Sethuran Wastes
The Sethuran Wastes are a vast and cursed desert in western Gallorea, walled by the Peaks of Dreg'nor to the west and the Peaks of the Sky to the southeast, and falling away toward the Black Gulf in the southwest. It is not a desert of the natural world but a blight upon it: a waste that was made, not born, and that has never stopped growing. Every year its edge stands a little wider than the last map set it, and every year a little more of the living country to its north and west is drunk down into sand. In the north, Kuroshka holds a scatter of contested oases along its margin. The interior and the south belong to the dead of Sethuran, and to worse things than the dead.
The Devouring Sands
The Wastes take their name from the empire they devoured. Sethuran was a power of the elder world, proud and cruel in the way of the western Rhazi realms, and its God-Emperors are remembered, where they are remembered at all, as tyrants who hungered without limit: for land, for tribute, for worship, for life without end. The last and greatest of them, so the Kuroshkan telling goes, was not content to hunger. He sought to be done with wanting altogether, and struck a bargain with Phlegethon, the god of tyranny, to thirst nevermore.
The god answered the letter of the bargain and not its hope. The Emperor was granted his freedom from thirst by having it taken out of him and given to his whole realm at once. In a single night the rivers of Sethuran ran backward into the ground, the wells drank their own drawers, and the green heart of the empire began to dry and to blow away. The curse was not a punishment that ended; it was a hunger set loose, and it hungers yet. The Sethuran Wastes grow because the thirst at their center has never once, in all the ages since, been slaked, and it reaches outward season by season for water it can never reach.
Everything in the Wastes is shaped by that one idea. The dead thirst. The sand thirsts. The very mirages promise water and deal death. The desert is a hunger given a hundred leagues of ground.
The Northern Oases
Along the northern margin, where the Wastes press against Kuroshka, lie a handful of oases: deep, cold, improbable springs that the encroaching sand has somehow not yet drunk. They are the only water for a vast and killing distance, and Kuroshka claims them all, garrisoning the greatest with grim little forts and taxing every caravan that dares the northern tracks.
The claim is more brittle than Kuroshka admits. The oases sit at the very lip of a growing curse; each year the sand comes nearer, and now and then one of the smaller springs simply fails between one season and the next, its fort found buried and empty. The soldiers posted there are the condemned and the unlucky, and they keep three rules above all others: hoard the water, trust no mirage, and never, on any account, follow the singing that comes up out of the south after dark.
The Haunted Interior
Past the oases the tracks give out, and the deep Wastes begin. Here the drowned grandeur of Sethuran breaks the dunes: the tops of towers, the crowns of temples, the upflung hands of colossal statues, all sunk to the throat in sand. Here the sun is wrong, the horizon lies, and the dead of the old empire have never learned to rest. And here live the things the Wastes have made of thirst.
The Parched
The commonest and most dreaded haunts of the interior are the Parched: the desiccated dead of Sethuran, who did not so much die as dry, and who never finished the dying. They are husks, light as reeds and hard as old leather, and they are consumed by a thirst that ten thousand years has not eased. They come at a traveler for the water in him, and they take it: a man seized by the Parched is drained in moments to a husk like their own, and rises, in time, to thirst as they thirst. A caravan lost in the deep Wastes is not killed. It is recruited.
The Beckoners
Crueler than the Parched are the Beckoners, the spirits (or perhaps the desert itself, wearing a spirit's shape) that raise the mirages. They show the dying exactly what the dying most needs to see: a blue oasis just over the next dune, a stand of shade, the walls of home, the face of someone loved and lost, always beckoning, always a little further on. Those who follow are led gently off the safe ground and into the deep sand, where the Parched wait, or where the ground simply opens. The Beckoners do not hunt with teeth. They hunt with hope, and in a place of such thirst, hope is the deadliest lure there is.
The Glassmen
Where the curse first fell, the sand was fused in an instant to black glass, and there stands a plain of it, glinting and razor-edged, that the Kuroshkans will not name. Figures walk that plain: tall, faceless shapes of glass that catch the sun in blinding shards. Where the Glassmen pass, the unwary are found cut to ribbons by no visible blade, or worse, found half-fused into the black glass themselves, still living, still aware, and unreachable.
The Sand-that-Hungers
And beneath and around all of these is the waste itself, which is not wholly dead matter. The dunes shift against the wind. Dust-devils herd lost men in circles for days. A skin of water spilled on the ground is drunk down before it can be drunk by a mouth. Old caravan-masters speak of the Sand-that-Hungers as a single slow appetite spread across the whole desert, patient and enormous, of which every other horror is only a tooth.
The Heart
At the center of the Wastes, beneath the deepest and highest of the dunes, the legends set the Unslaked Emperor: the last God-Emperor of Sethuran, undying and unquenchable, bound in the ruin of his own buried palace by the bargain that unmade him. It is his thirst that drives the curse, and the desert grows outward from wherever he lies, a slow blind reaching for water that recedes forever before him. No one is known to have reached him and returned. The Kuroshkans hold that no one should try, for the one thing worse than a thirst that cannot be slaked would be to give it, at long last, something to drink.
Rumors and Legends
- That the singing heard from the south after dark is the Parched at their old rites, or the Beckoners tuning their lures, and that a soldier who listens to it entire will walk out of his fort that same night and never be seen again.
- That the oases do not fail by chance, but are drunk deliberately, the Thirst-King reaching a little further north each year, and that Kuroshka's whole northern frontier is simply the front line of a war against a desert that is winning.
- That there is water at the very heart of the Wastes after all, one last spring the curse has never found, and that whatever drinks from it last will inherit the thirst, and the desert, and the crown.
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