⚠️ SPOILERS FOR BASICALLY MY ENTIRE DERANGED FANTASY UNIVERSE ⚠️
⚠️ SPOILERS FOR BASICALLY MY ENTIRE DERANGED FANTASY UNIVERSE ⚠️
ok so Arcadia as a nation is built on the world’s worst possible starter pack because the gods had a divine war so violent they were out here using GALAXIES like cosmic folding chairs and then their blood rained onto the mortal realm like a divine OSHA violation and from that blood you get Beastborn, which are nightmare monsters, and Bloodmarked, people carrying godlike power in human bodies that might corrupt them into the very monsters they're meant to fight cool cool GREAT foundation for a civilization. It is basically “what if Chernobyl but make it holy.” literally every problem in this universe traces back to divine bodily fluids. you're welcome. love that for them
ANYWAY then we’ve got Elodias, moon god, celestial sadboy, who goes to a temple seer named Malritha and says hey can you help me find the woman from my dreams, and Malritha is like sure :) while internally experiencing the kind of psychological collapse usually reserved for black hole documentaries. because no one has ever loved her once ever in her entire life, not romantically, not platonically, not even in a “you seem nice” way, and then this gorgeous moon man shows her one ounce of kindness and she immediately goes from spiritually hollow to clinically unwell. she helps him find Senia, the sun goddess, his soulmate, and then has to stand there and watch the love story happen in real time like the universe personally logged in just to spit in her face and because she's always the tool that connects other people's love stories but never gets to BE in one and it escalates from unrequited pining to full FBI surveillance behavior to stuff I genuinely cannot say on this app and she tries to seduce him with an entire fake prophecy scheme to get Elodias alone and he’s basically like “did you invent an apocalyptic emergency to trick me into sleeping with you???” and when he rejects her that is unfortunately the moment the boss music starts.
so she goes to the literal EDGE of reality and casts the most hateful curse imaginable: Senia gets stripped of her divinity and is reborn as a mortal over and over with no memory, and Elodias stays immortal and has to keep finding her, loving her, and then losing her within seven days of her remembering who she is. forever. eternally. repeatedly. because apparently Malritha said reduce, reuse, recycle trauma. and the best part is every time Senia dies, Elodias’s grief causes storms so violent they flatten coastlines, drown villages, and force entire cultures into generational survival rituals just to cope with what is essentially one moon god having an emotional support apocalypse every few decades. entire civilizations are getting weather-alerted by a man with attachment wounds. I made that. no I won’t apologize
THEN there’s Thainos, and while everyone else is out here making cool shit like Leika with her nature spirits and Archadeus with his beastmen and Atonia with her terrifyingly competent elves, this dude looks at the cosmic lineup and goes "I'm gonna make anxious meat sacks with abandonment issues and the ability to make bad decisions" and the other gods are like WHAT and he's like no trust the process and they very much do NOT trust the process. the gods are like that is the dumbest shit we have ever heard in our eternal lives. Leika literally crushes a human child's skeleton in her fist like SEE? BAD BUILD. and Atonia calculates their exact extinction probability and is like bestie they're speedrunning self-destruction but Thainos is over here defending humanity like a dad defending his kid’s shitty macaroni art even though the macaroni art is actively on fire and screaming.
so Atonia hits him with the ultimate dare: fine, give up your godhood, become one of them, and find ONE single soul untouched by cruelty, and this man says BET and just YEEETS himself out of divinity then gets born as a human baby named Aren with zero memory of ever being a god and wanders around for years as this sad healer feeling weirdly haunted by existence for years, then one night collapses in a field having a full identity crisis and screams at the sky for answers, at which point the gods start LAUGHING from the heavens because they are, frankly, haters, and all his memories slam back into him at once. and he realizes ohhhh no. oh no no no. I made a bet I can't win and now he has to find this one pure soul and at first he's optimistic and then a hundred years go by and he's nervous and then FIVE HUNDRED YEARS go by and humanity is still doing greed, war, betrayal, cruelty, and avoidable nonsense on loop like it’s their national sport. and he's fully in his what have I done era but he's a THOUSAND YEARS deep and cannot quit now so he just keeps walking and keeps meeting genuinely wonderful people but nothing ever lasts because that's the whole point and THEN a military governor named Verin sees this guy healing people with no profit motive and is like sounds fake. sounds illegal. sounds heretical.
