurological activity of their prey, homing in on the flicker of a moth's simple mind from a kilometer away. Their series of clicks was one of the few sharp, defined sounds in the Iah night.
Stone-Shelled Grokkers: also called living mountains. Immense, six-legged grazers that move with geological patience. Their carapaces were mottled grey and white, patterned like the shattered moon itself, offering near-perfect camouflage amongst the rocks. They scraped lichens from the canyon walls with raspy, powerful tongues. These massive herbivores, though very intelligent, are largely passive, viewing most creatures as insignificant as a shifting pebble. They can hibernate for centuries, often mistaken for hills, and in grand cases, mountains.
Rift-Crawlers: Horrifying, centipede-like scavengers with dozens of hooked legs and clusters of crystalline eyes that could see in absolute darkness. They cleaned the bones of Shroud-Cat kills, their chitinous bodies clicking and scraping in the deep dark where no light reached. They are highly territorial and often battle Shroud Cats for their meals and dwellings.
Sorrow-Swans: Graceful, long-necked avians with feathers of pure, pearlescent white, they are shy creatures that sang only when the moon was highest. It is said they were the first to know the song of the Fallen Star, even before the Moon-Forged. They mated for life, and it was said that when one died, the other would sing until its own heart gave out. They tend to stay close to lakes as their diet is primarily fish and insects.
Tide-Drifters: Bioluminescent, jellyfish-like organisms that pulsed with soft blue and green light, their tentacles gather ambient energy from the water. They were devious creatures who appeared to be harmless but possessed the ability to adopt the visage of trees, casting illusions over their tentacles to appear as harmless roots when in truth they paralyze and consume anything unlucky enough to fall for their trick.
Murmuring Choir: It isn't a single species, but a symbiotic colony of fungus and insectoid creatures that covers entire groves. By day, they were inert, resembling mossy growths. But by night, they awoke. Millions of tiny lights would begin to pulse in unison, accompanied by a low, resonant hum that vibrated through the soil. It felt like standing inside the mind of the forest, a collective consciousness communicating in a language of light and sound. It was ancient, alien, and utterly hypnotic, mirroring the star that gave rise to their birth. Often described as the “Will of Iah”
Kanoloa. A colossal, gas-filled organism that lives its entire life in the upper atmosphere. It moves with impossible grace, a sky-whale swimming through the currents of the air, filtering airborne microbes for sustenance. Its underbelly shimmered with captured moonlight, a slow-moving god against the backdrop of the stars. It is a creature born not of the land, but of the space between the land and the broken moon, a testament to life's utter refusal to be constrained. It is thought that the Kanoloa is the embodiment of the Fallen Star’s lamentation of being thrust from the heavens long ago.
The First Iahns; The Moon-Forged
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For ages, the species of Iah continued to diversify until the coming of the second astral year gave birth to a new race. From the crystalline dust, sentient geode-creatures arose, their thoughts resonating through a shared mineral consciousness. In the plains softened from crater floors, grasses grew that captured starlight, releasing it in a soft, silver luminescence during the long nights. And from the very heart of the continent, where the moon's core lay buried deep, a new people emerged.
They were the Iahn, the Moon-Forged. Their skin was a mosaic of pearlescent dust, and their eyes held the ghost-light of stars that had died eons ago. To them, the pull of Vescrutia was not a chain but a cradle song, a constant, loving hum that reminded them they were home. They were the grandchildren of a murdered celestial, and grief was their inheritance.
Their civilization was a monument to sorrow. They did not quarry the mountains; they spoke to them. Learning many things from them, and their communion with he land. From the crystalline peaks, they grew spires that spiraled towards the heavens, structures that resonated with the faint energy of their world. They charted the stars not for conquest, but to map the scene of the crime. Their poetry was an elegy; their science was a séance.
Each night, they would gather on the high plateaus, their luminous forms a stark contrast to the dark plains. They would turn their star-filled eyes to the two great celestial bodies above: Krin, the pocked and silent executioner, and Bako, the furious, glassy-eyed accomplice. They felt no hatred—the concept was a discordant note in their harmonious minds—only a deep, resonant sorrow. Their purpose was not revenge, but remembrance. The story had to be told.
