The Damaged Lands

Once this was Esvar, homeland of the Esvari — the most advanced country the continent had ever seen. Libraries, universities, aqueducts, roads that ran straight and true for hundreds of miles. A language so precise that their legal codes are still studied by scholars who can find copies.

Now it is the Damaged Lands.

What happened is not entirely agreed upon. The Esvari themselves do not speak of it willingly. What is known: something broke. Not a war, not an earthquake, not a plague — something else. The land itself changed. Crops would not grow. Water tasted wrong. Animals left. And then, over a generation, so did the people.

Those who go there now report a silence that feels intentional, and a sky that is the wrong colour at dusk.