so Thainos gets dragged before religious authorities because apparently helping people for free is sus behavior, and they exile him for the crime of not being manipulative enough. so they tell him to go the fuck away so he does and then some forest nomads do a smoke vision thing with him and a child points at him and whispers "he's made of light" BUT SURPRISE Verin's soldiers followed him and see this and go absolutely-fucking-not, we are NOT letting symbolism happen on our watch. and they spike iron through both his palms and tie him to a dead tree on a hilltop to die from sepsis because humans remain undefeated at missing the point. and while dying he realizes the tragedy is not that humans are incapable of goodness. it’s that they keep choosing comfort over courage. they could rise. they simply do not care to lock in. and with his last strength he’s basically like I loved you anyway, idiots, and dissolves into light that scatters into every living person on earth so every time someone is randomly kind for no reason that is literally a dead god's love still stubbornly refusing to give up on you and if that doesn't wreck you I don't know what to tell you
AND THEN there's Azrael the God of Guardian Angels who deleted his brother Cain from the search history of life because Cain would not stop assaulting mortal women and making monstrous hybrid offspring, which is already a sentence that should make the whole family reunion weird forever. and Azrael spends ages trying literally any other solution first and every single option somehow gets worse, so he finally takes Cain out of the cosmic group chat permanently. and for this, instead of being thanked for preventing further horrors, he gets exiled because his divine parents care more about preserving family image than stopping violence. elite parenting. TEN out of TEN. absolutely no one is doing dysfunction like the gods are doing dysfunction. and the extra insult is that once Azrael is gone, the protections around the mortal world basically collapse, which means the exact thing he was punished for stopping gets even worse. incredible work everyone. tremendous team effort. so now he’s in the woods, demonized in campfire stories as some monster that devours women, because history in this universe is powered by lies and bad PR
enter Rynn, a tavern girl with the self-preservation instincts of a decorative spoon, who gets saved by Azrael once and immediately decides this terrifying forest cryptid man is now her personal problem. so she keeps bringing him food, keeps coming back, keeps ignoring every warning sign, every confession, every “please leave me alone before this gets worse,” because she has apparently never met a red-flag she couldn’t interpret as ‘I CAN FIX HIM.’ and then because this universe has active beef with women, she prays for divine protection and gets answered by a corrupted angel who does the exact thing Azrael was exiled for trying to stop. she ends up dying in childbirth after begging Azrael to raise her daughter Hope, and this ancient exiled god who has spent generations being treated like a monster actually does it because he loved her that much. so yes, his entire character arc is basically “feral ancient murder man gets emotionally adopted by one persistent mortal woman and then becomes a single father against his will.” beautiful. horrific. hate that for me
MEANWHILE because apparently divine monstrosity wasn’t enough, the mortals decide they too would like to enter the suffering Olympics. enter Princess Jade of Moradim, which becomes Solara later but hold that thought, and she befriends a river healer named Khali who is secretly a WHOLE ASS GODDESS just out here cosplaying as local wellness support. Jade’s fiancé, Prince Eshuah, catches feelings for Khali because he and Khali are operating on wavelengths Jade has never even had access to, and then Jade walks in on them kissing in the rain. now does she process this in any mature or emotionally regulated way? absolutely not. don’t be ridiculous. she lures Khali to ancient ruins, beats her to death with a rock, then stabs Eshuah when he finds the body. and her father, King Aldric, sees all this and goes wow. awful. anyway let’s fix the narrative. so he buries the truth, buys the history, commissions a whole ass mural at High Pass painting his murderous daughter as the hero and a scholar who digs all this up centuries later writes "History is not written by the victors. It is written by the wealthy… Truth is a luxury the poor cannot afford, and justice is a fiction the rich need not purchase." and those lines alone should probably fistfight every monument on earth
SO THEN the Divine War kicks off and this is where EVERYONE suffers. it starts because Astrid convinces her best friend Natalia to stay five minutes longer to watch a fucking sunset. five. minutes. and a god takes Natalia after dark and fucks her shit up permanently and Astrid's guilt eats her alive so she accepts divine blood from Silas the Trickster god thinking power will fix what grief broke but her boyfriend Eamon dumps her over it and she panics and begs Silas to take the power BACK and he just laughs in her face because that man is every red-flag situationship with a god complex and access to nuclear launch codes. and THEN the same god who killed Natalia catches Astrid out after dark and assaults her and the divine blood detonates and she becomes the first mortal to ever kill a god and she rips him apart and drags the corpse into the village square like HERE. THIS IS POSSIBLE NOW. FIX YOURSELVES. and honestly that is one of the most insane and iconic crashouts I have ever assigned to a woman. that is peak unhinged behavior in the most iconic possible way
