The World of Desiderium
Desiderium remained once the world had died. As continents cracked, as oceans dried, The jaws of the Void opened greedy and wide – Yet from that world-death, Desiderium was pried.
Desiderium remained once the world had died. Mortals had risen; their deities defied. War split the heavens as gods chose a side; Creation writhed with wanton deicide.
Desiderium remained once the world had died. The gods who survived spent their glory and their pride, They burned all their strength to turn apocalypse aside; One by one they fell, yet one diminished would abide.
Desiderium remained once the world had died. Now half-whole, with only mortals as its guide. Their armies bear violence where their wills yet collide, And the futures that ensue are theirs to decide.
The World That Remained
Desiderium is a world that survived its own ending.
The catastrophe lies long in the past, dimly remembered as the World-Cracking. In the intervening centuries, cities have been rebuilt, roads reopened, and borders drawn and redrawn, all amidst the ruins of their predecessors. Generations have lived and died beneath governments founded after the old world fell. Fields are planted, markets gather, temples fill and empty, rulers levy taxes, and armies march for reasons their soldiers understand. This is post-apocalyptic only in the longest sense; an age amidst the ruins of a world that ended, failed to disappear, and in which life simply continued.
It is not, however, a world that has healed, for it did not crack cleanly. Mountains and canyons had briefly tried to co-exist in the same geography. Rivers remembered courses through lands that no longer existed, flowing into the primordial Void. Some cities linger after their histories were erased from time; elsewhere, histories endure while the cities that made them were erased from all being. The cataclysm that broke the world left gaping wounds in structures that had once been so stable as to appear eternal. What restoration mortal hands could achieve has been wrought, but the ruin – both literal and metaphysical – is unmistakable.
The peoples of Desiderium inhabit this broken place. Ancient roads end abruptly in wilderness where surviving records insist great cities once stood. The surviving lower courses of towers raised for forgotten purposes loom above neighborhoods built from their fallen stone. Some canyons have no bottom at all, opening instead into the primordial Void. Elsewhere lie shattered workings whose histories no longer agree with their substance. In the places most deeply marred, distance, memory, or causality cannot be trusted without careful qualification – if they can be trusted at all without exertion of will and power.
To the unfamiliar, these impossibilities are wonders. To those who live among them, they are geography – simply the way of things. The impossible has become domestic. A merchant knows which road grows longer in winter. A farmer knows what should not be planted in ground that remembers being sea. A magistrate may be asked to judge the inheritance of a family omitted from one history but present in another. Cities maintain ancient wards whose spellwrights are long dead. Ordinary life persists because people have learned where reality can be trusted, where it must be negotiated with, and where it is simply wiser to build elsewhere. Whatever remains of the World Before, the powers that once ruled it are almost entirely gone. Their ruins are too immense to ignore and too useful to abandon. Mortal cities accrete under shattered towers that should never have been possible. Fortifications incorporate ancient walls forged from materials that are not real yet demonstrably exist. New bridges are fixed to ancient roads. The living do not inhabit a world that came after the past, but one built within it: smaller, rougher, mortal things raised among monuments to powers that mistook divinity for permanence in a universe where no law is guaranteed.
Desiderium is not a dead world inhabited by survivors. It is a living world dwelling in its own corpse.
Enough remains to be worth fighting for. Enough remains to be worth fighting over. And perhaps, through mortal will and wit, hope may yet be found within desiderium.
Factions: The Collective Agents of Desiderium
The kingdoms, faiths, orders, and wandering hosts of Desiderium are not always divided by ancestry or land. Some march for a sovereign, others for faith, memory, coin, or a future that does not exist yet.
For all their differences, the factions of Desiderium tend toward two broad dispositions.
Some heed the lessons of the past (whether, for them, that past is the World Before or something far more recent), remembering and making war upon those who forget. They shape the present around absence: preserving what remains, avenging what was taken, and refusing to permit loss to become erasure.
Others look toward the future. They accept the truth that the future is undetermined and, in that sense, not beholden to the past. They build new nations, pursue unrealized possibilities, and place their faith in things the world has never yet contained. Sometimes such hope is merely naïve, forgetting lessons the past paid dearly to teach. Where it is not, however, it is still neither innocent nor gentle. The hope that inspires liberation, discovery, and renewal can also nourish an ambition that does not hesitate to destroy whatever stands between the present and the future it has imagined.
Few people belong entirely to either disposition, but factions are shaped by the direction of their deepest longing. Some fight to preserve the lessons and memories of the past, while others fight to secure the future.
None can stand inviolate and bloodless.