MESANA/MAISANA
LOCATION: Central Daystar
LANDFORMS: Vast plains (both dry and humid) in the south and east, hills and highlands across the rest
CLIMATE: Varies; aridity and poor mineral contents continue to desertify the lowlands, ranges temperate to dry
NOTABLE RESOURCES: Grazing spaces, remnants of Ancient architecture and craftsmanship
PEOPLE: Dunerider Clans, Riverfolk Stows, Undergrounder Crews, the Skylander Orda
INFRASTRUCTURE: A repurposed, mostly defunct in the last few years, network of cement highways; varied greenwater sea routes based from Serkara, as well as riverine routes
PLACES OF NOTE: Var Rak Kelis, Port Horizont, Serkara, Tudza, Ramza, Gates of Mesana, Siebenhold, Abendbrot, Aetherion, Palatine Hill
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LANDFORMS: Vast plains (both dry and humid) in the south and east, hills and highlands across the rest
CLIMATE: Varies; aridity and poor mineral contents continue to desertify the lowlands, ranges temperate to dry
NOTABLE RESOURCES: Grazing spaces, remnants of Ancient architecture and craftsmanship
PEOPLE: Dunerider Clans, Riverfolk Stows, Undergrounder Crews, the Skylander Orda
INFRASTRUCTURE: A repurposed, mostly defunct in the last few years, network of cement highways; varied greenwater sea routes based from Serkara, as well as riverine routes
PLACES OF NOTE: Var Rak Kelis, Port Horizont, Serkara, Tudza, Ramza, Gates of Mesana, Siebenhold, Abendbrot, Aetherion, Palatine Hill
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Few places on Daystar bear the candor and the burden of housing so many dreams and so many nightmares. For every millennia known and remembered, Mesana has spawned both wonder and dread unto the world, its then-gentle clime a safe haven for every manner of creature, upright or not. To the belief of many, it is the cradle of humanity, and certainly that of its culture. Much of its history, however, has been lost to time, or worse, was actively erased by those that came to dominate the whole of it, if not the continent at large. A hegemony so vast, it needed no grandiose titles of legitimacy. The Domain.
These prodigious and prodigal Ancients, originally of the wedded city states of Myrrah and Bellum, its vast farmlands dotting vast seven hills with hexagons of cobbled stone and clay brick, at a time when every hill was a kingdom, and every hamlet a city. A deeply spiritual folk and reclusive folk, they held little affection for the ambitions of warlords and chieftains, letting their contemporaries - many of them, ancestors of the modern day tribes - tend to their own business as they clung haphazardly to theirs. Alas, whether one is to blame the zealotry of Ancients themselves, or the less fortunate forebears' earthly desires, is as lost to history as the pearly palaces that arose upon fields razed, cities ruined, cultures extinguished and salted. What is known, at the very least courtesy of the lasting grudges and long memories of the Undergrounders, and the vested interests of other races, that the priesthood, primarily in its judicial duties over the now-united Mirabelle, had grown apposite to power, and where once checks and balances maintained the status quo, only one force came to reign supreme over the hearts and minds of its people. Their conquests, led by legendary generals known as the Trecenarchs, men perceived as near demigods in their competence and responsibility both, took them to the edges of the known world, and laid it at the metaphorical feet of Mirabelle's patron deity, that which the Orda calls the 'Sky', roads built to a golden age for a thousand feet to tread - from skulls of every man, woman and child they deemed unneeded in the new world to be wrought. Across centuries, with the labour of those they subjugated, the Ancients expanded the natural caverns beneath Mesana into a vast industrial network of mines, foundries and irrigated fungal farms, wherein they exiled those enslaved, to a fate worse than a simple killing - the obliteration of their cultures, identities, and dignity, crafting the Undergrounders' ancestors - Thralls and Enforcers - through breeding programs. They turned Mesana's surface into a gilded cage of avarice, with rivers redirected to feed gardens of exotic flowers that reached beyond the sight of man - and turned themselves, in similar fashion, to something more befitting of their perceived superiority. Advancements made by their countless priests - from its lowest Siccativi to the highest Ankhite - allowed for brass and steel horrors to take place of limb and organ. A life eternal, a life of gods. A life of auric giants--with feet of clay, as it were.
