#mana-eater dragon

This is gonna be kinda vague, so please excuse the metaphorical dust. Also, no map for this one, because I didn’t even think to make one until I started writing this.

The world of Mana-Eater Dragon takes place on the southern half of a continent; hotter to the north, and colder to the south. A chain of mountains run along the western coast, like the spine of a great creature, and the southern tip fractures into numerous island chains. The east coast is dominated by forests, turning into dense jungle the further inland you go. To the north is a large rocky desert, although a number of rivers wind their way through the otherwise arid terrain.

As of the start of the story, most of the continent is united under one large kingdom, with a few tributaries scattered across the land. As a result, this kingdom has been relatively untroubled by war from outside of its borders, and has become somewhat complacent in the last hundred years of peace.

A great river splits the continent in half from east to west, with the kingdom’s capital situated right in the middle. To the north, at the foot of the mountains, lays the Order of the Sun’s seat of power, the Mounting Summits; a city in its own right. And to the south, where the air tends to be cold all year round, sits Fortress Nocturn: the home of the Overlord of Darkness, which has sat empty as a testament of the Order for centuries.

What a way to end, huh? Literally talking about the weather.

It rains a lot in Ishqua. Like, a lot. Between the mountain ranges, plenty of coastlines, and the kingdom’s position in the tropics, days without rain are rare outside of summer time. Mistings and light drizzles are common, although these can escalate to full-on downpours with little provocation. The Ishquani people are well prepared for this, and most will ignore any that isn’t immediately drenching them to the bone.

During the summer, the sky clears and the temperature rises. Wildfires are rare, but since some plantlife will mutate to produce volatile fruit, precautions are taken against any kind of environmental combustion. Windspeed tends to pick up during the summer as well, encouraging citizens to weigh down any loose objects they don’t want sailing off into the distance.

Winter is rough, producing a mixture of rain and slush at first, and eventually resolving into snow and ice storms over time. It’s not unheard of for it to get so cold that it literally rains icicles in some places, with most people bringing reinforced umbrellas with them to protect themselves.

One important note, and I know it’s not technically weather but whatever, is pollen. Since plants can carry mana, and mana can cause mutations, precautions are taken around allergy season to avoid unnecessary accidental consumption of pollen when the flowers and trees begin to throw the stuff out. It's common to see people walking around with face scarves, masks, and/or goggles; resulting in a subculture forming around it.

So that’s it. Worldbuilding June is over again, and there’s still more world to build. 

Well, since Mana-Eater Dragon is an RPG, it’d be pretty easy to run through the main characters and antagonists. However, I want to take this time to talk about the main-est of main characters, and the driving force behind the latter half of the Cycle: the Overlord of Darkness.

As a refresher, the Overlord arises when the sun’s mana output is at its maximum, absorbing the mana and attracting dark-inclined creatures that terrorize the kingdom until the end of the Hold, where the Overlord does battle with the Order of the Sun’s greatest warriors. Eventually, the Overlord is defeated, and returns to the crypt at the bottom of Fortress Nocturn to sleep until the Cycle summons them again.

The Overlord has a number of powers, either naturally from absorbing mana, or bestowed on them via enchantments/curses from previous Overlords. An Overlord’s entire body acts as a Magician’s Anomaly, absorbing mana from their environment at a tremendous rate and allowing them to use that mana to perform magic. Once chosen as Overlord, the Overlord retains that position until they have gone through 3 Cycles; at that point, they can choose to pass the role on to a random person, or keep going. The Overlord cannot age, and when slain their body disintegrates, rebuilding back in the indestructible crypt at Fortress Nocturn at the start of the next Hold. The Overlord naturally attracts followers who are attracted to darkness, such as goblinoids, slimes, and some of the more destructive elementals, and will often find themselves in the employ of thieves, bandits, and other ne’er-do-well.

The current Overlord is a dragon known as Shah, or more commonly by their epithet: the Mana-Eater Dragon. Shah has been the Overlord for well over 100 Cycles now, making them one of the oldest Overlords in recorded history, and has used that knowledge of history to their advantage. Their dragon form is ever in flux, with eyes, wings, talons, and jaws forming when necessary, and the rest hidden by shadows and fog the size of an elephant. Being a dragon, they can put the mana they absorb to good use by casting powerful spells, or enchanting weapons and armor for their followers.

Being both a dragon (a creature that needs mana to survive) and the Overlord (a creature that absorbs mana from their surroundings) sounds like a pretty darn good deal, but the truth is that it’s a losing situation. Between the abilities passed down as Overlord and their own natural consumption of mana to stay alive, Shah is almost always in a state of ceaseless hunger, which drives them to go after alternate sources of mana even when the sun is at its peak.

