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"Seek not the outer path of guidance, for all guides wish to take you somewhere. Truth is an experience born from within and within alone."
—Kertya Goldlotus, Regrets

Born of towering spires of flame and ash, of fickle murky lakes and rivers that shift over mere weeks, and acrid clouds that blot out the light of the red sun above, Tangda stands as one of Zalanthium's most striking inhabited planets. It is home to a sovereign nation, isolationists who refuse to allow any travelers into the resource-dense system. Once home to the single densest collection of adamythril in the entire universe, the planet and its neighbors were mostly depleted in the by the actions of the Warlock this world produced, the profound enlightenment-seeker Kertya Goldlotus. Its twin moons, the cerulean ocean Seakeeper and the luminous lava-flooded Ash-Spire, seem to mirror the pure forms of the volatile aspects of the world, its water cycle violent and polluted and its tectonics erratic, spotty, and omnipresent.

Physical

Tangda is a large terrestrial planet, at a mass close to that which suggests peak tectonic activity and volcanism. Its plates move around quickly and erratically on its surface, covered by very little water, and the influence of its moons' orbits, especially the perturbed one of Ash-Spire, feed immense cycles of volcanism worldwide. Its primary terrain is young and volcanic, with the visible layer of the surface being on average four years old worldwide.

The atmosphere is acrid to non-native life, filled with particles of basalt dust and volcanic ash. Filtration of particulates and adaptations to use the ambient haze are common across Tangdan life. From the surface, the sky looks a dull violet, usually covered by large cumulocinous clouds—dusty and muddy mixtures of volcanic ash and water vapor.

Geology

Tangda's rock is almost entirely basaltic. Its hundreds of tectonic microplates are churned around by the immense energy released from the decay of adamythril in its core, at such a rate that maps of terrain change on the order of years to decades. Sudden pyroclastic deposits from its worldwide volcanism bury valleys, rifts and sinkholes open new ones just as quickly. The terrain is always shifting, never staying settled enough in most areas for permanent structures to be wise or viable.

Metal ore in the form of volcanic ash-sand deposits and mixed into lava rocks is relatively abundant on the surface, though any pure or refined metal is hard to come by and more difficult to manufacture. The most common surface metals are silver, iron, lead and nickel, followed by a range of assorted uncommon elements created from the adamythric decay in the planet's core, circulated through its vast mantle into the lava plumes powering its over three hundred thousand volcanoes.

The tectonic activity of the planet is fueled primarily by the allotropic decay of adamythril within its core, which in its specific ultra-dense form creates antimatter as it decays into unstable isotopes of aelkium and orichalcum. This antimatter, in the form of anti-helium nuclei, annihilates with any nearby matter, releasing about 1.19 nanojoules of energy per nucleus. This decay pushes convection in strong plumes from the abnormally hot core at a higher frequency, giving rise to much taller and narrower convective cells and thus more varied and fractured plates.

Tangda's terrain is highly variable, but few places of relative evenness exist on the planet. The closest one can usually get is a basin of lava-rock in what was once a valley between volcanoes. Despite this, a few sparse cratons in the central regions of the largest plates do exist, which have a statistically extreme lack of volcanism and much smoother terrain.

Magnetosphere

Tangda's core is made of a dense collection of metals, including the vast adamythril deposits that churn the planet around and give rise to its distinctive terrain. This metallic mix is uneven and ripples in precise patterns that both strengthen and tangle up its own magnetic field. The resulting magnetic knots form powerful fields across the planet's surface in the form of intersecting lines, which combined with the dense ferrous ground deposits makes conventional magnetic compasses useless.

These magnetic leylines have been one of the defining forces behind the planet's cloud cities. Even a slight bit of extra force against the gravity of the planet is helpful when constructing cities meant to be permanent

Hydrosphere

Tangda is a wet world, despite having no permanent bodies of water. The lower elevation regions are covered in a mud made of ash and water, with particularly wet areas near the equator having transient lakes and rivers. Storms caused by shifting winds and local eruptions often bring rain as well, giving the whole world a potential to be flooded locally at any time.

