The Following Terms are of Vandyrus and its greater connected strata and may be useful to understand certain documents, passages or even common phrases:
Ereth – An obscure and rather archaic Vandyrian word, Meaning something akin to existential essence or a “greater foundational spiritual purpose“, such as in The Ro’Edyne Cycle’s:
“weaving new blood into Roedon’s ereth”
Grundy – Slang: Meaning something fundamentally true on a gut level even if aetheric or elusive:
“Physics, for all it’s mad witchcraft be the grudy basics of natural order.”
Wrathian – Describing institutional cultural cruelty:
“Don’t get caught, lest ye’ find yerself mired in Wrathian tortures!“
Perforated – Common slang for being shot with a rifle or a smaller slug leaving a hole:
“Ka’s blood! Damn raven sniper near got me perforated!”
Boogy – Bad Loot; The opposite of booty or ‘good/worthwhile Loot’. Often meant to describe junk or folly filler:
You’ve got nothin’ to gamble with, mere scrap & boogy!”
Sko’Gore – An engine that burns composited waste through alchemical means:
“Aye! We have a chassis, just need guns and a mean Sko’gore”
Ul’Dyne – Very ancient, Pre-civilizational, pre-historic:
“Amidst the sparse and ul’dyne spires of the Kartongan wastes”
Alchetanger – A sealed glass tank with a metal cap, often kept in vaults of shrines:
The North of Vulsa, looking out over the Fangs of the North
Vulsa lies in the east of Vandyrus, a continent of black rock and silver snow, where the mountains seem to breathe fire beneath the ice. It is vast, its northern crown large enough to swallow whole nations. High above the laws of civilization stretch the Fangs of the North, serrated, ice-sharpened ridges that divide the continent’s ruined core from its more habitable south. The ascent through those peaks is lethal. The wind cuts skin like knives, avalanches roar without warning, and the air itself freezes the blood. Wolves dwell in those highlands, taciturn, self-contained, but not cruel, and the few who cross the passes into their domain seldom return unchanged.
The Ruination of the Central Kingdoms is the stuff of Dark Legend
Below the Fangs lies central Vulsa , a land forever broken. When the world buckled in the Cataclysm, its heart was torn open, and the scars never closed. Whole ranges sank, rivers changed direction. What was once a broad interior now sinks by degrees into frozen black marshes, fissures of ice, and deep, killing snows where the remnants of old kingdoms drown a little more each year. Villages drift southward on rafts of half-frozen mud, while ruined keeps stand like teeth above the mire. Even the wind moves slowly, heavy with ash and memory.
The nations of the Southern Kingdoms are by no means warm, Snow is replaced with driving rain, Endless cold by infinite grey and Frostbite with rot & rust
South of the wastelands, the land softens into the civilized forges of Volsa, its snow giving way to black volcanic soil and the strange, shimmering craft of the Vulsan smiths.
Here stands the last light of their civilization. The continent’s interior remains wild, much of it unmapped. Ancient craters from the Cataclysm pock the landscape, many believed to be sites where skymetal once fell. Settlements cling to trade rivers or to the smoldering forges themselves, leaving vast tracts of wilderness where only wolves, spirits, and scavenger bands roam. Culturally, Vulsa sits between ruin and revelation. It is a land that remembers the gods’ wars in its ore and carries both the genius and the madness of creation in its veins.
To outsiders, it is a kingdom of cold mercenaries and unbreakable metal. To those born beneath its ash-stained skies, it remains the crucible of the world, where craft and sorcery, memory and metal are one and the same.
Combined with Roedon and Tymere, the Kingdoms of Vulsa make up what the rest of Vandyrus refer to as the Triskelion nations.
Each volume, whether written by calloused hand or ink-stained scholar, serves as a stone laid in the long road from myth to memory. Here, the passing of empires is recorded without flourish; the migrations, conflicts, bargains, and betrayals of peoples inscribed in forms meant to endure, not seduce.
These books are not the domain of poets, nor the refuge of folk legend. They are a reckoning—plainspoken, methodical, and relentlessly grounded in what endures after rumor fades.
is proud to present:
The Histories and accounts, myths and legends, Chronicles and logs of long lost misty tales in the oral, elder crystalline and high psychic tradition, All…..
The crest of the Vulsan highlands gave way to the ice-wraithing peaks of razor white and endless brutal cold, through which a snow leopard girl ran barefoot through the frozen hellscape of northern Vulsa. Though born to the cold, she had never known it like this. The wind flayed her skin raw. Ice bit her pads until blood streaked the stone behind her. Her arms were crossed tight over her bared breast , not from modesty but to shield what little warmth remained.
Behind her came laughter.
