22 June 2026 CE
4:48 AM Wahannon Standard Time (UTC +8:00)
Raabeg Palace
Tenzennon, Wahannon
“We should evacuate to Tenzennon, they’d never think of attacking there,” sneered Hwagem sarcastically as the entire world shook violently around him. Contrary to his father’s prediction, they were, in fact, attacking there. Hwagem Pohassa was deep in the bowels of the oldest standing palace in the oldest city in Wahannon—although whether it would be standing for much longer was very much an open question. Not even during the Civil War had rebels dared to target this place, but now even in the basement there was still dust falling from the ceiling onto his head as missiles from Ademar-knows-where rained down. So many millennia of history being at risk would be deeply tragic if it wasn’t terrifying, although at this point, Hwagem was really more annoyed than anything. It was hard to keep being scared after months of anarchy had reigned. “Where did they even get this many missiles?”
It wasn’t even clear exactly who they were. In the last Civil War, the lines had at least been clearly drawn on species lines—the felines of Amahan and the ailurines of Bóhan against the orc-dominated national government. In the current anarchy, there seemed to be innumerable factions, ever-shifting and constantly disbanding and reforming into newer factions with ever more inscrutable demands. It had started as a rebellion against federal power by the Eighteen Provinces of Wahanta—those “leftover” regions of the country not given political autonomy and constitutionally entrenched status after the war, which while politically disempowered, composed almost sixty percent of the country’s population. In the months since, though, the various provinces had invariably all collapsed into infighting factions, lost control of portions of whatever armed forces they had managed to cobble together, and seen the political unity they had briefly had against the federal government collapse as they turned on each other to try and take control of whatever economic resources they could. Not even one of the Eighteen Provinces, it seemed, had stopped to consider that 60% of the country rising up in rebellion would completely devastate the national economy.
Tenzennon was not even the real capital of Wahannon, even if the text of the Basic Law said it was. No government agencies were seated here, no national policy decisions were made here. It was only a symbol, only a vast collection of museums, preserved ruins, and statues to various forgotten gods—oh, and almost every single Wahannonite financial institution and major corporate headquarters. But the de facto capital, Ómaznon, had already been bombed, besieged, and occupied, so there was no other single target the various factions could attack that gave any sense of satisfaction or pride for hitting. And so the Wahannonites waged war on their own history, their only global city, their own beating heart. It wasn’t the first time, of course. It probably wouldn’t be the last. Tenzennon had lasted in one form or another for more than four thousand years. But, at least in Hwagem’s opinion, this was certainly the stupidest reason Tenzennon had ever burned.
Hwagem Pohassa was the youngest son of the nominal President of the Federal Republic, Wareg Pohassa. Until last month, he had been as far away from all of this nonsense as he could manage to get—the University of Tawari in Sakarna, where he had been studying orcish paleosapientology. He had hoped to stay for a PhD and to continue studying the first migrations of orcs out of Gondwana, but even despite his orcishness, the Sakarnese propensity for xenophobia had left them disinclined to renew his visa, even though it had meant sending him back home into a literal warzone. Hwagem was almost certain his father had had something to do with their decision—he had never approved of his son’s choice of university, disparaging the University of Tawari as an “absolutely irrelevant bottom-tier glorified vocational school in the worst part of Sakarna.” Hwagem’s response had been “but you have heard of it.” It was worth noting, as far as Hwagem was concerned, that U of T had the highest ranked sapientology program in Sakarna, making it the best place in the world to study the subject if you were both interested in orcs and not interested in being in Wahannon. Wahannonite universities were all fairly useless unless you wanted to study Wahannonite history or nuclear engineering, and Hwagem wanted to study things far, far older even than Wahannon. There was once a time where there were no orcs in Wahannon, or on Yasteria at all, and he wanted to know when and how they got there. But his father had been so determined to get him back to this shitty country he had flown him home under threat of being shot down by rockets.
“You can study plenty of old bones in Tenzennon,” his father had chided him.
As the ceiling above him continued to shake, Hwagem had begun to worry for his own bones in Tenzennon.