They forged no weapons of war. Through generations of study, the Iahn learned to hear the music of their world. They understood that the strange metals veining their land, the legacy of a dozen star systems, could be made to resonate. They learned that the continent of Iah itself, the body of their First Ancestor, was an instrument.
They did not build a weapon. They built a voice—an ode to the heavens known as the "Ishi no Uta" or the "Stone's Song". Language that spoke not with words, but conveyed memory, emotion. They crafted reliquaries of resonance: Chrono-Astrolabes that mapped the echoes of time, Looms of Starlight that wove nebular light into tapestries of history, and countless other treasures. Using the entire continent as a sounding board, they prepared to broadcast their ode to the cosmos, a lament for the First Ancestor that would echo through the void forever.
When the day came, a single Iahn elder placed a hand upon the central resonant spire known as the Monolith, connected to the moon's former core, now a repository of vast energy known as Kalestea. A low hum began, spreading through the crystalline cities, across the starlit plains, and deep into the planetary crust. The hum grew into a chord, a sound that was also a feeling—the loneliness of a star before it dies, the silent scream of a world shattering, the profound love of a mother for her lost child. The Ishi no Uta was a tapestry of cosmic memory, beautiful and heartbreaking, a voice for the voiceless dead.
On the eve of the second astral year, the cycle that had brought such ruin, the Iahains were ready. As Kirin and Bako began their slow convergence, their jealous orbits once again narrowing in the sky, the Iahn unleashed their song.
From the heart of Iah, a beam of pure, silver-blue light erupted, piercing the heavens. It was not a violent blast, but a focused, coherent wave of information, of feeling. It carried the glitter of ice-tail comets, the hum of a captured star-core, the silent scream of a breaking world, and the gentle, persistent love of a mother planet. It was the entire story of the third moon, translated into the language of light.
The beam struck Krin first. The ancient moon, so long inert and silent, shuddered. The light did not scar it, but permeated it. For the first time in its existence, the giant of grey stone felt something other than gravity. It felt an echo of its crime. From its deepest, oldest craters, a fine, glittering dust began to rise—not of impact, but of sorrow. Crystalline tears for a sibling it had never known, only destroyed.
The beam passed through and struck Bako. The furious sphere of volcanic glass, ever raging, faltered. The light plunged into its obsidian seas, cooling them not with water, but with memory. The volcanic fires dimmed. The shifting landscape stilled, hardening into vast, tormented shapes, like sculptures of remorse.
The requiem did not stop there. It continued outwards, a story flung into the deep dark, a message to any who might see it. It told of Vescrutia’s love, of a beautiful child made of stardust, and of the jealousy of titans.
On the surface of Vescrutia, the Iahn watched. They saw the light of their ancestors dim the rage in one moon and etch sorrow upon the other. They had not sought vengeance, but acknowledgement. And in this act, they had transformed their two tormentors into eternal monuments of their tragic creation.
Vescrutia felt it all. She felt the song of her grandchildren, the transformed grief of her two wayward children, and the story of her lost daughter now travelling on light wings to the far corners of existence. Her own deep, resonant hum, the song of her gravity, shifted. A new note was added—no longer the simple melody of a mother, but a complex harmony of love, loss, remembrance, and reconciliation.
The Iahn had not just given a voice to their continent; they had given a soul to their entire system. And the continent of Iah, a land born of a falling moon, now stood as a beacon, ensuring that in the vast, silent dark, no star would ever truly be forgotten. It is said that Iah experiences its elongated periods of nighttime because the Twin Moons grant their graces to the land, focusing much more intently on it, atonement for their actions against their sister.
They were the Iahn, the Moon-Forged. Their skin was a mosaic of pearlescent dust, and their eyes held the ghost-light of stars that had died eons ago. To them, the pull of Vescrutia was not a chain but a cradle song, a constant, loving hum that reminded them they were home. They were the grandchildren of a murdered celestial, and grief was their inheritance.