Rats. Hounds. Masked raccoon handlers. Chains clinked. Knives rang. They had chased her through the night, chained her, broken her, and worse. Now they ran her for sport, calling out between laughs, savoring the way she stumbled and slipped.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs shook, until the land itself seemed to end.
At the crown of a peak she stopped, stunned, sobbing, and saw it.
A great tower of shimmering crystal stood there, impossibly tall, its facets catching moonlight like frozen fire. At its base, before doors larger than a temple gate, stood an old owl. He tottered. He muttered. He fumbled with a ring of keys, squinting as though locked out of his own home.
She had nowhere else to go.
She staggered to him, trembling, violated, desperate, and fell to her knees. “Sanctuary, sir,” she cried. “Please.”
The old owl cocked his head. “Sanctuary?” he said mildly. “Oh no, not here. Far too cluttered, methinks.”
He did not seem threatened. He did not seem to register her terror at all.
“They’re coming,” she sobbed. “Slavers. My tribe is gone. I’m alone. They want to—” Her voice broke. She could not finish.
The owl blinked and peered past her, into the snow and empty wind. “I see no one.”
“They’re coming,” she said again, voice cracking. “Please.”
“Well, if you’re not in need of a book,” he replied, distracted, “I’m afraid I cannot help you with—oh feathers, I’m terribly sorry, what did you say you were looking for in the index?”
“No,” she cried. “Sanctuary. Please. I beg you.”
“ ‘No Sanctuary,’ ” the owl murmured thoughtfully. “Hmm. Can’t say I’ve heard of that one. Sounds like a dire yarn.”
Behind her, laughter carried on the wind.
The owl leaned closer and whispered, not unkindly, “I’m sorry, my dear, but I am only the guardian of this librarium. The sum of all libraries and the Librarium entire. If you have need of a book, there are countless others inside who can help you.”
She finally understood.
She turned, and now she could see them—shapes moving fast over the ice, teeth flashing, voices raised.
“Oh,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t trouble you… for anything but a recommendation.”
The owl’s face brightened with relief. “Ah,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”
The massive doors opened without him touching them, wider than mercy should allow.
“Top floor,” he said. “Ask for Beatryx of Whondor, the all-seeing—if she hasn’t spotted you already.” He wrapped his scarf around her shoulders, covering her shaking body, and ushered her inside as the scoundrels closed in.
She walked inside, looking back as the doors framed the pack of slavers closing in on the little owl steward, obliviously still chattering away with that knowing smile. He winked at her. “Oh,” he added pleasantly, “there is tea and cakes, if you desire—”
“OLD BIRD!” a voice barked. “You’ve got something that belongs to us!”
The doors slammed shut.
The owl turned.
“If you seek a book request,” he said calmly, “you’ll need to speak with old Julius, and I rather doubt he takes orders barked by riffraff.”
“Fek off, owlette,” sneered a rat, twirling a hooked knife beneath a vulgar scrap of mustache.
“We saw her go in,” growled the hound. “Now you bring her out, or we start getting violent.”
“Oh dear,” the owl said, smacking his lips. “I don’t think that will work.”
“I’m warning you,” the dog snarled. “Fetch the bitch or we kick in that door, nail her to the floor, Rape her what she’s worth, and burn this place to the ground with you muttering inside. Clear enough?”
The owl smiled.
“Perfectly.”
With a sudden, ear-shattering screech—far louder than anything thrice the size of the old owl could make—he erupted in sheer, irrational defiance. The doors burst open—not outward, but inward, dragged by a force like gravity reversed. Shadows lashed out. Five screams became one.
An ashen white gust pulled them in. The owl himself was drawn back into the shadows of the hall as though they had all been cast into the bellows of some ornate hell meant to confound both helion and heathen alike.
Then, they saw what had come from somewhere far beyond to join them. In place of the steward now stood a horrible titan of a thing, for where the owl had stood moments before now towered a terror vast enough to dwarf the hall itself: a white dragonbird, horned, feathered, scaled, one eye ruined, the other burning violet with judgment. Its breath pulled the slavers from their feet as if they were dust—a beast known only to pre-cataclysmic lore as a Tytotitanus Voremithadrax.
A roar shattered the nature of both the situation and reality itself. Where there had been a tottering old owl moments before now stood a terror already towering over them, standing atop the ruin of the largest hound and already swallowing the gurgling half of the other who had been pulled into the massive beast’s mouth when it had breathed them into the shadows of the hall. The rat screamed, and deep inside something snapped and countless ancestors recoiled in terror as the scale of verminous rodent to a beast of an owl matched that all-natural scale of silent predator and moist, shrieking prey.
His ordeal did not last long; snatched from squealing, the rat was thrown into the air, then caught by the owl-dragon’s massive tongue—snakelike and covered in sharp, writhing, dark red tendrils that hissed with their own hunger—tendrils that sliced, split, silenced, and snapped back into the owl-dragon’s mouth in a second.
