Yir is no mere swamp but a kingdom of vapors perched high above the world. Cold rainforests sprawl across shattered uplands where the land itself rises in broken cliffs, thousands of feet above the grasslands below. Mazes of mangroves knot with drowned forests, and black pools yawn like mouths between their roots. Paths vanish overnight, swallowed by shifting waters, and the cliffs themselves bleed waterfalls that vanish into the mists beneath. To descend from Yir is near-suicide; the plateau was not meant for escape, only endurance.
The folk of Yir are scattered and sparse. Small mammals dart through the undergrowth, preyed upon by tall, sharp-beaked bird clans who prowl with spear and arrow. Between them stalk the lizard-folk, chameleon-skinned and silent, hunters who thrive in ambush and camouflage. None bend to any empire, and all live uneasily amid ruins far older than themselves.
Everywhere in Yir rise the shattered remains of temples—stone long claimed by moss and rot. Their carvings are worn, their rites forgotten, but still the swampfolk whisper of the beings once worshipped there. The old priests promised change, spoke of transformation as a gift. Yet the stories linger of shapes half-formed, of folk who shed their skins endlessly, never complete, never at peace. In the black pools, the locals say, something still waits.
Since the first primal cataclysm, Yir has stood apart. While much of Zhuru collapsed and sank, this plateau endured—elevated, isolated, spared destruction yet cursed by its own survival. The rest of the continent recoiled, leaving Yir a ghost land, mistrusted and avoided, a place spoken of only in hushed tones by traders passing far to the south.
Conflict festers even in isolation. The Bird–Civit Wars rage, tall hunters clashing against nimble arboreal fighters in ambush and reprisal, spears hissing through the rain. In the drowned forests, the Arboreal Kingdoms feud endlessly, their skirmishes as frequent as the storms. For Yir is a land that breeds no peace; its folk are too busy surviving one another, too busy fearing the return of whatever once ruled here.
Old Kartong – The Untamed City
Location
Old Kartong rises in the central wastelands of Zhuru, east of the Yorozhian Hell Desert and south of the Crater Sea. Its position at the throat of caravan routes makes it impossible to ignore. Merchants, raiders, smugglers—all who cross the desert or skirt the sea must pass near Kartong’s shadow.
Overview
On a land that should command trade and dominion, Kartong festers instead. It should be a jewel of commerce: it lies astride the arteries that bind the grasslands of Rakwi, the kingdoms of Izhura, and the savannas of Varduun. Yet Kartong is no jewel. It is a scar, a wound that never heals, a ruin forever gnawed by predators who cannot keep it.
The Tower
Kartong does not sprawl—it climbs. The city’s foundations rise out of a black desert outcrop, and above them thrusts the ancient tower: a spiral of stone and steel older than the clans who squabble beneath it. Its angles are strange, its height defiant. No lion, no hyena, no gazelle remembers who raised it. The tower predates their chronicles. Some whisper of an elder folk drowned by cataclysm, others of god-folk who bled stone into the desert. Whatever its origin, it remains—an accursed spire sneering across the horizon, a beacon no caravan can ignore. Travelers call it the Accursed Sneer. When the desert ends and grass begins, it is the first sight, black against the sun, commanding the throat of the land. Even those who skirt it bow their heads, unwilling to meet its gaze.
A History of Ruin
Every folk has tried to hold Kartong. All have failed. When the lions held it, the hyenas poisoned its wells until the streets stank of rot. When the hyenas ruled, the lions marched in fury and left its towers burning. When the gazelles dreamed of governing, they were robbed in daylight by hyenas and dragged screaming into lion dens by night. So it has gone for generations: conquest, collapse, conquest, collapse. No flag endures. No crown survives. Old Kartong always reverts to its natural state—feral, lawless, ruled only by hunger.
The Maw
At the city’s gutted heart sprawls The Maw, Toa Zokuda’s den of debts. Half gambling pit, half brothel, half execution-ground, the Maw is Kartong in miniature. Here stolen princesses are chained for sport, debts are collected in flesh, and cruelty itself is currency. What the desert sun does by day—burn, wither, strip bare—the Maw does by night.
