Synopsis: Vordath

The City of Dupli was no longer in its prime of life. It could hardly be said that it was even a city anymore, because thousands of the houses that people had once lived in were in ruins, abandoned, or inhabited by creatures best not thought about. Not the over exaggerated terrors of mice, no, most of the inhabitants of Dupli City were huge rat-cockroach hybrids that had been formed in the Bloodrain and were nigh-on impossible to kill.

The Bloodrain occurred almost twenty-two years ago. An overambitious, weedy magician named Torquin Bloodleaf had summoned a demon far beyond his control, and, enthralled by it, had created this once-marvellous city. It had then become a housing estate for human sacrifices that the demon took whenever it wanted.

One day it overfed or ate something that disagreed with it or something that to humans would be equally as benign. For the demon, though, it meant that it lost control over Bloodleaf, who had by then been driven quite mad. Bloodleaf performed a spell way beyond his capabilities and ended up destroying the demon in the process, making it explode like a nuclear bomb.

And like a nuclear bomb, the demon’s remains had formed a giant mushroom cloud that spread over the whole of Vordath like a suffocating blanket. It had seeped into everything it touched with alarming ease, warping and changing the very nature of everything. This falling and seeping of the ashes of the demon became known as the Bloodrain, and those things and people it affected the Tainted.

So where Vordath used to be a cutesy, happy little planet that people came from all over the galaxy to see (they found it fascinating to watch the steam ships go by in the bubble of the past that everyone else had long since left behind. It was almost a tourist resort, where you could visit actual shipwrecks in a time when the only remaining ships were skyships, and meet real witches and sorcerors when technology had invaded and conquered the rest of the universe. It was a place of adventures and so much fluffiness that it was a wonder the inhabitants didn’t choke) it became abandoned and left to its own devices, which didn’t turn out for the best.

But we digress.

The City of Dupli, then, became incredibly run down. Most of the inhabitants were killed or warped into creatures that were no longer human, or even recognisable. And it was somewhere deep inside this ruinous place, in a damp hellhole that hadn’t been lived in for years but was in surprisingly good condition, that the first child born after the Bloodrain sat poring over a mountain of paper that she had stored there over the years. It was everything you could ever hope to know about Vordath after the Bloodrain, but it still didn’t hold the answers she needed.