By now, fear had taken the remaining two, but they both tripped on blood. They did not have time to attempt getting back up. A sweep of wings longer than a bridge sliced the boar into four even slabs of armored ham hock, while the wolf—now ended at the knees—shrieked as he was caught in mid-run, his torso crunched and he spat a chest-worth of blood as his head was pulled into the beast’s mouth, eyes darting as his mind raced for solutions that yielded only darkness and digestion most unkind—which I will not trouble you with here.
From the tower above, the snow leopard girl watched with shaking hands as the doors slammed shut once more.
Three days later, she left clothed, healed, provisioned, with a map leading her back toward Vulsan civility and far from coastal raiders: and the guardian slept in the loft study beneath a purple fez, tea cooling on a small table beside him.
A libraryis a structure—physical, bounded, and mortal—built to house collections of books, scrolls, and treatises. Within its walls, knowledge is organized, preserved, and protected against the encroachment of time and ignorance. The library is the world’s memory, fragile and incomplete, a fortress of ink and parchment against the flood of forgetting.
A librarian is the steward of the library’s order, a keeper of its ledgers and guardian of its peace. Some are mere catalogers, others fierce defenders of the written word; all are servants of the archive, sworn to balance access with preservation. The librarian stands between the world’s hunger and the vulnerability of knowledge.
A librarium is another thing entirely: not a structure, but an internal and often interdimensional space, whose true extent is measured not in walls or floors but in the reach of its nexus. Within a librarium, the local rules of size and space may dissolve; a single doorway may open upon endless stacks, forgotten vaults, or entire realities of script and secret. Some libraria are alive with their own will; others are crossroads to libraries lost or unborn. The guardianship of a librarium is never simple stewardship—it is a pact with the archive itself, whose price and promise no wise folk ever take lightly.
Thus: Library: The physical house of books. Librarian: Its steward and keeper. Librarium: The boundless, ritual nexus where all libraries, and all their dangers, converge.
Once the western mirror of Vulsa’s greatness, Roedon now lies in half-light and ruin. Its keeps are black with smoke and lichen, its folk live amid cracked pillars and moss-eaten vaults where kings once feasted. The wind from the Drael coasts carries the stench of raids, and from the north come the wolves of Zhuru, burning and stealing the few young left to enslave.
The *Roedans are a hard folk—thick-furred, grim-eyed, and proud in their suffering. They remember the age when Roedon and Vulsa were twin realms of iron and ice, bound by shared blood and rivalry. But while Vulsa endured through faith and fury, Roedon broke beneath its own winters. The priests fled, the citadels fell silent, and now each valley shelters its own chieftain, each ruin its own petty god.
Unlike the sunken reaches of the Vulsan marshlands, Roedon has not drowned—but it is freezing, bleeding, and starving. The raids from Drael never cease, the Zhurians press from the frost, and even the dead seem restless, wandering the moors in packs. Yet in the ruins of Thryne and the haunted markets of Den’Rydan, old blades are still traded, and old tongues still whisper of the Day of Return—when Roedon’s warriors shall ride again, howling beneath banners stitched from wolf hide and sea salt.
*Roedans – An archaic term meaning both Northern Ro’Edyne & Southern Roedoni immigrant populations.
This is the record kept in stone and ink, not song or sigh. Here is the unvarnished account—lineage, war, migration, and law—presented in the sober manner of those who must remember, not simply believe.
Compiled from the earliest surviving fragments through the great succession wars of 5747 AC, this history aims for clarity, chronology, and the unromantic burden of fact. It is the Roedani scholar’s answer to legend: a ledger of what can be proved, traced, and disputed by the living, however dim the dawn from which it rises.
After a wager of skill and reason was won against the elder-beards of the Londorai—whether by clever tongues, crooked dice, or the hand of fate itself—there was struck a common and good deal in the wake of a war whose name is lost. History forgets the weak and the petty, and the Londorai remember only victories, yet Roedon sings that the bargain was sealed not by crowns but by laughter, not by oaths but by necessity. Some say it was done together, shoulder to shoulder.
Others mutter that it was the work of Rowes of Dayne alone, that queer hero of half-remembered tale, who in one telling bested the sky-king Arynn at arm-wrestle, and in another struck him blind and mocked him while the folk of Roedon learned to stand as one. There are songs where Arynn is made drunk on his own thunder, waking certain he had won, while Rowes stayed behind turning meat upon a spit and swearing all was as the sky-king remembered. Roedon prefers both versions and sees no need to choose.