The Law of Old Kartong
There is no king, no clan, no crown. The city is ruled by those who can hold a den for a night, a street for a week, a quarter for a season. Debt is its only law. Cruelty its only justice.
Reputation
Old Kartong is spoken of in whispers, half warning, half dare. Rogues praise its wealth: caravans always pass near, smugglers always dock. But they curse its curse: no one leaves clean. Mercenaries grow rich there, then die there. Predators thrive because prey walks in willingly, thinking to cheat the cycle, but Kartong devours them all in the end.
Stories of Old Kartong
- The Chronicles of Thahn
- The Curse of Old Kartong
The Kartonga – The Wastes of Old Kartong
The Kartonga is a wound within Zhuru, a land so dry and desolate it rivals the worst of the world’s deserts. The ground is scarred with craters, the sky forever hazed with dust.
At its heart looms Old Kartong, the spire-city, a jagged fang of stone carved into impossible angles. No one agrees whether it was built or grown, whether it belonged to beasts, reptiles, or something that came before them all. Some whisper of the insect races—the pre-mammalian lords of a hellish epoch, long vanished yet never truly dead. The spire is not ruin but scar, proof that something vast and wrong once ruled the continent.
The Kartonga is not a kingdom but a midden. Outcasts and refuse from every other nation crawl here when all else has failed them. Thieves, mercenaries, warlords, and heretics congregate amid its shattered craters. Loose alliances form and dissolve in blood, for nothing is sacred, and betrayal is the only constant. Here there is no culture beyond survival. Honor is a lie, loyalty a fleeting bargain. Outsiders enter Kartonga at their peril, for here even the idea of law is mocked, drowned in skulduggery and backstabbing.
Gorzanth – The Fortress-City
Gorzanth is no jewel, no haven. It is a scar, a fortress squatting on its hill like a carrion beast. Its walls are blackened with soot, its gates plated in iron and scarred with the sigils of conquered folk. From afar, Gorzanth looks less like a city than a siege engine frozen in time, contempt made stone.
Around the fortress sprawls the horde: reed huts, skin tents, mud hovels, swelling when raiders return, shrinking when they march. The horde is impermanent, but the fortress endures, obsidian walls bristling with towers like broken fangs.
Inside, Gorzanth runs on blood. Pits roar with slave-fights, criminals are dragged into anthills, enemies sacrificed in flame. War is not a calling here—it is the only truth. Coupling in Gorzanth is indistinguishable from combat. Packs rut in the streets, courtesans scarred and cruel offer pleasures edged with blood. Tenderness is weakness; sex is conquest, as public and violent as the pits. Barracks, dungeons, slave pits, and forges hewn into the stone. Here, captives are consumed, steel is hammered, and the war machine never sleeps.
Varduun – The Hyenalands
Varduun is a land cursed twice. Once by fire, when Drael fell and the earth split, vomiting up new coasts and subvolcanic plains. Again by its inhabitants, for the hyenas infested the land and made it their own. It is hellishly hot and dry, its grass scorched by fumes, its rivers bitter with ash. Coastal vents still spit lava and poisonous gas, staining the air with smoke.
This is the Hyenalands. Their cities crawl across the plains like sores, mud-brick huts clustered around black-walled fortresses. Hyenas live quick and short—dying of hunger, violence, lust, or sickness—and laugh while they do.
Rape gangs roam alleys, criminals are fed to anthills for spectacle, and blood spills daily in arenas. Conflict defines them. Anything not hyena is prey. They harass the drowned folk of Drael, raid caravans of Izhura, slaughter lions in their beds, enslave jackals, and turn even upon one another when boredom strikes.
RONIN – Steel for the Taking [Album]
Risky Pleasure [Original Soundtrack]
Risky Pleasure [Original Soundtrack] – Vol 1
M8TINGS
On The Ages Of Thanator
The Height of Civilization
Of the first and second ages before the Cataclysm, nothing certain is known.