In the past, Shah was known for never taking human form. That’s why, with the Order of the Sun tracking them down earlier and earlier every Cycle, they have decided to break with tradition. This Cycle, they have immediately left Fortress Nocturn and taken the appearance of a young woman, using their knowledge to pass as a lorekeeper and herbalist in various villages. Their plan is to amass and arm their followers in secret, then attack the Order to bring its strength back down. This way, when they pass the torch on to the next Overlord, the Cycles can return to normal.

I have a couple more characters planned, but I’ll give them their own posts once June has passed. Just to whet your appetite, three of the characters coming in the future are:

A lesbian succubus who prefers physical strength over seduction

A fairy who comes from local nobility, but finds themselves sacrificed to the Overlord

Most people walk wherever they need to go. It’s cheaper, easier, and doesn’t require any training. If you’re patient, you can walk from one side of Ishqua to the other in a couple of months. The average person, however, will only go as far as the next town over, which is usually less than a week away by foot. Unfortunately, it’s tough to take anything with you when you have to carry it on your back.

To get around this, most people either ride domesticated animals like horses, elk, goats, or large flightless birds, or use them to pull carriages or wagons. Aside from the non-standard mounts, they work pretty much the same as they do in our world. Warm-blooded herbivores are much more common, since they’re low maintenance and relatively safe to be around. Carnivores are harder to train and deal with, but they’re popular for anyone expecting trouble on the road.

Major inland routes tend to be along rivers, so boats are an easy way to get anywhere that’s downstream, and use animals to get back upstream. Larger ships can travel along the coast using the wind and sails. This is the closest that Ishqua gets to mass transportation, but a lot of trade good get from point A to point B by waterways. The capital city is built along one of the largest rivers that bisects the kingdom, and the merchants’ quarter is a major trade center across multiple nations.

Magic can be used for teleportation, but it has plenty of limitations. A mage might be able to teleport themselves a dozen feet, but taking anyone with you or going someplace you can’t see is asking to have your constituent parts scattered across the four winds in a fine red mist. That said, enchanted items like self-driving wheels, magic sails, and shoes of infinite stamina all make getting places a lot easier.

Like I mentioned back in the post for Fun, music is a national pastime, so obviously there’s going to be a lot of music in Ishqua. Most music is ad-libbed, with individuals joining in, dropping out, and building on each other in taverns, rest houses, and town squares all across Ishqua. Simple instruments are more common, such as flutes, drums, and guitars. More complex instruments like pianos and violins are only found in cities, where actual bands and orchestras form and play in theaters. Being a career musician is a difficult path outside of the city, since almost everyone can play an instrument.

Speaking of theaters, plays are the new rising attraction in the big cities. Theatre troupes performing plays imported from Ishqua’s neighboring countries travel from city to city, with anywhere between 5 and 30 actors on stage at any given time. As for native-made productions, Ishquani plays tend to be musicals, inspired by the heroes and villains from Cycles past. The most popular plays are about the warriors who defeated Overlords in the past, but a few troupes have been experimenting with stories about the rise of certain Overlords.

Since almost everyone in Ishqua is literate to some degree, books are the perfect way to keep busy without leaving the house. Thanks to the use of magic as a sort of printing press, it’s easy to produce plenty of textbooks, novels, and journals. It’s harder to get them out in the villages, where a local library might have 5-10 books total, but in the city you’ll find collections number in the hundreds. The capital city has the National Archives, which has a copy of every book that enters or exits Ishqua, and can be considered equivalent to the Library of Alexandria or the Baghdad House of Wisdom in our world aside from not burning down. Yet.

Different people have different things that they use day to day, so I’m gonna split this up between a couple of “average” groups.

The average villager will only carry what they need that day, since a bag will get in the way of their daily work. For example, a farmer might have their tools in a sling over their shoulder, a knife in its sheath for self-defense from wild beasts, and a small canvas bag of mixed nuts and fruit for a mid-day meal. A city-dweller might drop the tools in favor of a small pouch of gems to buy things about town. Pretty straight-forward.

Nobles don’t carry a lot on their own. At most, they’ll carry a purse with gems and a sidearm like a sword or dagger. That said, their retainers will carry pretty much everything else. Food, spare clothes, more money, and so on. Any given noble will have at least 2 retainers, and at least 1 body guard. A member of one of the Great Families might have 10-20 retainers and around a dozen bodyguards.