Their civilization was a monument to sorrow. They did not quarry the mountains; they spoke to them. Learning many things from them, and their communion with he land. From the crystalline peaks, they grew spires that spiraled towards the heavens, structures that resonated with the faint energy of their world. They charted the stars not for conquest, but to map the scene of the crime. Their poetry was an elegy; their science was a séance.
Each night, they would gather on the high plateaus, their luminous forms a stark contrast to the dark plains. They would turn their star-filled eyes to the two great celestial bodies above: Krin, the pocked and silent executioner, and Bako, the furious, glassy-eyed accomplice. They felt no hatred—the concept was a discordant note in their harmonious minds—only a deep, resonant sorrow. Their purpose was not revenge, but remembrance. The story had to be told.
They forged no weapons of war. Through generations of study, the Iahn learned to hear the music of their world. They understood that the strange metals veining their land, the legacy of a dozen star systems, could be made to resonate. They learned that the continent of Iah itself, the body of their First Ancestor, was an instrument.
They did not build a weapon. They built a voice—an ode to the heavens known as the "Ishi no Uta" or the "Stone's Song". Language that spoke not with words, but conveyed memory, emotion. They crafted reliquaries of resonance: Chrono-Astrolabes that mapped the echoes of time, Looms of Starlight that wove nebular light into tapestries of history, and countless other treasures. Using the entire continent as a sounding board, they prepared to broadcast their ode to the cosmos, a lament for the First Ancestor that would echo through the void forever.
When the day came, a single Iahn elder placed a hand upon the central resonant spire known as the Monolith, connected to the moon's former core, now a repository of vast energy known as Kalestea. A low hum began, spreading through the crystalline cities, across the starlit plains, and deep into the planetary crust. The hum grew into a chord, a sound that was also a feeling—the loneliness of a star before it dies, the silent scream of a world shattering, the profound love of a mother for her lost child. The Ishi no Uta was a tapestry of cosmic memory, beautiful and heartbreaking, a voice for the voiceless dead.
On the eve of the second astral year, the cycle that had brought such ruin, the Iahains were ready. As Kirin and Bako began their slow convergence, their jealous orbits once again narrowing in the sky, the Iahn unleashed their song.
From the heart of Iah, a beam of pure, silver-blue light erupted, piercing the heavens. It was not a violent blast, but a focused, coherent wave of information, of feeling. It carried the glitter of ice-tail comets, the hum of a captured star-core, the silent scream of a breaking world, and the gentle, persistent love of a mother planet. It was the entire story of the third moon, translated into the language of light.
The beam struck Krin first. The ancient moon, so long inert and silent, shuddered. The light did not scar it, but permeated it. For the first time in its existence, the giant of grey stone felt something other than gravity. It felt an echo of its crime. From its deepest, oldest craters, a fine, glittering dust began to rise—not of impact, but of sorrow. Crystalline tears for a sibling it had never known, only destroyed.
The beam passed through and struck Bako. The furious sphere of volcanic glass, ever raging, faltered. The light plunged into its obsidian seas, cooling them not with water, but with memory. The volcanic fires dimmed. The shifting landscape stilled, hardening into vast, tormented shapes, like sculptures of remorse.
The requiem did not stop there. It continued outwards, a story flung into the deep dark, a message to any who might see it. It told of Vescrutia’s love, of a beautiful child made of stardust, and of the jealousy of titans.
On the surface of Vescrutia, the Iahn watched. They saw the light of their ancestors dim the rage in one moon and etch sorrow upon the other. They had not sought vengeance, but acknowledgement. And in this act, they had transformed their two tormentors into eternal monuments of their tragic creation.
Vescrutia felt it all. She felt the song of her grandchildren, the transformed grief of her two wayward children, and the story of her lost daughter now travelling on light wings to the far corners of existence. Her own deep, resonant hum, the song of her gravity, shifted. A new note was added—no longer the simple melody of a mother, but a complex harmony of love, loss, remembrance, and reconciliation.
The Iahn had not just given a voice to their continent; they had given a soul to their entire system. And the continent of Iah, a land born of a falling moon, now stood as a beacon, ensuring that in the vast, silent dark, no star would ever truly be forgotten. It is said that Iah experiences its elongated periods of nighttime because the Twin Moons grant their graces to the land, focusing much more intently on it, atonement for their actions against their sister.
