The Orrery hung in the void, grinding eternity into particles. Its vast celestial gears ticked endlessly away, rings within rings carrying worlds and wonders through the dark.
As the gears turned, the mighty Pendulum swung beneath them: a great mirrored disc depending from the heavens, counting and measuring the passing of days. By day, it flung Agony's scorching brilliance across the world. By night, it reflected Ecstasy's pale glow, soothing the heavens.
Its silent passage set the cadence of daily life, a metronome for the world's breathing. People woke and slept to its rhythm without thinking, their bodies tuned to its arc the way a musician's ear tunes to a note.
For the residents of this world, none of it warranted commentary. If pressed, perhaps they might have compared the Orrery to a cosmic watchmaker's dream, built by someone who had lost the original plans. Its gears ticked on with precision and flair, though everyone agreed something was slightly off and no two people could agree on what.
This was, of course, the subject of several theological schisms, one fallen empire, and a rather aggressive neighbourhood watch.
The centre of this world, both politically and physically, was the World Tree Palladium. Her mountainous branches challenged the sky with the quiet confidence of something that had been there first, and around her roots lay the great sprawling capital of Metropolaris: a city of ambition, grime, and the absolute conviction that it was the most important place in existence, which it was, provided you asked the right people.
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The Bramblewoods divided the rest into duchies and petty kingdoms, or rather, kingdoms expanded until they reached those natural limits and pretended they'd meant to stop there. This made war inconvenient, forcing kings and merchants alike to rely on the sorts of instruments that required more paperwork than armour: diplomacy, culture, espionage, advantageous marriages, and the occasional hunting accident.
Beyond the borders, ancient powers watched and waited: the Fae in their marchlands, the Takwin in their elemental dominions, and a great many other things that preferred not to introduce themselves first.
The people caught in the middle got on with it, as people generally do. And, of course, there were Heroes.
Gods and Heroes alike were the product, or perhaps the consequence, of the narrative forces that drove the world. History here was not merely an account of events but a story with opinions about how things ought to go. Prophecies fulfilled themselves out of spite. The plot was always thickening.
Heroes were lightning rods to those forces, destiny shoving them in the way of monsters, villains, and the occasional angry deity with a flair for the dramatic.
It was a world of gods and monsters, and other fictional inconveniences.
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