Thus it was that the silver-frozen halls of Londoraia, with their ermine thrones and star-bright gold, sent their giants south to carve a city from mountain bone, long, long ago—before the hill that would one day crown the heights of Den’Rydan had yet learned its name. These Londorai giants were of kin, tall and boisterous, and they walked the sea itself, wading deep through black water to drag the old rowendyre ships ashore, hauling whole peoples with them from the Eld’Hal, that ancestral north now lost to ice and oath alike.
Liars and lions will tell you these works are Vandyrian dirt, relics of some dead empire, but they have yet to tilt a true rowendyre without snapping it like kindling. Here stand the northern forts, halls born of ships—wood of the sea set into living stone, not by spellcraft but by hand and law. Blocks taller than any stronghold were torn free and crushed until diamonds lined the great central terrace, the labor of the strongest Londorai males, while the towering wee girls pressed rubies from the same ruinous weight. The oldest halls were dug naked into the mountain, ships slid within them like bones into flesh, and the strongholds locked fast by giant swords driven deep—not as threat, nor as boast, but as covenant.
For the vow was plain: if Londorai ever returned to make war, it would be against the enemies of the world, and Roedon would stand back to back with them. The giants drank, and the mirth of it shook the rafters of heaven and the highest halls on high. Then horns sounded from the frozen west. In less than nine days they had built what others would call a world, and after the revel they went stone-faced to answer that call. They were never seen again, for into myth they strode, and Roedon remembers them only by what they left standing.
The females of the Londorai remained. It is said they stayed knowingly, and gave themselves to the males who had fought and lost for them, trusting that their own would one day return the favor. These were no dire giants, but a lesser, equally majestic kind of wolf—still tall, still proud, still enough that their blood runs thick in Roedon to this day, though few will admit it aloud.
Varduun is a land cursed twice. Once by fire, when Drael fell and split the earth, vomiting up vents, ash rivers, and poisoned plains. Again by its folk, for the hyenas claimed the land and made it theirs.
It is a land of cracked savannah, fever-swamps, scorched plains, and wasted rivers. Disease prowls through its camps as easily as raiders do. Unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and deaths in childbirth are common; the alleys swarm with half-starved pups and abandoned ferals. Life here is cheap, short, and cruel—and the hyenas laugh at the cruelty not because it is funny, but because it is all they know.
The Hyenalands are no kingdom, no empire. They are a trinity of strongholds and hordes—Gorzanth, Zarnack, and Krothuum—locked in endless rivalry. Only when all three are threatened at once do they bare their teeth outward, and then the savannah burns.
And always, on the horizon, the whisper of a fourth city—Old Kartong, not theirs, not of Varduun, but a ruin that mocks them all.
In almost complete contrast to the hyena wastes of the Zhurian East stand the Realms of the Doglands — a loose constellation of citadels and town-states nestled between the ridges of Izhura and the guarded frontiers of the Lions’ territorial dominions.
Where the hyena tribes thrive on terror, filth, and frenzy, the folk of the Doglands labor toward the illusion — and perhaps the first true experiment — of civilization. Their walls are high, their gates fortified, their plazas swept and sunlit. Within, sandstone towers rise over clay-tiled streets; bazaars spill with spice, silver, and textiles traded freely among breeds once enslaved.
The population itself is a breed-born refuge of runaways and freed thralls, their collective memory steeped in the hunger for autonomy. Every law in their realm speaks to the preservation of the self — and the punishment of those who would erase it. Execution and treason are the two pillars upon which their justice rests, and mercy is measured not in pity, but in restraint from cruelty.
Yet for all their civility, they remain a young and precarious nation. The Dogfolk abhor conscription, reject state labor drafts, and refuse to bind service to punishment. Their armies are few, their militia undisciplined, and their reliance on coin and contract makes them slow to rally. They are merchants before soldiers, architects before conquerors, and in that inversion lies both their nobility and their doom.
Still, their hatred of both Jackals & hyenas runs hotter than any forge in Vandyrus. No treaty, no creed, no trade route is ever permitted to cross the filth of those carrion plains. To the Dogfolk, coexistence with Wolves is a cautious truce; with Horses, a mutual respect. But with Hyenas — only eternal war, declared in silence, and fought in every child’s bedtime story.
For mistakes, even noble ones, do not require frequency to accumulate ruin. And the Lions across the western sea, in their cruel provinces of Gamandor, have long delighted in watching fledgling nations stumble — savoring, with almost culinary patience, the pleasure of playing with their food.
What follows is not the legend of a bloodline or the boast of some vanished royal house, but the hard account of a land and a people who refused to be buried with their masters. This is the story of those who survived the jackal yoke and the ashes of Old Jantara—not to restore what was lost, but to build what had never been tried.
In these pages, there are no crowned heroes or ancient thrones, only the beginnings of kinship forged on the open steppe, in stolen fields and new-won villages, among folk who decided that freedom was not a gift but a task to be hammered out day by day.
