Where civilization collapsed, barbarism flooded in. Folk learned to raid and kill for grain, to trade in flesh and steel, to build power out of violence and hunger. Wolves became mercenaries, equine tribes turned fertility and milk into contract and leverage. Lion kingdoms rose and fell, always hungry, always reaching for what could not be kept. The den-cities of Vulsa and Roedon are monuments to collapse, law and pride standing only as long as the next disaster allows.
The Cataclysm’s legacy is a living wound. The crust of Vandyrus is riddled with voids, rifts, and buried collapse. Valleys fall away in a night; seas vanish into cracks; entire cultures disappear when the ground betrays them. No one trusts the earth, the sky, or even the promise of peace. Superstition grows out of soil that devours the dead—and sometimes the living.
The present is an age of desperate alliances, petty kingdoms, and doomed banners waving over future sinkholes. This constant ruin has shaped Vandyrus into a world of the haunted and the hungry. To be born here is to expect collapse, to risk everything and trust nothing.
Yet even in the ruins, not all is decay. The old slaver gates, impossible artifacts, still link Vandyrus and Thanator—arteries pumping misery, trade, and ambition between two dying worlds. Raiders, slaves, exiles, and cults pass through them still, shaping the little that remains. Vandyrus endures—not because it remembers, but because it refuses to be erased. Cultures rise from necessity; folk define themselves by survival in the face of extinction, knowing the next age may be the last. History here is a tapestry of gaps, a string of endings dressed up as legacy.
Vandyrus will never match Thanator for splendor, ambition, or mythic pride. What it has instead is stubbornness, a grim pleasure in surviving every collapse. Its only gift from the Cataclysm is unending ruin: a world that never finishes dying, that never forgets how to bleed, and that grants peace only in the silence that follows its latest fall.