He didn’t even know where in the old palace he was. He had gotten separated from his father and the rest of the family when a missile crashed directly into the state apartments—no doubt an assassination attempt, botched by the fact that the missile failed to actually explode. Hwagem had stood there, staring slack-jawed, at the cold steel of the missile sitting there atop the rubble that had been the hallway between him on one side and his father, brother, and sister on the other. He had picked the bedroom farthest away from them, naturally. Someone—his father or brother, he hadn’t been able to tell—had shouted at him to run, and so more on autopilot than anything he had turned and ran as fast and as hard as he could away from them and from everyone and everything else. Another blast not long after had just barely missed him but blew a hole into the wall and floor that Hwagem had then fallen into, dropping him into some clearly long-forgotten section of the ancient palace that had been sealed up. He had no idea how far below the ground he was, but he knew it must be deep, because it smelled terribly musty, and with just the hint of gas to really make things interesting. One or the other blasts had left a hint of ringing in his ears, and he could tell that he was more than just a little disoriented. He really ought to stop going, he began to tell himself, but the continued shaking drove him yet further, seeking the stability and cover that only the deep, deep Urth could provide. And so he kept going, farther and deeper, into the ancient, increasingly decrepit palace.
Raabeg Palace had been the seat of the last Emperor of Wahannon, and quite a number of Emperors before him. The structure most people were familiar with was actually relatively recent, built only in the 1880s atop the ruins of a much more ancient structure that had long before crumbled in disrepair. Located atop a mound in the center of Tenzennon, it was popularly considered to be the site of the first ever Imperial Palace of Wahannon, although it was far more likely the first Emperor had actually been seated in Tanynraa or even the much more distant Haxanna, both more than a hundred kilometers away and not, like Tenzennon, at the top of a damned mountain. Tenzennon, although settled as early as 4,500 years ago, had only been a tiny little village home primarily to religious orders and sacred temples until probably a hundred years or more after Imperial Wahannon began in the year 24 CE. Tenzennon itself was a major feat of engineering, requiring all kinds of over-engineered roads, aqueducts, and even cargo elevators and boat locks to make it habitable. While not nearly as showy as the much larger and much, much older Great Mounds of Ancient Wahannon, it was equally if not more miraculous in scope. It would have taken decades to turn what had once been just one of a million tiny little holy sites into the capital of an empire, and as that empire had declined and risen again over time, various dynasties would abandon the expensive and relatively isolated Tenzennon in favor of cities far more logistically favorable. There was not actually one palace in Tenzennon but dozens and dozens, most of them located atop one another on this exact spot, each built anew atop the rubble of the old. What was today called Raabeg had likely been known by countless names across countless generations. Which one precisely had built the one Hwagem now sheltered in, he had no idea. Whichever it might be, it was far younger than anything he was actually interested in.
It was clear that this hallway had been sealed up for a very long time. The walls were covered in the faint ghosts of once-rich decoration, all painted directly onto the wall. The designs were straight out of an ancient history museum, all of them like something you might expect to see in an exhibit about the Great Mounds, ancient megatemples which predated Imperial Wahannon by more than a thousand years. The people were all oddly flat and all mostly identical, always standing sideways but staring straight ahead with wide, open eyes. Every now and then a much larger figure with distinctive headgear appeared, no doubt a King or perhaps one of the gods. Prior to the Ademarization of Wahannon, there had been eighteen gods in the Wahannonite pantheon—except in those places that were permitted by ancient law to recognize only seventeen. Hwagem could only name a few of them, like Haxan—the god of soil and rock, who had been the favored of a majority of imperial dynasties, or Ynraa, the goddess of law whose image was still today found in almost every court of law in the country. She was always depicted with extraordinarily large tusks that were blunted, so as to imply she, like the law, had tremendous power but that it ought to be tempered.