The Iahn Exstiction; Birth Of The Usagi
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The celestial aria reached Krin and Bako, who seemed to dim in shame. It reached Vescrutia, who wept tears of sympathy.
And it reached the Horsemen.
Vescrutia’s eternal foes, beings of entropy and violent silence who rode steeds of solidified shadow, heard the song not as a lament, but as a challenge. They tore through the veil of space, their arrival a sudden, jarring cessation of cosmic harmony. They were the antithesis of order, or life, where the Iahn created, they destroyed; where the Iahn sang, they brought a shrieking silence.
The Monolith, which had hummed with life moments before, screamed a final, dissonant chord and shattered into dust. The Moon-Forged, a people of art and peace, had no defense against such absolute malice. The Horsemen laid waste to their shimmering cities, toppling their observatories and burying their priceless relics beneath miles of fractured stone. The song was silenced. The Moon-Forged were no more.
Grief descended upon Vescrutia and her twin moons. Kirin and Bako, in their distant sorrow, wept tears of superheated plasma and frozen lament. These celestial tears rained down upon the ravaged continent of Iah, falling upon the broken bodies of the Moon-Forged. The starlight in their flesh and the moondust of their skin reacted with the cosmic grief, smelting down into a new, fertile loam.
From this slurry of grief and starlight came a cradle, nurturing the sacred ground. In a hidden valley, sheltered by mountains that still echoed with a faint memory of the song, a new life emerged. This was the Garden of Crestfall, and in it grew a single species of flora: the Kamaria Lotus. Its petals were like polished moonstone, and at its heart pulsed a faint, internal luminescence. Each blossom carried a fragment of the Ishi no Uta, a whisper of the Moon-Forged memories, the voice of the stone.
Vescrutia hid this garden, a secret memorial, for an age. Then, a humble species of Night Hares, simple nocturnal rabbits with fur the color of deep space, stumbled upon the hidden valley during their foraging. Drawn by the Lotus's soft light, they began to feed on its petals.
A miraculous change overtook them. Over the generations, they underwent a metamorphosis. Their hind legs strengthened, allowing them to stand bipedal. Their paws grew deft and nimble. Their simple, instinctual minds expanded, blossoming into consciousness. And in that new consciousness, they heard it: a hum in their bones, a whisper in their souls. It was the Ishi no Uta.
They were no longer Night Hares. They were the Usagi.
The Usagi were born attuned to the stone’s voice. As they explored their land, they found the ruins of the Moon-Forged. When an Usagi touched a fallen crystal, they did not see stone; they saw a memory of a star chart. When they listened to the wind whistling through a broken arch, they heard a bar from the Stone’s Poem. Being so attuned to the Stone's Poem allowed them to perceive remnants and the Aware. They helped lay the wandering spirits to rest and defended the realm from those who would harm them or others.
Using the knowledge that now resonated within their very being, the Usagi began to rebuild. They were not the Iahn, but they were their inheritors, their spirit reborn. From the rubble of the past, they coaxed new cities from the bones of the old, their architecture a different, more grounded interpretation of the same celestial song. They became stewards of the buried relics, guardians of a memory they had not lived but felt with every fiber of their being. The great ode of the Moon-Forged was silenced, but in the Usagi, the Stone's Poem had found a new instrument, ready to begin its next verse. Starting with their capital, Lu'Jericho, City Of The Moon.
And it reached the Horsemen.
Vescrutia’s eternal foes, beings of entropy and violent silence who rode steeds of solidified shadow, heard the song not as a lament, but as a challenge. They tore through the veil of space, their arrival a sudden, jarring cessation of cosmic harmony. They were the antithesis of order, or life, where the Iahn created, they destroyed; where the Iahn sang, they brought a shrieking silence.
The Monolith, which had hummed with life moments before, screamed a final, dissonant chord and shattered into dust. The Moon-Forged, a people of art and peace, had no defense against such absolute malice. The Horsemen laid waste to their shimmering cities, toppling their observatories and burying their priceless relics beneath miles of fractured stone. The song was silenced. The Moon-Forged were no more.