Higher layers of clouds tend to be made more of ash than water, but high-elevation wet clouds sometimes precipitate on dormant mountainous peaks and form glaciers. The abundance of tall mountains on Tangda ensures that at least 20% of the world's water supply is locked up in these glaciers at any time, which circulate as the mountain slowly collapses or erodes by way of snowmelt. When there is more volcanic activity, these glaciers expand and become muddier. In quieter periods of Tangda's rampant tectonics, they melt into rough rivers which carve short-lived canyons and leave behind only the coolest layers of pure ice.

Tangdan water is very fresh compared to the brine-soaked seas of most other worlds, but it is not without its impurities. Natural pollution from the ash and metal particulates in the higher layers of clouds and from the ground the rain falls on contaminates every body of water in one way or another. Though the natives are adapted to such things, any off-worlder would have at least one irritant in the air and water that is incompatible with their chemistries, most notably lead, which has a great poisonous effect on most species.

Orbit and Rotation

Tangda orbits close to its red sun, orbiting about every 8.1 standard days. While most planets that orbit their stars this quickly would become tidally locked, Tangda avoids this due to the influences of its own mass and its moons. The planet has a 2:3 resonance of rotation and orbit, with a rotation period of just over 5.1 days. This orbit and rotation gives it a strange solar cycle, with a longitudinally based local time every solar cycle called "Sun-freeze", the point in the day where the sun briefly reverses apparent motion in the sky.

The temperature differentials between day and night on Tangda are rather extreme, only dampened by the thick atmosphere distributing heat and the ashen haze layers cooling the day side of the planet. Days can reach up to 40°C in the equatorial regions, while nights worldwide can drop as low as -30°C.

Moons

Tangda's two moons could not be more different from one another, nor from the planet they orbit. They have inspired countless myths of warring gods and forces, and define so much of the culture in timekeeping and storytelling and figures of speech that one might think they have some element of sentience to them.

Ash-Spire is the closer, smaller moon, which orbits the planet in a violently fast fourty-six hour period. It goes beyond Tangda's own volcanism and hyperactive tectonics, with large swathes of the moon's surface being entirely covered in luminous lava flats and the rest dominated by millions of volcanoes. While a moon of its size would normally not have an atmosphere, the outgassing caused by its immense volcanism is enough to sustain one of silicate particles and carbon dioxide. Ash-Spire's orbit is notably eccentric, caused by its interactions with Seakeeper and the inner planet Djyeta. It is theorized that Ash-Spire's core is made of dense Adamythril, but the pressures within its core would not be sufficient to create the decay-volcanism chain that Tangda has.

In culture, Ash-Spire is often the feisty younger god that embodies rage and passion, the one that pulls on Tangda's elemental nature and wins the battle of flame and water ever so slightly because of its closeness, despite its lesser strength. Its ideals are the extreme that many will go to war for, the values people hold above their own life.

Seakeeper is Tangda's second moon, much more massive than Ash-Spire and with an orbit every 3.5 days. Seakeeper is entirely covered by a freshwater ocean, acidified by the outgassing from both Ash-Spire and Tangda. It has a thick atmosphere of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Seakeeper's orbit is notably less eccentric than Ash-Spire's, to the point that the orbit is nearly circular. Tidal heating of its more rarified solid mass is less extreme, despite Seakeeper being more than twice as massive as Ash-Spire. Due to its distance, it actually appears ever so slightly smaller in the sky than its sister moon, occasionally being fully occulted by the lava world.

In myths and stories, Seakeeper is often the embodiment of gentleness and nurture, a prepresentation of the ideal of stillness and peace, an alluring stagnation that all too often leads to death on Tangda, but a virtue that one cannot truly live without. It is the temperer of the Ashen temper, a reminder that motion must be balanced with rest.

Biology

Tangda's biosphere has necessarily evolved to handle the constantly-shifting and unstable volcanic landscape. Not only do lifeforms need to manage against the world's high gravity, they must also remain mobile enough to avoid burial by ash and rock or sudden flash floods.

Flora

Tangdan flora primarily consists of obsidian-blue mosses and similar low-ground spreading colonial organisms. There is no core to the body of many of these, and the rate at which they spread ensures that no individual can be fully killed off by the majority of volcanic upheavals. Depending on climate, some of them bear nutrient-rich patches and flowers to pollinators to carry their genes farther than they could ever spread on land. Due to the low level of useable light emitted from Djekkhan, the gravity of Tangda, and the consistent blockages of much sunlight from the constant haze and fickle clouds of ash high in the atmosphere, plant life has evolved to use as little energy as possible and collect as much as it can.

