Yorozh is not a desert in the mortal sense. It is a wound upon the land of Zhuru, a raw volcanic ashland where nothing endures but suffering. The skies split with wild lightning, storms of fire and glass sweeping across the horizon. The ground quakes and collapses without warning, swallowing whole caravans into the abyss.
Few dare to linger. Yorozh is not so much lived in as crossed, and even that is folly. Among those who haunt its wastes are only predators: raiders who strike from shifting camps, cannibals who feed upon the weak, and slavers who hunt not to settle but to drag captives elsewhere. Their rule is simple: preparedness and speed. Cross quickly, stay alert, never show weakness—for the moment one stumbles, Yorozh claims them.
Before the first Cataclysm, maps speak of this land as a chain of tropical palatial isles. Whatever god or disaster tore Zhuru, Yorozh was inverted, remade into torment. Its present is not ruin but inversion, beauty made into mockery.
Now, The water of Yorozh completes the lie. What little liquid gathers in fissures, slag-basins, or wind-scoured hollows is not life but solvent—alkaline, metallic, and venomous. It strips flesh from tongue and gut, burns the throat, and leaves those desperate enough to drink it writhing in hours-long agony before death or madness claims them.
Nothing drinks freely here except insects, and even they are monstrous distortions: scorpions the size of shields with glassy stingers dripping paralytic venom; flies as large as fists whose bites lay eggs beneath the skin; ants that swarm in living carpets, their mandibles injecting poison that liquefies tissue from within. Every crawling thing is parasitic, every winged thing toxic, all of them thriving on rot, ash, and suffering as if the land itself breeds them with intent.
Yet even this seems merciful when the storms come. The sandstorms of Yorozh are not wind but annihilation—walls of ash, salt, and volcanic grit driven by shrieking gales. Lightning does not strike; it scours, ripping through the sky in horizontal sheets, melting solid rock where it crawls, turning stone into slag and glass. Within these tempests fly shards of silica, inch-long knives honed to razor edges, flensed from the dead bed of a small inland sea that once existed here long before the Cataclysm.
Its salt now rides the storm, cutting flesh to ribbons, scouring bone bare in moments. Caravans caught within are not buried but erased, reduced to red mist and scattered remains. When the storm passes, the ground is smooth again, as if nothing ever crossed it—Yorozh cleans its wounds by killing anything foolish enough to witness them.
IN PRODUCTION
- Terrors of Yorozh
- Death & The Endless Desert
- New Jantara
- The Jackalands of Yorozh