Grief descended upon Vescrutia and her twin moons. Kirin and Bako, in their distant sorrow, wept tears of superheated plasma and frozen lament. These celestial tears rained down upon the ravaged continent of Iah, falling upon the broken bodies of the Moon-Forged. The starlight in their flesh and the moondust of their skin reacted with the cosmic grief, smelting down into a new, fertile loam.
From this slurry of grief and starlight came a cradle, nurturing the sacred ground. In a hidden valley, sheltered by mountains that still echoed with a faint memory of the song, a new life emerged. This was the Garden of Crestfall, and in it grew a single species of flora: the Kamaria Lotus. Its petals were like polished moonstone, and at its heart pulsed a faint, internal luminescence. Each blossom carried a fragment of the Ishi no Uta, a whisper of the Moon-Forged memories, the voice of the stone.
Vescrutia hid this garden, a secret memorial, for an age. Then, a humble species of Night Hares, simple nocturnal rabbits with fur the color of deep space, stumbled upon the hidden valley during their foraging. Drawn by the Lotus's soft light, they began to feed on its petals.
A miraculous change overtook them. Over the generations, they underwent a metamorphosis. Their hind legs strengthened, allowing them to stand bipedal. Their paws grew deft and nimble. Their simple, instinctual minds expanded, blossoming into consciousness. And in that new consciousness, they heard it: a hum in their bones, a whisper in their souls. It was the Ishi no Uta.
They were no longer Night Hares. They were the Usagi.
The Usagi were born attuned to the stone’s voice. As they explored their land, they found the ruins of the Moon-Forged. When an Usagi touched a fallen crystal, they did not see stone; they saw a memory of a star chart. When they listened to the wind whistling through a broken arch, they heard a bar from the Stone’s Poem. Being so attuned to the Stone's Poem allowed them to perceive remnants and the Aware. They helped lay the wandering spirits to rest and defended the realm from those who would harm them or others.
Using the knowledge that now resonated within their very being, the Usagi began to rebuild. They were not the Iahn, but they were their inheritors, their spirit reborn. From the rubble of the past, they coaxed new cities from the bones of the old, their architecture a different, more grounded interpretation of the same celestial song. They became stewards of the buried relics, guardians of a memory they had not lived but felt with every fiber of their being. The great ode of the Moon-Forged was silenced, but in the Usagi, the Stone's Poem had found a new instrument, ready to begin its next verse. Starting with their capital, Lu'Jericho, City Of The Moon.
Usagi Visuals
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The Curse Of Fading; The Thieves Guild Emerges
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For centuries, the Usagi thrived. Their cities, built in the cradle of the Moon-Forged ruins, were marvels of reclaimed beauty. They were a people defined by a shared, inherited melancholy, a purpose whispered from the very stones beneath their feet. Every Usagi child was born with the echo of the Ishi no Uta in their soul, a quiet hum that guided their hands as they carved resonant woods and polished salvaged crystals.
Usagi came in many shapes and forms, with those of Silver fur being the rarest, yet most attuned to the voice of stone. Often hired as guides to assist in the location of Moon-Forged artifacts, as they were able to enlist the help of spirits to aid them, or put harmful ones to rest. Their society was a harmonious one, a chorus conducted by the ghost of a dead moon and overseen by an Oligarchy known as the Listeners. Yet unlike their predecessors, the Usagi learned to weaponize their acute hearing, forging countless armaments, justifying their essential mystical creations as necessary defense mechanisms.
But time is a solvent, and memory, even one etched in stone and soul, can fade. The first signs were subtle. A carver would find their hand slipping, the perfect curve of a resonant sculpture eluding them. A storyteller would lose a verse of the Stone’s Poem, the cosmic tragedy replaced by a frustrating silence. The hum was weakening. They called it the Fading.
With each passing generation, the Fading grew worse. The vibrant connection to the Moon-Forged became a dull ache, a sense of profound loss for something they could no longer clearly remember. The Usagi population became fractured, and Silver Furred Usagi's population decreased to 1/100,000. Some argued for a return to the old ways, a desperate, almost monastic devotion to the remaining relics. Others, seeing their civilization stagnate and their purpose wither, looked for new paths, new songs. Dissonance entered the chorus.