Primitive trees form from several vine-like species of plant, which use spires of Tangdan stone or other mineral columns as their support against the planet's high gravity. These often end up very conical, with the more stable individuals hardening as they age.

Kanra

The Kanra were the first of Tangda's species to gain minds and become builders of civilization. Adapted to the shifting terrain and scalding rains through mobility and tool usage, they have survived by way of mobility and constructed shelters for millions of years. Their senses for vibrations both aerial and subterranean, as well as powerful directional hearing and acute near-distance vision, have been major assets in their ability to take stock of their environment. While not very hardy, their anatomy supports very high muscle densities without much increase in their size, allowing longer-lived Kanra to gain great physical strength compared to their younger peers.

Kanra societies were mostly pastoralist until the technological revolutions that started the culture of cloud cities, living in harmony with what little resources they could collect and carry. The backbone of their storage and construction capacity was their use of domesticated animals for millennia. Their ability to form massive and complex webs of social relationships helped them spread and form large cultural groups across the planet even with the dangerous terrain. They were the first to discover the craton plateaus and set up forges and metalwork, permanent structures, and landmarks that could stand the test of time.

Arsho

The Arsho were once livestock and cargo animals kept by the Kanra for their meat, eggs, and hardy bodies that could transport heavy loads across the rugged terrain. While their species is innately nomadic and doesn't tend to form groups, they were herded in large quantities by the Kanra who domesticated them, for the purposes of resources and cargo. Arsho are capable of great internal change as well, much like the Kanra but in the area of their mind's faculties. As their bodies are not as nimble, they adapt to learn and predict deep in their unconscious. Arsho were known to intuit disasters days before they actually occurred long before they joined the ranks of civilization builders.

Eventually, the forced and learned sociality, proximity to sapient beings, and collective unconscious intuition gave the Arsho some slight potential within the Noosphere, allowing them to gain sapience and self-awareness as well. Arsho language, culture, and philosphy all developed while still held captive by the Kanra, though this dynamic would not permanently remain.

History

Stability

Tangda as it was in the 6000s CE, ruled entirely by Kanra, was on the verge of two revolutions. The first would be a prosperous one, rich refining techniques finally allowing complicated technologies to be forged and structures that can last to be constructed, using some adamythril allotropes in their work to achieve fantastical results. The second would be a revolution that would reshape the fundamental way of living for the planet and triple their sapient population.

The plans for cities held up by immense volumes of buoyant or heated air, suspended above the cratons, came about centuries before they were viable. Scrap metal and wood, fabric woven from a truly complex amalgam of fibers from plants, glass, and sand, and the fuel to make it work were difficult to acquire.

Arsho Separatism

As the Arsho initially developed their languages, as they began to communicate amongst themselves and share information, they became increasingly unwilling to live under the heel of the Kanra, especially as a source of food. They began to rebel in greater and greater numbers, a phenomenon that was first noted as a disease. The outspoken Arsho were slaughtered in broad daylight, only furthering the resentment the rest had towards the Kanra. Eventually, a word-of-mouth movement for complete separation galvanized into a warfront.

The casualties were brutal, the first few attacks proving to the Kanra that the unusually noisy Arsho wre both intelligent and speaking a language they did not. Over several years, the weapons went from forged swords and spears to particularly sharp rocks and chunks of metal, particularly adamythril-rich deposits. When struck and put under stress or chipped, an adamythril deposit will rapidly decay at the breaking point or stress line, making for pseudo-thaumic weaponry accessible right on the ground of Tangda.

This separatist war went on for thirty six years before peace was reached, a treaty only gained when the Kanra fighting had little to no memory of the reason they wished to keep subjugating the Arsho. A begrudging treaty was drafted to accept the Arsho as sovereign peoples, though they were to remain far from Kanra land. Land claims had become popular during the war, and the excuse to carve up a favorable position for themselves was all too tempting. With a deal reached, almost all of the Arsho officially left the civilization to begin their own.

Exploration

The first of many cloud cities rose in the 6600s. With a much more stable base for development and manufacturing, technologies skyrocketed like never before, enabling spaceflight and sustainable agriculture with almost no resources required. The Kanra were the sole beneficiaries of this, though word spread through the borders to the Arsho that they had conquered the heavens themselves. Many were hopeful that they would abandon Tangda entirely, set off to other worlds to never return. But the Kanra found in their journeying that the other planets in the Djekkhan system were unsuitable for habitation, despite their vastly more stable terrain.