The downfall of a civilization is rarely a quick thing. And the Domain, for all its might, faced many crises, changing sails and continue to swim gallantly onward. This crisis, it could not avail itself of. A plague is believed to have descended - a divine punishment, maybe, or a natural phenomenon. Whatever it was, this 'ferrophage', iron-eater, was a foe that did not tear limb from limb, or rob the Ancients of their immeasurable wealth, but rather chipped away at the foundations of everything they had grown to hold dear. Their lives again mortal, their armories meaningless, and their designs sundered, slowly but surely, as a drop of water carves the side of a mountain. They turned on each other, cannibalizing their ties and their pride to prolong at least some semblances of what they once had, and eventually, their long-suffering kidnappees seized their opportunity. Sieben, mockingly named in a tongue she barely recognized, but which once belonged to what was left of her long-dead tribe, Seven, the seventh Enforcer of Diakon Galena, struck down her mistress and master, and rallied the household serviles to rebellion. From what at first became a covert effort after their flight into the Underground, rose a revolt strong enough to challenge Ancients and loyal Enforcers both, sending the ailing god-kings down a dead-end: any efforts, whether through conventional warfare, manipulation and brutality, or alchemical terrors (the vapours of which still oft linger in long-forbidden, deadly silent places beneath the earth), only further damaged an already unsustainable system, degrading beings already humiliated by their returned mortality with undignified starvation. And as if the world itself had witnessed enough and craved no more, the land shook. In places, it split open. Storms of polluted smog were released from within the Gates, savaging the temples and manors both with acid, ashes and hate. The very heavens seemed to descend... and then, halted. Just as quickly as it had began, the Cataclysm had ended, the Domain came with it. Stories, most often of boogeymen, like 'Old Zeke', stealing Undergrounder children in the dead of night - remain of the Ancients that supposedly lived, but to most, chiefly those that came to Mesana after the fact, t'is all they are. Haunting stories of a haunted land, and of a people which even the most courteous would struggle to find sympathy for. And as for their purported destroyers? They reclaim tunnels long thought lost, their jubilant chaingang chants echoing through the Deep like the pulse of Daystar itself. Some dig for new copper veins or boneglass fragments, but more often, they seek the past—remnants of Ancient architecture, bones of yore, that still breathe through patterned mosaics and unbroken vault doors - no longer in supplication, but in domination, seizing what is of benefit to their individual crew, and gladly destroying the rest.
Others came later. Scattered confederates of those that fled to the very edges of the known world. Sailor-kin from places unrecalled. Riverfolk and Duneriders, each taming a different piece of the war-torn ruins; with one becoming a seedling for the fourth, as an unexpected discovery led a clan of them to obsess over Mesana's history, and the secrets of the Domain. Though the recent upheaval of the Shifting Sands has marred much of a century of healing, a sweeping expanse of shifting terrain, where four peoples live in rhythm with the land's slow, relentless transformations. The region stretches outward like a sun-baked tapestry, its southern and eastern reaches dominated by vast plains - some cracked and dry as ancient bone, others lush with seasonal humidity that brings tall grasses to sway like waves on an inland sea, sometimes even allowing the resilient, acidic forests to thrive. Along these arteries of life, the riverways that cut across central Daystar to the south-east like veins of mercury, many surviving stows hold council under hay canopies, walkstaves treading the waters with practiced calm. They cast wish-stones downstream, a quiet ritual for future hopes, and deliberate in reed-thatched gatherings on the future harvests (or lack thereof), the health of spawning grounds, and their own fates - washed up in the tides of sorrow. Clans trace old trade routes astride hardy elks, their long scarves trailing in the dust, adrift between scattered oases and wind-carved outposts, always with an eye for barter, always listening for whispers of uncovered relics beneath the sands, always hoping against hope, that another day will give them and their kin another chance to thrive again. To the north and west, the land rises into undulating hills and worn highlands, where crews labor beneath the stone, fighting to reclaim every inch lost in the last decade, and high above, where the winds thread through crags and cliffside terraces, dwell the three castes of the Orda. Their apiaries cling to the rock like ornaments, and were once home to humming cloudbees whose wax was prized in inkcraft and medicine, and their honey turned to debilitatingly strong mead; Sun-led and guarded outposts and forums etched into stone, Sky-hugging observatories that measure more than stars, and wind-scribes of the Moon Caste worriedly checking for signs of the Eschaton. And as mentioned above, said Eschaton might just have come, with no Scholarch to report it to.
Maisana, the land of Seven Hills. And Mesana, the Wasted Land. Once a wellspring of civilization, its dales resounding with song and half-chuckled jest, Mesana is a land dying, if not dead already. But while there is enough reason for one to tread its treacherous span, there is yet hope for its revival.
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