A continent where the gods are dead and their blood is slowly running out. The bloodlines remember. So does the ground.
A vertical continent of climate and culture. Harsh and rigid in the north, warm and cosmopolitan in the south. The middle is the wound. The gods died here — or withdrew — and what they left behind ran in human veins. Now the bloodlines are thinning. The great houses know it. None of them have admitted it yet.
“lo 'Sckal nih lo 'ScKal” — violence creates violence. The last words of King Dermis Royer.
Renaissance-adjacent court culture. The throne changed hands once too recently — Creedies sits where a Royer ought to. The kingdom has stabilized under the usurper, and is collectively invested in not asking too many questions.
A kingdom that turned breeding into governance. Pale, broad, built for endurance — the body is a political document. Even meals have hierarchy. Every social moment is a small evaluation. Ruled by the Queen and her engineered bloodline.
The deep south. North African and Arabian coast in feel — brass bells, caravan markets, music, color. They abandoned divine worship not through philosophy but witnessing. They look at the bloodline hierarchy the way someone looks at a religion they left.
The most lived-in and most haunted country in Lyos. Fertile, productive, full of people pretending the ground beneath them isn’t soaked in old grief. Survivors who changed their names. Soldiers who deserted and started farms. Belladonna merchants who set up permanent shops. Hospitable, but measured.
Not a kingdom — a network of port cities tied by contracts and family marriages. The only people in Lyos who don’t care about your bloodline. They care about your credit. Can you pay? Can you deliver? That’s the only theology in Belladonna.
A clan that may or may not exist. They appear primarily in folklore — oral tradition, travelers’ tales, soldiers’ songs. Their blood is mythic-ambiguous. What a character believes about them reveals more than the Vainihana themselves ever could.
A hidden heir, the legend who raised him, the warrior who marches under another banner, and the queen-king holding a stolen throne. None of them yet see the full shape of what is moving against them.
Twenty years ago, King Dermis Royer was assassinated in the southern territories. The throne fell to the usurper Creedies. The infant heir was hidden — raised by his grandfather Aeouis as a living weapon, trained since childhood in the ancestral dual-sword form, and sent into Jandell under a false name: Ashten of the Northern Settlements.
A story about inheritance — what blood demands, what silence costs, and what happens when a weapon learns to think for itself. Themes of loyalty, identity, and the weight of a name run through every chapter.