Expansion in the skies above Tangda was the compromise they settled on. Terraformation was out of the question for now, but the liquid temptation of ground that doesn't quake and churn gave them a deep disgust for anything surfaceborne on their own homeworld.

Second Arsho-Kanra War

The strip-mining of Tangda's readily replenished metals for the construction of hundreds, thousands of cloud cities caused damage that would be washed away in mere decades, but severe enough that the Arsho living on those lands suffered immensely for it. Seeing the luxury at the top of those cities and the devastation that caused only grew their ideals of separatism, and if the weak and pliable Kanra wouldn't abandon Tangda, some sects of Arsho argued that they may have to instead.

Bargains with the miners to visit, then eventually inhabit the cities were struck, though mostly out of desire to use the cities and their technology to become space colonists themselves. But with the ever-expanding empire of the Kanra, they had regained a desire for the "classical era", a kind of conservative renaissance that unfortunately included fringe extreme diets. A craving for the forbidden meat their ancestors once ate began to trend amongst certain parts of the youth, then the businesses, then the politicians. A subjugation of the Arsho, at least partially, was put on the table in secret.

The plot to steal ships en masse and leave Tangda for blacker pastures was uncovered, a perfect excuse to reprimand and brutalize the organizers and make an example of them. In a show of true mercilessness, the offending Arsho were tried, sentenced, and exsanguinated while hanged on hooks in public. And the bodies were not given to their people, but cooked and eaten to "return the stolen knowledge to its rightful keepers.

Needless to say, this breaking of the centuries-old compact of equal order and dissolution of their place as livestock sparked a second war. A massive bloody conflict, with the Arsho bringing magi and the fell powers of the adamythril they had so studied against Kanra blades and vehicles. Cities were felled. Tensions only grew with every battle, till none were left that had not picked a side. Few defectors existed; it was one of the cleanest species-war divides in history. Predator versus prey, food and labor versus the yoke and knife.

After decades of this forever war, precisely the year 6775, an Arsho man was born who would change the course of history. Kertya Goldlotus, a combatant and off-time philosopher, fought for liberation alone, but lamented every life taken by the war. It was simply a clash of ideals catching everyone in the crossfire, something that could, that should be worked out peacefully. Nevermind the fact that the Kanra were wrong in their quest of subjugation, that this war had been had and settled before.

Kertya met an equally remorseful and hesitant Kanra soldier in solitude in a small valley, and neither battled the other. They shared a deep love for the peaceful time that they hoped would come, and a strong desire to finish the war to bring it about. The Kanra warrior, Amurak Vikstone, threw aside his devotion to the Kanra cause for the sake of peace. No good had ever come from the consumption of Arsho meat or milk, and the labor could be solved by machines. The two became allies, then lovers. But Amurak was slain by another Kanra warrior, his own elder brother, and his body was flayed and crucified to signal him as a traitor.

Aggrieved, Kertya briefly pushed for the war to continue, developing arts of combat using adamythril-forged weapons as tools of incredible violence. When they broke, he turned to metal slag chunks, then stones, then his own teeth. He hijacked a transport to the capital city for the war efforts, finding their researchers readying ships of radioactive matter. Slaughtering them, he boarded the ships and stole them for his own efforts.

Kertya would make his way to the Benefactor, briefed by the notes from the corpses in tow (stolen themselves from interstellar noise) that this load of nuclear waste would be the price for any one wish the provider desired. Kertya thought on his year-long journey about what exactly to wish for. To override the wills of all for peace went against the philosphy he still clung to; annnihilation of the Kanra would only be more violence upon violence. Kertya sought enlightenment and answers more than anything else, to the cycle of cruelty that existed.

Lotus Era

"Benefactor, I have brought you your feast. I request absolution and enlightenment of soul. Make me one with all under the purview of Seakeeper and Ash-Spire, that I may come to understand everything and bring an end to this cycle of suffering that binds my world!"