What remains are fragments: whispers of empires so vast they reached between worlds, whose towers rose like frozen lightning from the jungle, whose bridges spanned not miles but continents.
They crossed oceans on wings of crystal and filled the skies with ships that pierced the void between moons. They drew unbounded power from the hearts of suns; they wove bloodlines as masons weave stone, sculpting beasts and kin alike into forms of purpose and vanity. Theirs was the very pinnacle of civilization — an age when artifice eclipsed nature, when even flesh and time bent to command.
Yet for all its might, it was warlike, cruel, and restless. Titans clashed not only with steel but with continents as weapons; armies of sculpted hosts and machines drowned the jungles in campaigns whose purposes are lost.
The Triumvirate of Valsa, Zalhara, and Yobura made war upon Ordon, Fahndur, and Xota, while Nambus and Manzadahn played both sides to their ruin. Those who conquered enslaved the fallen; those who enslaved grew fat and sotted, birthing weak offspring doomed to become chattel of distant empires.
Thus civilization and its madness rolled on — vast, monotonous, inexorable. The Cataclysm By this time the nations of the world had grown stagnant. Kings quarreled like children over dust and ashes, while their people starved in famine and bled in endless border wars. From palace to hovel the realms sank into weariness, uprisings breaking like sparks from the slow grind of a history gone stale. No vision stirred, no glory endured—only the dull ache of decline.
Then the Cataclysm struck, rending the civilizations of Thanator asunder.
The crystal towers of High Thanator shattered like glass beneath a hammer, seas boiled, and the skies convulsed in violent upheaval none could withstand. The last embers of that golden age drowned in fire and fell to ash, and from its ruin began the long night of dread. The Age of Dread It is known that before the unyielding feral terror, before the mists of horror yet to come, there was an Age of Ruin and Rage.
From the wreckage of High Thanator’s crystal towers and jeweled decadence crawled forth the warlords of Dread Thanator—men and beasts clad in iron and smoke, lords of a world shattered, where the sword was the only law and blood the only coin. The planet itself was broken, scarred with ruin, its once-proud civilizations ground beneath cataclysm. Behind the veil of myth it may be seen as an era of Dread & untethered Madness, a time when the land was scoured but not yet dead, when the people clawed back scraps of order with desperate ferocity.
Tech still smoldered in the husks of elder cities, and the will to reclaim the heights of civilization still burned in scattered tribes and kingdoms. But they were not united. Warlord rose against warlord, bloodline against bloodline, feud against feud. The dream of recovery was smothered beneath vendettas older than memory, and the iron strength that might have rebuilt the world was squandered in endless slaughter. In those struggles the last relics of the elder world—the weapons that had once commanded the heavens and leveled continents—were drawn forth again.
And when they were unleashed, Thanator was plunged into devastation anew, a firestorm that burned the last bridges to the age before. From that ruin came the long descent, and from that descent the dread gates opened to The Age of Terror.
And so, Deep within the mists of an ancient and feral age, long after the primal dread had passed and the ruinous cataclysm had broken the elder stars, the Moon of Thanator was shrouded in terror. Savage tribes stalked the vine-choked ruins, monstrous beasts prowled the swamps of unending decay, and the bones of forgotten empires sank beneath strangling jungle. There, amidst carrion thrones and temples drowned in mire, life clung by fang and blade alone. It was the Age of Ruin, where the strong rutted and slew, and the weak were devoured by the dark. Yet fragments of the elder order endured.
Seven cities of the Elder Kind still brooded over the continents and the shattered isles, born in ages before memory forgotten and myth most antique. They rose as mountains of stone and metal, deified by generations who knelt before their gates as though before the artifice of unknown gods. Kovan, Sulrakka, and Bandire rotted upon the accursed rock of Drodos; Dytaan drowned in the mists of forgotten Nyanti; Vezhtyne and Gorodos towered upon the barbarous marches of Tulton; and far to the heathen north squatted grim Pryntara, half entombed in ice.