Ynraa was one of the patrons of Raabeg Palace and her image was found all over the upper levels, but strangely, Hwagem didn’t see her anywhere here. He recalled vaguely in the back of his head learning once that Ynraa was among the newer of the gods, with her cult dating to only shortly before the establishment of Imperial Wahannon. But surely, wherever he was, it couldn’t be that old. This simply must have been a work of one of the dynasties that had a fetish for Ancient Wahannon, of which there had been many. He noted that one particular figure, obviously male because he was depicted quite nakedly, appeared over and over on the wall. If Hwagem had to guess, this was something out of the 1500s, when an orcish dynasty had restored the Cult of Haxan to prominence after a dynasty of Ademarist Ailurines had briefly repealed worship of the Seventeen or Eighteen Gods and replaced them with the God-on-Urth rather than the god of the Urth. That dynasty, whose name Hwagem couldn’t remember—he couldn’t remember any of them, really—had itself been brief, the last resurgence of Wahannonite paganism before the much more simple (and much less prone to slavery) Asendavian religion had finally taken hold of the Wahannonite population around the 1600s. Its rise had had something to do with the human dynasty—Wahannon’s only—that had overthrown it in what was called the Era of Ademar’s Revenge, which violently cast out the Cult of Haxan from the halls of Wahannonite power, never to return. Taking a moment to take in the sight of the… distinctive image of this god on the walls, wondering how such an attractive image might have ever lost the adoration of the public, it was only then that Hwagem noticed the shaking and the blasts had ceased.
Silence.
There was only Hwagem, the dim light of his phone’s flashlight, and dozens of faded paintings on the wall, with the hall going ever downward on a notable incline into the shadows. How long had he been going down this strange corridor? How far deep had it taken him? Why did it smell so bad in here? He had no idea, but considering that behind him there was only war and destruction, there was really only one way to go.
So he continued.
It seemed as though the paintings got stranger and stranger the further Hwagem went. At the beginning they had all been perfectly well-ordered groups of people lined up beneath the enormous, naked god, or king, or whatever, with lines of text Hwagem couldn’t read above and beneath them. Now, however, there was no text at all, and the pictures ceased to be arranged in neat lines. Faces and figures extended in all directions, sometimes even in swirls, up and down and all around the walls, with figures being less and less realistic. The giant naked man suddenly started appearing with the head of a bull, or the long legs of a crane, or both. In one of them he even had the head of a fish, which was very strange—if there was one thing he knew about Ancient Wahannonite religion, it was that they hated the sea and everything in it. Sometimes there were fish-headed worshippers too, as if this god or king were preaching to them. The Ancient Wahannonites had believed that the sea was the land of the dead. He wondered if this was actually supposed to be the god of the sea—Sebna, if Hwagem remembered correctly—but he knew that the sea god was never, ever supposed to be depicted visually, lest he be invoked and curse all who saw him to die and be dragged into the realm of ghosts and demons. The Wahannonite hatred of the sea was famously why the Emperors had historically outsourced foreign relations to the Kings of the Wapagna Islands, which while integrated into the empire since the dawn of Imperial Wahannon, had always enjoyed significant autonomy simply because mainland Wahannonites absolutely dreaded traveling on boats to go check on them or to sail to foreign ports.
Despite the increasing diversity of animal depictions, Hwagem noted that the people were invariably orcs, with nary a feline or ailurine to be seen. This was also strange, since the 1500s and 1600s were the time of greatest species diversity in dynasties. The ailurine horselords of Bóhan had always, always featured heavily in the cultural imagination of Wahannon—as enemies, in the earliest days, then as conquered subjects whose domination was a point of imperial pride, and then as powerful and noble warriors who brought glory to the empire. The felines of Amahan, in contrast, had always been popularly imagined as reclusive, individualistic, and generally disagreeable, but considering their generous mineral wealth and the fact that it was they who had taught the orcs how to farm rice, they should still appear sometimes. There had been at least one feline dynasty by the sixteenth century, he was almost certain. And yet, all the people here were green, tusked, and rotund to the point of corpulence, all hallmarks of the ideal orcish figure for all Wahannonite history. This was something that Wahannonite culture shared with the Sakarnese, who also favored a heavier aesthetic. The ever-present god-king figure, though, was always depicted with a straight and narrow torso, often being the only figure so depicted. Was he supposed to be malnourished? Why would that be something to glorify?
As the hallway went deeper—never turning, never a single door or even decorative wall niche—Hwagem noticed the paintings becoming more vibrant, as the smell grew ever stronger. He really ought to stop, a voice in the back of his head pleaded, but there had come to be a hint of sweetness in the air as well. He couldn’t stop now, he decided, after going so far. The art really seemed to be coming to life now! With stronger colors he could see that the god-king was a different green than the people, much deeper—like emerald, rather than the much more yellowish little people beneath him. Emeralds were a hallmark export of Amahan, perhaps this and his thinness were supposed to endear him to felines, as a way of bridging the species gap even despite his obvious orcishness? There were animals all around them now, all kinds of creatures. Rams with horns twice the size of their bodies, turtles with wings flying over the head of the god-king, some sort of canine-looking creature with scaly legs like a dinosaur’s, and several animals he couldn’t even recognize.