from there it is just dominoes falling into a woodchipper while the woodchipper is also on fire. Azrael and teenage Hope plead before the First Gods for intervention and get hit with basically “sounds difficult, thoughts and prayers.” and Silas is actively TRYING to start divine civil war because he thinks business as usual is worse than apocalypse which is certainly a take, Zenith the God of Gods switches sides to fight WITH the Bloodmarked which sounds heroic until you realize every battle just sprays divine blood everywhere like a busted fire hydrant of corruption and the Bloodmarked think their creepy eclipse rituals are unmaking godhood but actually they're just poisoning the entire continent and everyone is too busy girlbossing through war crimes to notice. and Titans start waking up and one DIES and its skeleton becomes the Hollow Spire library which is the hardest worldbuilding flex I will ever produce, the sun god Solarius detonates over Moradim creating Solara, the Bloodmarked start losing their minds to divine blood corruption, Astrid, the girl who started this whole thing over five minutes and a sunset, completely snaps and Jeffrey Dahmers her own people, Zenith clocks out of life and crystallizes into an entire island, and Hope ( RYNN'S BABY from earlier, the living proof divine and mortal could coexist ) dies at seventeen in the war she chose to fight and Azrael loses the only good thing exile ever gave him and is like actually fuck all of this. the homeland becomes a cursed wasteland. the surviving gods just nope out of existence choosing to be hated as absent rather than keep accidentally destroying the world. everyone loses. I wrote a war where the prize is trauma
ALL OF THIS is being chronicled by Tanneus G'Raja a scholar born in those very Wastes, who finds a statue of Astrid in CHAINS with an inscription that says "may our children forgive us for what she became" because his own people rewrote their heroes into villains within a single generation and after spending his entire life excavating divine tragedies he realizes the silence of the gods IS the love. they didn't abandon humanity they removed themselves so they'd stop accidentally destroying it and his final testament is basically “I would do it all again,” which is not mentally healthy but it is very sexy of him unfortunately
after the gods dip out a blind seer named Athea starts channeling prophecy through SIREN BONE NEEDLES pulled from ocean depths gifted to her by motherfucking mermaids and builds an entire divination system out of prophecy, grief, and the human need to believe the sky is saying something back. one of her constellations, the Dragon, is actually a prison for something so catastrophically awful that the beings who understood it chose death over risking its release. so that’s FUN. love a whimsical horoscope with an eldritch weapon of mass destruction hidden inside
THEN this beautiful disaster of an elf named Alaquinn Althaea blows her entire life savings on a fancy journal and decides she's going to study nature spirits despite having zero training zero funding zero institutional support and honestly zero common sense because apparently self-preservation is not a strong cultural value in my world. and she finds a water sprite that's completely forgotten its purpose and is now just squirting people in the face and giggling which is peak comedy until it freezes mid-squirt and whispers "The Silence is coming" in a voice that is NOT ITS OWN and the government hits Quinn with a literal CEASE AND DESIST for doing unapproved research because apparently uncovering an existential threat without proper administrative approval is frowned upon. bureaucracy remains undefeated
then a warden named Dani helps her get into the Hollow Spire, the aforementioned Titan skeleton library, and Quinn starts discovering that nature spirits everywhere are glitching out. and I know Quinn seems like a side quest right now but she is the entire main quest in disguise WATCH
she befriends a relic hunter named Mordain whose wife literally dies whispering about the Silence and grief takes this formerly decent dude and turns him into a paranoid authoritarian nightmare and Quinn brings him into the Hollow Spire thinking she’s helping him find meaning, but instead he becomes the guy who gets her KICKED OUT because she presents proof that something ancient is waking up and the institution doesn't silence her for being wrong—they silence her for being RIGHT—and Mordain leads the charge to ban all void knowledge so the one person who could have warned everyone gets destroyed by the friend she brought inside and THAT is why humanity is completely blindsided when the Silence actually hits. so yes, humanity gets fucked sideways by the apocalypse because one woman had the audacity to be correct before everyone was emotionally ready to hear it. which is the most devastating institutional failure I've ever written
THE SILENCE rolls in whispering to five people including Mordain who has spent years executing the very people the gods designed to fight this thing and Mordain discovers his entire righteous crusade was actually serving the enemy the whole time. elite work. phenomenal strategy. no one is doing self-sabotage like this man is doing self-sabotage. a jealous prince gets possessed. an entire civilization starts collapsing. there’s a race for the Eclipse Pendant. Mordain finds out the price of stopping this entity is complete erasure from existence
not death, WORSE!!!