They were mighty in aspect, terrible in memory—but they were not salvation. Each was a prison, clutched by kings and warlords alike who wore crowns of iron and despair, ruling gloomy dominions from halls that had once served as gateways to the stars. None recalled their true design, nor dared to name the vanished architects who had raised them.
Between those titan relics sprawled a world unmastered. Tribes of beast-folk warred in endless vendetta, wolf against lion, stag against boar, panther against all.
The jungle was an enemy unto itself, strangling, choking, feeding carrion to the rivers and the swamps. From its depths crawled horrors with scale and fang, older than any city, older than the cataclysm. Even the tribes who raided and rutted by torchlight knew themselves hunted.
And all were prisoners of the sea. The oceans of Thanator beat against every shore with a hunger as endless as time, swallowing coasts, birthing storms, cutting one people from another with leagues of black water. Islands rose and sank in a single lifetime, and those who dared the waves found only shipwreck, madness, or the waiting teeth of abyssal leviathans.
So it was that Thanator lingered in twilight: a world of ruins where the past would not die, and of jungles where tomorrow might never dawn. From the gloom of her seven cities and the blood-soaked thickets of her tribes, the moon waited for the tread of heroes and tyrants alike—for in the Age of Ruin, all thrones were carved in bone, and all crowns were stained with blood.
Izhura
The Grassland Courts
Izhura unfurls as a broad and tranquil sweep of grass. The winds are softer here, the soil richer, yet still the land refuses the plow. It is no breadbasket—fields wither, harvests fail—but the grasslands are fertile for herds and caravans, and so the Izhurans turned their destiny toward trade. Their roads run like veins across the plains, caravan after caravan, their merchant cities growing not from farming but from the pulse of goods moving between desert, steppe, and coast. To the east the grass grows heavier, swelling into swamp, while westward it thins toward dust.
This is the realm of the equine folk—barbarian merchants whose strength is in their dual nature. Their warriors are famed for endurance, broad-shouldered and relentless. Their merchants are straight-dealing and shrewd, winning trust where others scheme. Their kings, by contrast, are hungry-eyed, calculating dynasts, forever measuring how to carve power from opportunity.
Among them, the females stand as visions of exotic splendor, veils and gold adorning their bodies, bosoms bared as symbols of wealth, virility, and divine favor.
Side by side with them dwell the cervine kingdoms, antlered dynasties proud and aloof, their courts coldly civil to their equine neighbors. Their tribes, however, mingle more freely: deer blood crosses with horse blood often, for the cervine of the plains have little patience for their haughty elk cousins in Konara. To outsiders, the two races seem forever opposed; in truth, their mingling is constant, their rivalries little more than ritualized pretense.
Izhuran culture is a feast of flesh and fire. They are known across Zhuru for virility, for stamina, for a sexuality woven into every rite and icon. Their temples rise as places of song, dance, and coupling, where rut is sacred and passion is seen as a gift of the earth itself. Councils of tribes meet to settle quarrels, but war is never far; sabertooth warlords ride the plains, direwolf bands raid from the wastes, and when there are no enemies abroad, the tribes contend with one another.
The Izhurans carry a heavy inheritance. Their bloodlines are tangled with the drowned empire of Xzlkul, the northern colonial nation that once ruled much of Zhuru before it was swallowed by the sea. The equine tribes of Zheria—enslaved as breeders and traded as chattel by Xzlkul—emerged free only when their masters drowned. From this hodgepodge rose the Zheri, progenitors of today’s Zhurians, a people both proud and scarred, their heritage equal parts conquest and survival.
Their numbers, however, remain fragile. Izhura has bled in two great wars—one against the lion kingdoms, another against the jackals of Bantos—and both were near-ruinous. They cling to survival now with desperate pride, straining to maintain strength against enemies who would gladly see them diminished further.