#kerathan

Yeah if you havent noticed my motivation to write facts kind went down the drain yesterday. so you can have my 30 page short story about Kerathan instead

Kerathan, despite having none of the necessarily geological functions or structure to support it, has a deep cave near its western border. though it is blindingly obvious that it's the work of one of the broken gods - what with the glowing lichen and stoney surface found nowhere else in Kerathan - it is a fairly popular point of interest amount the Verakins.

this is due, in part, to its easy to memorize location, being near both Kerathan's only proper river and the left edge of Kerathan. it's also often used for spiritual/religious purposes, offering plenty of quiet spaces away from predators and the ire of the broken gods.

all verakins go to heaven! or, at least, the weird fucked up simulacra of heaven native to Kerathan.

after dying, verakin souls stick around in the body for a few days after death - a sort of purgatory. it's described as serene and dream-like, and allows some of the nastier emotions associated with death to fade away. many use it to reflect on their lives and who they've left behind.

before long, the souls get drawn out of their body and into the depths of Kerathan, where the proper afterlife is. while the trip across is fairly quick and painless, getting used to the afterlife takes some time. it's home to something like 70,000 verakins, all engaged in strange and exotic activities and places.

there is also the small fact that nobody has a physical body in the afterlife. you are, for all intents and purposes, a mind floating freely in the body of a half-melted god. (more on that later). sure, you'll be able to imagine having a body and doing the familiar verakin things, but it'll never quite be the same.

latherkes (lah-THUR-keh) are waist-high foraging herbivores occasionally seen in quieter parts of the forest. appearance-wise, they're somewhere between a deer and a pig, with a characteristic bony protrusion on their mouth we would recognize as a beak.

for reasons nobody can quite understand, they often produce a cacophonous, multi-voiced call comprised of trills, chirping and squawking. every call is unique, though none are pleasant to listen to.

verakins are cuddly little creatures! since verbal communication is a no-go (more on that later) and visual communication doesn't always work, verakins have fallen back to touch as one of the main ways they show affection to each other.

to pretty much no ones surprise, verakins have a mostly adversarial relationship with the Broken Gods.

verakins are reasonably upset that these powerful beings with an incredible capacity to improve things try to fuck them over pretty much any opportunity they get. since they'd get blasted to smithereens if they tried to actually do anything about it, they've settled for a deep, seething contempt for the Broken Gods - and, by extension, much of the natural world.

verakins lay eggs! theyre similar to the picture above, but duller in color and material.

this isnt because theyre birds, or anything; creating children is a horrifically messy and complicated process under the hood, and the physiology of verakins is already barely held together with duct tape and tears.

the Broken Gods - called Vathakin by the verakins - are the mad gods of the forest.

some can be found wandering around the far edges of the forest, terrorizing whomever they come across. others are barely sentient, covering swaths of land with their confused and largely immaterial presence.