being unwritten from reality so nobody remembers you ever existed and he does it anyway and years later Quinn finds his blank journal and feels grief for someone she cannot name because he has been erased so thoroughly that only the ache remains. which is disgusting of me actually. horrible behavior from an author
FIVE YEARS LATER we get Lucien, half-elf half-angel, walking into a coastal town with psychic mind control and enough charisma to start a full-blown cult where baptism rewires your brain and dissent gets you murdered by your own neighbors. and then there’s Mira, violet-eyed, traumatized, deeply not having a good time, whose baptism fails because something in her blood basically says lol. no. and Lucien sees this and is like interesting. terrifying. I need to own that immediately. so he blackmails her into marriage and systematically dismantles her life piece by piece. Mira eventually reaches the point where she takes his dagger into the woods intending not to come back, and then a void creature with her exact eyes touches her and something ancient in her blood wakes up and she chooses to run instead of die
NEXT she falls in with Forsaken resistance fighters, finds out she's pregnant, a soldier named Mordekai basically becomes her dad and then dies from Beastborn venom getting her to the Verdant Veil because in my universe no one is allowed to experience stable emotional support for longer than ten minutes, and that’s where Kaelen and Elowen from the Silence take her in and QUINN shows up because yes everything is connected and yes I am personally a threat to corkboard manufacturers, and she’s returning the void texts that got banned because of HER OWN RESEARCH decades ago and drops the bomb that Mira is actually NIMWE, a void warrior entity who volunteered to be born mortal to restore cosmic balance, and her child is half void half light, which has literally never happened before. no pressure queen. and she names the boy Kai after the man who died getting her there because I believe in emotional damage with continuity and when Lucien sees three-year-old Kai's eyes and realizes he’s indeed the father, he goes absolutely nuclear like a baby daddy on Maury
Mira grabs Kai and runs to a hidden village where she trades with MURMELEKS, half-goat gossip merchants whose entire economic system is just monetized tea. these creatures monetize secrets. they are capitalism in hoof form. then she trains with Kirisha’na, the First Baelak, this ancient white tiger warrior who is the last speaker of an entire dead language because apparently I enjoy doing full academic side quests for fun. Kirisha’na absolutely refuses to let Mira remain broken and drags her through healing the hard way because she herself has survived worse and came out stronger. and then one day bandits show up with suppression stones, bonk Mira in the head, threaten to do unspeakable things to her, and eight-year-old Kai casually reduces them to pink mist with his void powers and goes “it’s okay mama, it’s not my blood.” which is the kind of line that should make every adult in a ten-mile radius immediately start vomiting from dread. and THEN Mira discovers the Eclipse Pendant reacts to Kai because he's Bloodmarked like his father so she yeets the most dangerous artifact in existence into the ocean because at this point the sea in my world is basically just God’s junk drawer
so they FLEE to Nareen, the island nation of eternal spring, which has its own soft flowing language called Naru because I do not know how to worldbuild like a normal person with hobbies and a social life. there are siren pacts. cherry trees planted for every birth. wishes carved into bark. for one brief shining second I let beauty exist without immediately lighting it on fire. and Kai falls in love with a girl named Amina under a cherry tree by the sea and whispers in Bae’Ravah, calling her beautiful in a dead language she will never understand, and it is the gentlest scene in this entire cursed universe
WHICH OF COURSE I THEN BODY-SLAM THROUGH A TABLE because Kai later kills a man who hurt Amina with a calmness that should have everybody hitting the emergency alarm, refugees arrive saying Lucien has conquered everything, and Kai decides they have to go back. Amina tells him she’ll wait under the cherry tree. he never returns
because Kai kills his father but does not stop there. he turns his power on every single follower, looks at Mira with nothing but love, and says “this is for you, mother.” and she holds him, tells him she loves him, and drives a sword through his heart. he asks why. she says “because you don’t belong in this world… but neither do I.” AND THEN STABS HERSELF. and they rise together as the Guardians constellation while years later Amina writes letters to a dead boy she doesn’t know is dead and sends them into the sea not knowing he is literally above her now, not knowing the letter will never reach him and also already has. which is such an offensively cruel concept that honestly I should be arrested
and on quiet nights people still hear Mira’s lullaby:
The river weeps, the mountains sigh,
The stars slip loose from ashen skies…
like hello??? excuse me??? who approved this emotional terrorism. certainly not me. except yes it was me. repeatedly. with intent
AND THEN there’s an entire book dedicated to answering the question:
WHAT THE HELL DID KIRI DO???