This wish was granted in a roundabout and literal way. While Kertya's consciousness did expand and his mind strengthened to allow him greater perception of himself and the world around him, the abilities bestowed upon him by the Benefactor kept to the exact meanings, giving him supreme control of water and molten metal. And thus did Kertya Goldlotus become the Warlock from Tangda, the Sage of Two and Fifty Cuts. In return, his quota was merely a half-billion tons of adamythril.

Upon his return, he was well anticipated by the Kanra armies, who had been making headway in their progress towards world reconquering. But Tangda is a volcanic world, filled with the very stuff that Kertya now had power over. Taking up his right forepaw, he crafted a lotus flower of innumerable blade-sharp petals from molten lead. In one singular act of violence, he scattered these across the world and bisected fifty-two cities, then demanding an audience for the whole world to see, lest more be shattered and sent to the ground to be swallowed by the tectonic sea.

Kertya Goldlotus ruled with equal brutality for both species, a philosopher-king out of necessity rather than greed. For years, he had all adamythril mined or sourced be separated out and refined, himself using the power he had gained to siphon some from the mantle of the planet. The flow of it was slow, too slow to pay back the debt he owed in one life, but with plans to expand this operation to other worlds, the Tangdan people saw no worries from it. Peace had arrived at last, all were equally subjected to that subjugation and loss they feared, and their tyrant remained kind in all areas of governance besides that precious fuchsia metal.

Adamythril War

Vivianna, Conqueror-Queen of Artura and a Warlock in her own right, landed on Tangda twice while Kertya was in a deep meditation, using her immortal body and armies to wrest massive deposits of adamythril from the world and setting the progress towards his freedom from debt back by years. On the third attack, Kertya awoke and fought her off, granting her a sum of adamythril in exchange for her desistance. He demanded they meet again in a year's time to negotiate between them, sympathetic as he was to his fellow Warlock. Ever careful, however, he traced Artura's position on her leave.

The next year, Vivianna returned, and Kertya gave her another sum for her quota, so much greater than his own that it was. He told her that she would receive no more adamythril from him unless she contributed technology for further joint development and offworld mining. Vivianna took great offense to Kertya's claim to the entire system, and declined the offer entirely.

When the Arturan magarchy sent a probe to take a chunk of adamythril, injuring the miners it stole it from in an attempt to silence them, Kertya was furious. He summoned his own personal militia to travel and make a statement. Bombarding the cities with molten lead, he declared war on Vivianna, claiming she had broken both the oath they swore to each other as sovereign nations and the sanctity of their shared position as Warlocks. Vivianna tried for right of single combat, set to be held on Artura's third moon a year from that day. Kertya, a man of rules and pride, accepted.

Artura once again sent probes, long-distance missiles this time meant to glass the surface of Tangda before the duel would be held. Kertya was contacted by the astronomical branch of his loose empire, informed of the silent ships they had barely detected. This time, Kertya used Seakeeper's own oceans to dismantle them, harvesting the parts for production of similar bombs should Artura retaliate.

On the scheduled day, Kertya descended onto Artura alone, on the southwestern tip of its supercontinent. In an act of pure reactive violence, he admonished Vivianna's cowardice and actions before severing the crust itself in a cutting motion said to encircle the world a hundred times. Immeasurably compressed water and magma tore through the plates themselves and rent Artura's continent into dozens, vaporizing Vivianna's own immortal body before she could even react. Millions were slain, and with the planet's infrastructure crippled and its Warlock killed, he returned to Tangda with his work done. Artura never responded.

Modernity

Kertya Goldlotus was regarded as simultaneously a hero of all of Tangda's people and a tyrant, a necessary presence that provided security and peace in exchange for the debt he incurred. Despite his wordly and celestial wisdom and the unfathomable powers granted to him, he died of illness like any other. Adamythril was mined in his stead until the debt was fulfilled forty-five years later. The issue of succession was only a short struggle, and many of Kertya's governing principles were kept for their effectiveness.

Tangda today, as well as the rest of the Djekkhan system, remains isolationist amongst an increasingly connected Zalanthium. The system has truly vast proportions of rare metals and compounds, but its wealth is locked away out of resentment for the stars. Artura remains an eternal reminder that others are exploitative and not to be trusted, and there are multiple Warlocks worth of mythrides set aside to ascend another if war calls yet again. Another eternal threat to produce a tyrant, an Overlord-in-waiting should anyone trespass for the jewels of this scarred system.