A member of the Order of the Sun will tend to lean toward the arms and armament side of things, carrying 1-3 weapons, an assortment of items and equipment related to their weapons such as arrows and bolts, any equipment needed to maintain their weapons and armor like whetstones and oil, and so on. Aside from that, members of the Order will carry an official sigil of the Order to identify themselves, a book or two to keep themselves occupied, and some medical supplies to treat themselves or other who have been wounded in battle.

As I mentioned yesterday, space is not the current final frontier. Travel beyond the atmosphere is the realm of fantasy stories, not possibility. Science hasn’t progressed far enough to develop aircraft, let alone launch vehicles or vacuum-proof cockpits, and magic is too unreliable to get anywhere near the edge of the atmosphere. So for now, the focus is strictly on terrestrial exploration.

Currently, the known world is limited to Ishqua and its neighbors, so the frontier is anything beyond those borders. Further north, on the other side of the Northern Desert, lies lands not known by many Ishquani aside from the strange, mostly silent warriors who occasionally follow traders back. These Northerners prefer large, two-handed axes, and seem to base their loyalty on the amount of gold and silver available.

Ishqua sits on the Western coast of the continent, so a great deal of attention is placed on what’s on the other side of the ocean. Scholars have proven via magic that the world is most likely round, so very few people subscribe to the flat-planet theory. Instead, the current thought is that there is another continent on the other side of the horizon, tentatively named Hwesta. No-one has been able to make it to Hwesta, despite a number of ships and their valiant crews leaving for that distant shore to never return.

Going the other way, there’s a great deal of the Eastern side of the continent that hasn’t been identified. A range of mountains bisects the continent, with the easy ways through blocked by winding trails filled with mutated murderbeasts. Some traders have found ways to get beyond the mountains by sea, but those ways are also protected by vicious winds and massive sea creatures. It’s almost as if there’s something that doesn’t want to be found on the other side.

And of course, there’s always the Abyss. The realm known only to demons is a place where few people have travelled to, and so far none of them have returned. That said, occasionally a demon will be summoned who has knowledge of the world as it was a few centuries ago, so it’s possible that those explorers survived long enough to tell tales of their own, or that the magics of the Abyss transformed them into demons themselves.

Space is big. I mean really big. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the herbalists’, but that’s just peanuts compared to space.

In many respects, the sky above Ishqua is very similar to that of Earth: one yellow sun during the day, one moon at night, and an assortment of stars and distant planets visible from the surface. However, that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Roughly 1/4th of the moon is broken, leaving it as a semi-permanent crescent with pieces trailing behind it like the trail of a comet. This is due to an Overlord of Darkness from ages past destroying part of the moon as a show of force before their defeat. In the modern day, not much is thought about the broken pieces, although the imagery of a crescent moon with a trail has become common shorthand for the Overlord and their forces, much the same way that the sun with its rays has become the symbol of the Order of the Sun. Go figure, right?

Some of the pieces of the moon have broken further, resulting in a thin ring around the planet. This ring is visible as a straight line above along the equator line, which is along the northern desert of Ishqua, and becomes more visible as you approach the tropic line, eventually disappearing just below the horizon as your reach the poles. These rings are just barely thick enough to be visible during the day, and can be seen in full force during the night. At one time, getting to the “end of the ring” was a myth similar to the end of the rainbow in our world, with the idea being that where the ring met the ground was where the gods lived, and that you could find the Root growing from that point as well.

A few planets are visible from the surface, although only one can be seen reliably without magnification. It’s a distant green planet called Abbiso, after the Abyss that Demons are summoned from. It’s unknown if Abbiso is the same place that the ancestors of modern Demons currently reside, but many prominent scholars believe that if it isn’t the Abyss, then it is surely habitable and, most likely, inhabited. At this time, no teleportation or scrying magic is powerful enough to view the surface of Abbiso, but that hasn’t stopped many, many people from writing speculative fiction about it. A current popular book details a near future where a team of people attempt to do long-term research from the surface of Abbiso, only for one of them to be left behind during an evacuation and have to survive until they can be rescued.

Beyond that, there are a lot of constellations in the sky. Like, a lot. There are over 200 constellations recognized by the Royal Ishquani Observatory, with roughly 30 of them also classifying as Birthsigns—the equivalent to horoscopes. This is due to a new constellation being identified for each Overlord of Darkness, each of the warriors who defeated them, each of the various gods in the Ishquani belief system, the various incarnations of the Root and the Wheel, and a scattering of other mythical characters.