because Kiri, this ancient white tiger warrior woman who trained Mira by basically roundhouse-kicking her through the concept of healing, once said “you not know what these claws have done… what these eyes have seen” and naturally I heard that and thought wow. sounds like a problem for Future Me. well Future Me unfortunately delivered. because according to official history, Kirisha’na is a monster. a butcher. a kingdom-killer. a feral beast who wiped out an entire civilization for no reason. and everyone just accepted that for centuries because if enough dead men write something down apparently that becomes facts
SO a scholar-physician from the Hollow Spire and a bounty hunter whose inner life is spiritually just “coin purse with legs” head into the ancient forests where the Fus’Ravahn used to live, because legend says Kiri is still alive. the Hollow Spire wants proof. the bounty hunter wants money. no one involved is making good choices
and they FIND HER. and she’s living alone in the ruins of her people’s homeland, listening to Mira’s lullaby on the wind because Mira and Kai are constellations now and the song is all Kiri has left of them. so already we are starting from an emotional place I would describe as deeply illegal
and the scholar is like tell me what happened. and Kiri, against all common sense, actually does. and this is where the whole nice tidy historical narrative bursts into flames
because yes, she destroyed a kingdom. yes, she killed people. yes, the records got those parts right. what they LEFT OUT, what they conveniently forgot to include, just a tiny little omission, no big deal, was that that this kingdom conquered her people when she was a child, enslaved her, kept her as a captive, and used her in ritual sex magic because Baelaks are so rare and divine that they decided her body was worth more as a mystical resource than as a person. so the “monster who destroyed a civilization for no reason” was actually a brutalized child who survived years of torture and finally burned her abusers to the ground. but naturally the kingdom wrote the history because history always hands the pen to power first and asks questions never
and the scholar is sitting there having his entire academic framework peeled off like wet wallpaper, while the bounty hunter, whose soul is apparently made of wet cardboard and misogyny, hears all this and goes wow. sounds fake. and calls her a lying bitch who’d say anything to save herself, because some men could watch a woman crawl out of hell still on fire and ask for documentation. and then he slaps suppression stones on her. THE suppression stones. the same kind used on Mira. because this universe does not believe in retiring harmful tools when it can instead lovingly pass them from one set of violent hands to the next like a cursed inheritance. generational trauma but make it reusable
and they start dragging Kiri back but she does not fight. she begs the scholar to kill her because she would rather die than ever be captive again. and the scholar, for one shining day in his miserable little historian life, chooses not to be useless. he kills the bounty hunter. frees Kiri. goes back to the Hollow Spire. and lies with his entire chest
says they never found her. says the bounty hunter died to wilderness hazards. files the whole thing away under tragic expedition loss, thoughts and prayers, very sad, moving on. and Kiri stays where she is: in her forest, alone, free, grieving, listening to the lullaby of a dead woman carried on the wind. cool. awesome. very normal material to write. definitely the work of a mentally stable and well-adjusted author
OH and there is ALSO another book where a scholar named Eren loses his wife to plague and follows a map hidden in a melody that grieving people have heard for millennia and ends up cracking open that Dragon prison constellation from earlier, and inside is something that can resurrect anything that has ever died, including some extremely furious Old Gods, and he has to choose between the woman he would destroy the world for and the world he would have to destroy to get her back, but I haven’t finished writing that yet so for now just sit there and marinate in the threat
anyway this is my universe. this is what I do instead of being normal
if you read all this, first of all what is wrong with you
second of all I love you deeply
third of all perhaps marry me
JK. unless?
but genuinely if you made it this far that is unhinged behavior and I respect it because caring this much about my worldbuilding is absolutely insane
which is perfect because so am I