Though there are countless Usagi clans, it was in this era of quiet desperation that the Zolgrundy clan rose to prominence. They were not poets or mystics; they were pragmatists, a long line of shrewd excavators and appraisers from the Under-Barrow. The city's slums. While others listened for dying echoes, the Zolgrundys studied the silence. Their matriarch, Vera Zolgrundy, was the first to propose a heretical theory: the Ishi no Uta wasn't just a memory, but a living energy that required a source. And that source was broken. They amassed political power quickly, having a solid footing among the Listeners.
Through forbidden delves into the most dangerous ruins, the Zolgrundys unearthed fragmented schematics of the Moon-Forged’s grand instrument. It was not simply the continent of Iah, but a network of immense resonant structures, all connected to a heart, a prime amplifier: the Monolith. This colossal spire, which the first Usagi had only known as a mountain of dust, had focused the song. When the Horsemen struck, the Monolith had shattered. But the Zolgrundy texts claimed a single piece had survived the cataclysm. A core fragment, no larger than an Usagi’s heart, containing the purest distillation of the Stone’s Poem—the Shard of the Monolith.
To the Zolgrundys, this was the answer. Restoring the hum wasn't a matter of faith, but of engineering. They needed to find the Shard. For reconnecting to the Ishi no Uta could place untold possibilities in their hands. To the public, a way to mend their broken society, to Vera, a way to establish eternal power. One that would see the Usagi impervious to the same end that ruined their ancestors.
Their quest began openly. They funded expeditions, commissioned scholars, and became the foremost patrons of historical recovery. But the Shard remained elusive. Other powerful families, content with the status quo or fearing the power the Zolgrundys sought, obstructed them at every turn. Relics that might hold clues were hoarded in private vaults; maps were stolen or destroyed.
Frustrated by honor and thwarted by politics, Vera's grandson, Corvus Zolgrundy, made a fateful decision. If they could not acquire the knowledge they needed through legitimate means, they would obtain it through any means necessary.
He began to recruit from the shadows. Nimble-pawed youths from the warrens of Under-Barrow who could slip through a barred window without a sound. Disgraced archivists who knew the secret pathways through the Great Library. Silver-tongued merchants who could trade in whispers and secrets. He organized them, trained them, and gave them a singular purpose: to recover any information leading to the Shard.
This was the birth of the guild. They had no official name, known only to outsiders as the Zolgrundy Ring, but among themselves, they were the Silent Paw Syndicate. They became a ghostly presence in Usagi society. A missing artifact from a rival’s collection, a “misplaced” ledger from the Scribes’ Council, a sudden windfall of information for a Zolgrundy scholar—all were the guild’s handiwork.
Over the generations, the Silent Paw became an institution, a secret pillar of Zolgrundy power. The family’s public face remained that of noble benefactors, tirelessly working to reclaim the Usagi’s lost heritage. But in the torch-lit tunnels beneath their estate, the actual work was done. Maps were pieced together from a dozen stolen sources, ancient dialects were translated from purloined tablets, and a network of spies tracked the movements of every potential rival.
The original mission became a convenient lie, a noble tapestry draped over a machine of extortion, assassination, and political puppetry. The tunnels, once filled with the careful tap of archaeologists' chisels, now echoed with the sharpening of daggers and the hushed trade of secrets that could topple the Oligarchy. The Fading was no longer a cultural malady to be cured, but a weakness in others to be exploited.
Usagi came in many shapes and forms, with those of Silver fur being the rarest, yet most attuned to the voice of stone. Often hired as guides to assist in the location of Moon-Forged artifacts, as they were able to enlist the help of spirits to aid them, or put harmful ones to rest. Their society was a harmonious one, a chorus conducted by the ghost of a dead moon and overseen by an Oligarchy known as the Listeners. Yet unlike their predecessors, the Usagi learned to weaponize their acute hearing, forging countless armaments, justifying their essential mystical creations as necessary defense mechanisms.