The pictures ceased to have solidly-defined lines, with colors leaking out of the figures and smearing all around them, all together. It seemed almost as if they were moving! It took a moment for Hwagem to realize that this was because he was moving, his head swaying side to side and his knees eventually giving way. “I… can’t breathe…” he said aloud, his words echoing up and down the hall so long they eventually sounded almost metallic. Even as he lay on the ground, the pictures still moved, and he realized then that there were even paintings on the ceiling. Stars, thousands of them, glinting impossibly in the light of his phone. Were there diamonds or something embedded in the stone? Long, serpentine creatures with dozens and dozens of bat-like wings circled among the stars. One of the serpents had a huge, singular eye with beams of light painted shooting out of it. The air was so terribly heavy and it was so hard to move his head, but Hwagem tried his hardest to follow the serpent’s gaze. The beam of light shot diagonally down from the ceiling to somewhere further down the hall, just barely beyond the edge of visibility. It seemed as though there were a bank of clouds at the edge of his perception, a haze of fog, as if the serpents had carried him up into the sky. It did feel as though he were floating, despite the air above his head being so, so terribly heavy.
He rolled over and forced himself up on his hands and knees. The god-king on the walls was so much larger now. It was overwhelming how many times he appeared, at all different angles, all around. There were fewer and fewer worshipers and it was just this god, just this one strange, naked man. Smears of raw color splayed all around him. Were they really painted there or could he just not see properly? Distantly, his own voice screamed at him from somewhere deep inside his head. Get out! Get back! Run away! Something is wrong! But he could not listen, and his voice began to fade, quieter and quieter, until it vanished entirely. Step by step Hwagem pulled himself forward, desperate to follow the line of the serpent’s sight. What could it see? What secrets lay beyond, just past the edge of the darkness? There were so many clouds now, no matter which way he looked. He tried to swat them away with his hand, but almost fell over when he pulled his hand up from the floor. The smacks of his hands and knees on the stone echoed and echoed forever and ever and ever and ever, even the hallway seemed to stretch on, longer and longer, into the infinite darkness. It smelled terrible. It smelled incredible. The animals were flying off the walls now, swirling around his head. The line on the wall, the golden beam of light, got brighter and brighter. Fire licked at his knees, bitter stinging flames of pain. New paint was on the floor now, bright scarlet, appearing everywhere that he dragged his knees that he could no longer lift from the stone. Further! Further! What does the serpent see? What is the secret of the naked god?
There were other beams of light now, from other serpents on the ceiling and on the walls, all converging to a single point somewhere further beyond. Was the end near? Was he dying? The flames roared up his legs and up his arms now, tearing into his very muscles and lapping up to his chest. The clouds were so dense now, everywhere around him. His phone slipped from his sweaty, tired hand and fell onto the stone with a terrible cracking sound that he could barely hear because it was so very far away. Forward. Forward. Find the end. See the secret. He swayed side-to-side, as if he were on a ship. Perhaps he was already dead, perhaps the god of the sea had already claimed him. But the beams of light were all so close together now. A new wall appeared through the fog, suddenly in front of him. It was covered in gold, inset with all kinds of gems in every color imaginable. The lines of light all converged above the crown on the head of a massive picture of the naked god-king. Were there seventeen or eighteen of them? There were so many. Too many. So many more than eighteen. Why so many? There were twenty… thirty… thirty-six? The ancients counted in base-36! Yes! How old was this place? How far back had he crawled?
The naked god-king stood atop a door frame. The door was black like Sakarnese ebony. No. Obsidian? How? Why? The frame was brilliant gold and the doorknob was a massive orb of perfectly clear crystal. A door! What was beyond? What secret did the naked man hide? As the flames burned deep into him, as the fog enveloped him, Hwagem reached up. He was falling now. There was no air. There was only the door. There was only the knob. There was only the blue-white light twinkling in the crystal. There was only scarlet on green—whose hand was that? Was that his hand? What was the secret? What was beyond?
Hwagem grabbed onto the doorknob.
The light went out.