Drael is not a land. It is a wound. A scar sprawling so wide it deceives itself into thinking it is still a continent, when in truth it is the exposed marrow of a world cracked apart. The seas tell the story first: straits driven deep where once were valleys, isles sheared off like the teeth of a skull, fjords and gulfs that seem less carved by tides than by a surgeon’s knife driven too far into the flesh.
From the Vulsian Sea that laps against Varduun’s shoulder to the Orotanian’s endless horizon beyond Roedon, all the maps show the same thing: Drael is broken. And yet it endures. Or rather, what festers there endures, because endurance in Drael is never life. It is domination, torment, sorcery, and the bitter fruit of catastrophe turned to empire.
To sail its coasts is to mistake it for ruin. The mountains are ashen and split; the swamps are drowned and rotting; the wastes breathe sulfur where vents still weep from the old cataclysm. Cities are carcasses of stone, great colonnades shattered into bone-like fragments, plazas filled with black water, ziggurats canted sideways like broken jaws.
Travelers whisper that the surface is abandoned, haunted by barbarian raptors who scrape their existence among toppled serpent-temples, while the serpent race themselves are remembered only in glyphs half-erased. But those who linger, those who trade in secrets, those who let the undercurrents of Drael seep into their bones—they know the truth. Drael is not dead. Drael is inverted. What the eye sees is bait. The true continent lies beneath. Subterranean kingdoms, vaults bigger than surface cities, crystalline towers that glow with false suns, citadels suspended in black chasms where gravity is a suggestion and sorcery is law. The serpent race never ceded this land. They merely turned it inside out, and what remains above is their camouflage, their petri dish, their theater of cruelty.
Upon that theater stride the scaled barbarian lords, the visible rulers of Drael’s ruin. To outsiders they are savages—primal, blood-maddened, half-beasts without subtlety. But in truth they are pawns wearing crowns, permitted their savageries by the hidden serpents because their wars serve as harvests, their conquests supply captives, their roaring thrones draw attention away from the true citadels that lie deeper still. Among them the dynoc tribes are most feared, larger kin of the dynonychus, who paint themselves in blood and feathers and wield jagged scythes as extensions of their talons. The velocian packs are leaner, quicker, assassins with slit eyes and laughter sharp as their teeth. The spinosaurs tower above swamplands, dragging rafts bristling with bone-spears, their jaws hung with fetishes of drowned prey. And scattered among them, always aloof, are the remnant dragonkind—some bowed into alliance, others hunted, all diminished, yet carrying a majesty that can still unmake an army when it rouses. Together they form the surface thrones, savage yet strangely disciplined, all “gifted” with the ruins in which they dwell. Gifted, yes, for the serpent race long ago discovered that the surest way to rule is to let another carry your chains and call them crowns.
Each throne city is paradox, a ruin birthing sorcery, a corpse still growing hair. They stand as reminders that Drael is not a continent like others. It is a crucible, an engine of torment, a forge where catastrophe has become permanent culture.
IN PRODUCTION
- The Darkness Under Drael
- A Most Invasive Species
- EROTICA: The Feast of Tentus