But time is a solvent, and memory, even one etched in stone and soul, can fade. The first signs were subtle. A carver would find their hand slipping, the perfect curve of a resonant sculpture eluding them. A storyteller would lose a verse of the Stone’s Poem, the cosmic tragedy replaced by a frustrating silence. The hum was weakening. They called it the Fading.
With each passing generation, the Fading grew worse. The vibrant connection to the Moon-Forged became a dull ache, a sense of profound loss for something they could no longer clearly remember. The Usagi population became fractured, and Silver Furred Usagi's population decreased to 1/100,000. Some argued for a return to the old ways, a desperate, almost monastic devotion to the remaining relics. Others, seeing their civilization stagnate and their purpose wither, looked for new paths, new songs. Dissonance entered the chorus.
Though there are countless Usagi clans, it was in this era of quiet desperation that the Zolgrundy clan rose to prominence. They were not poets or mystics; they were pragmatists, a long line of shrewd excavators and appraisers from the Under-Barrow. The city's slums. While others listened for dying echoes, the Zolgrundys studied the silence. Their matriarch, Vera Zolgrundy, was the first to propose a heretical theory: the Ishi no Uta wasn't just a memory, but a living energy that required a source. And that source was broken. They amassed political power quickly, having a solid footing among the Listeners.
Through forbidden delves into the most dangerous ruins, the Zolgrundys unearthed fragmented schematics of the Moon-Forged’s grand instrument. It was not simply the continent of Iah, but a network of immense resonant structures, all connected to a heart, a prime amplifier: the Monolith. This colossal spire, which the first Usagi had only known as a mountain of dust, had focused the song. When the Horsemen struck, the Monolith had shattered. But the Zolgrundy texts claimed a single piece had survived the cataclysm. A core fragment, no larger than an Usagi’s heart, containing the purest distillation of the Stone’s Poem—the Shard of the Monolith.
To the Zolgrundys, this was the answer. Restoring the hum wasn't a matter of faith, but of engineering. They needed to find the Shard. For reconnecting to the Ishi no Uta could place untold possibilities in their hands. To the public, a way to mend their broken society, to Vera, a way to establish eternal power. One that would see the Usagi impervious to the same end that ruined their ancestors.
Their quest began openly. They funded expeditions, commissioned scholars, and became the foremost patrons of historical recovery. But the Shard remained elusive. Other powerful families, content with the status quo or fearing the power the Zolgrundys sought, obstructed them at every turn. Relics that might hold clues were hoarded in private vaults; maps were stolen or destroyed.
Frustrated by honor and thwarted by politics, Vera's grandson, Corvus Zolgrundy, made a fateful decision. If they could not acquire the knowledge they needed through legitimate means, they would obtain it through any means necessary.
He began to recruit from the shadows. Nimble-pawed youths from the warrens of Under-Barrow who could slip through a barred window without a sound. Disgraced archivists who knew the secret pathways through the Great Library. Silver-tongued merchants who could trade in whispers and secrets. He organized them, trained them, and gave them a singular purpose: to recover any information leading to the Shard.
This was the birth of the guild. They had no official name, known only to outsiders as the Zolgrundy Ring, but among themselves, they were the Silent Paw Syndicate. They became a ghostly presence in Usagi society. A missing artifact from a rival’s collection, a “misplaced” ledger from the Scribes’ Council, a sudden windfall of information for a Zolgrundy scholar—all were the guild’s handiwork.
Over the generations, the Silent Paw became an institution, a secret pillar of Zolgrundy power. The family’s public face remained that of noble benefactors, tirelessly working to reclaim the Usagi’s lost heritage. But in the torch-lit tunnels beneath their estate, the actual work was done. Maps were pieced together from a dozen stolen sources, ancient dialects were translated from purloined tablets, and a network of spies tracked the movements of every potential rival.
The original mission became a convenient lie, a noble tapestry draped over a machine of extortion, assassination, and political puppetry. The tunnels, once filled with the careful tap of archaeologists' chisels, now echoed with the sharpening of daggers and the hushed trade of secrets that could topple the Oligarchy. The Fading was no longer a cultural malady to be cured, but a weakness in others to be exploited.
The team
