The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Dust

Of that which is written

Previously:

Steam

Salt

Lightning

These are the words of the dust:

"Whatever you came from, whoever you were, you will become us - you will become dust - descend with us and be transformed".

The words of the dust are True. All earth, from the very foundations of the world to the black soil left after the last rot is destined to come here, to the plane of dust. It dances on the wind, in dervishes and occulting clouds. In rasps and roars and whispers, the words of the dust are clear.

The plane of dust may be infinitely wide (or more accurately: indefinitely wide) but its length is limited, its strata charted in corded slats of bone. North and south or east and west might hold (though never both pairs at once), but the more important directions, the directions of its length, are Infallen and Nowherebound, towards its two absolute limits, everything in the plane being in constant movement from the former to the latter.

Infall is the beginning of the plane, and the beginning of the end of elemental earth. Mountains and ruins with roots that have rotted away in the Prime Material crash down here, smashing together like tectonic collisions fast-forwarded by many orders of magnitude. Little survives here, little can even exist here for more than a few moments. Those who fall in with their mountains and perish are the lucky ones - the break-men survive, but are cracked and bleed sand and never die.

There is a garrison of angels here, in a citadel of adamant, guarding the feet of Mount Celestia from the encroachment of entropy. These angels are a bleak lot, venal in their hunger for pleasures of drink and art and sex to distract them from the hard torrent of their duties. The dust here is closer to shrapnel, the noise omnipresent and booming like thunder.

In the blasted swathe where Infall's devastation spills out there is a battlefield, trenches dug and fortifications erected, a war against gravity and entropy. These fortifications are the footing for the machineries of collapse which power the Thin City, levers wedged into cracks of sinking cliff-faces, wheels spun by plunging boulders, and suchlike - and carefully managed fractures to create objects and structures of useful and beautiful forms.

Where the eternal catastrophe of Infall flows out and settles, it becomes the foundation of the Thin City. Perhaps more accurately a city of many cities - they abut each other because this is the only place in the plane that a city could stand for any while. Even more accurately they are many aspiring cities, places without pasts populated by institutions unrooted in history, ruled by the sorts who would do away with the past - tyrants, prophets, utopians, rags-to-riches prospector-kings with one eye at all times on the shattering of Infall. They are inheritors of imagined cobble-kingdoms pieced together from rubble-mythoi, the artifacts and idols they are downstream of. Their wealth is in sifting for these artifacts, for motes of gold and jewels. To gain the manpower for this sifting they raid the societies even further downstream for slaves, and trade for them as well, for the Thin City is the only place on the plane that manufactories can stand.

When faced with their own lack of a future, many cities of the Thin City will collapse in one final inversion festival, slaves freed and masters self-annihilating in fatalistic decadence, opening the way for the next iteration to begin again.

What might have once been continent-shading mountains at Infall will be largely ground down to grains and gravel past the brittle foothills of the Thin City. They become a fertile substrate for the plantlife that can set to seed and sprout into maturity in the brief period before the ground crumbles beyond its ability to support them. There are no forests here, but grasses stretch further than you could ever see.

This plain feeds the Thin City. Yeomen-clans plant rapid radishes and growfast gourds and race to harvest their crop while the fertile bands of soil slip constantly away, land claims taking the form of these ever-passing streams rather than static plots. The coffee-rite is the pillar of their culture, and their brew is of a strength and bitterness that can quite literally wake the dead. To them sleeplessness is an asset, paranoia a necessity, and stimulant psychosis as storied as Cú Chulainn's riastrad. The clans can be roughly divided into four types, which they share with the clans further Nowherebound: those who carry what they can ride with, those who carry what they can walk with, those who carry what they can climb with, and those content to frenetically build until oblivion takes them.

The plain holds the last certain stops for the camellipede caravans on their expeditions back and forth to the far and Nowherebound edge of the plane, their concentric-ring-yurt caravanaserai forming temporary centers of commerce and relatively-peaceful negotiation. Men in these markets share cups of coffee and hide each other's faces under their grass-cloth hoods, that they might silently discuss deals in the gurning trade-language.

The plain's bounty feeds not just the plane's people, but its monsters as well. A thousand varieties of megamite, some domesticated, some never so, sift for organic particulate. Ankhegs tunnel beneath it, devouring wandering herds and unlucky travelers alike. The ankhegs' nests are reinforced by their wax, a precious and aromatic substance, one of the few things that can reliably keep the ominpresent dust of the plane out. People live among them as parasites, rubbing themselves with the ankhegs' scents and learning the tap-tap-taps of their antennae-talk so that they may scrape the wax from the walls unmutilated and feed off their hosts' grubs - disgusting fare to be sure, but the alternative is to learn the antennae-talk for the sharing of food, and thereafter be cursed to become a gorge-ghoul for eating the regurgitated meat of one's brethren.

Both the gorge-ghouls and the uncursed parasite-people are, of course, out of their gourds, because of their lifestyle and because the sheer porosity of the underworld they live in opens it to the piping weep-wind cavities of Pandemonium. When they wander onto the surface they are often sought as musicians and story-tellers.

The soil inevitably reduces down into desert and a sea of silt where a man can become immured in an instant if he sets his foot down in the wrong spot. The sound of the dust largely fades to a hypnagogic susurration. What substantial structures and land-forms remain are ground together by the silt-sea's currents like molars, the plane seeming to take on an active intelligence in their breakdown. This process seems to be necessary because what remains here is exceptional - materials of exceeding durability, infused with magic, or even alive in their own right - to sum up: dungeons, a torrent of dungeons rammed into each other, tremendous stores of wealth and power delved by the quick and the brave.

Life here clusters around rivers - rivers exploded from splattering aquifers - but unlike in the by-comparison hospitable conditions further Infallen these rivers do not have banks of mere clay. Before water could flow through them they were rivers of fire, erupted from the roiling black sea of oil below in pyre-flame geysers, vitrifying impermeable banks of glass.

Clans of the fertile plain venerate their dead, and wake them for wise counsel in the coffee-rite, and while the clans of this wasteland share the coffee-rite, their veneration goes beyond death. Undeath is religion here - the eternal truth beyond the precipice of fleeting life - as evident as the sand-fleas scraped from your legs. The risen skeleton moves without muscles, sees without eyes - organs are mere idols. Undeath strips away these illusions and leaves only the pure animating intelligence.

Here there is a saying:

"To the one with no eyes there seem to be a million gods muttering and farting, and to the one with three eyes a thousand gods. To he who bears two eyes there are a hundred gods, and to he with one but twelve. To the one whose eyes have rotted away there is but one god, and its name is the division unto zero".

Undeath is aspirational, and not in dry and still sepulchrism but in becoming-fluid, corpse-clay wetted with putrescence, marytrforms slouching towards victory in eternity - the emptying-out of history their weapon as much as their flowing gestalt limbs.

Many die without ever rising again, for the wasteland gives little, and takes much.

Perhaps the most dangerous dwellers in the wastes are the dao. As beings of elemental earth this place is even more hostile to them than it is to all living things, wearing constantly at their bodies and spirits. To shore up this erosion they become man-eaters, soul-drinkers, the stolen mortal substance granting them a balance they by nature lack.

They lurk here among the dust, pariahs and exiles from the holy kingdoms of the dao in the plane of earth, because in their eyes the alternative is far, far worse. A story:

In the first days the gods made geniekind as their finest servants. Gods themselves are beings of the astral, of the ideal, of concepts and conceptualization and worldviews that are worlds unto themselves. They worked with the elemental to form the Prime Material, their magnum opus, but could never understand it the way beings of matter and energy could - and so they created genies to be their bridge between the divine and the elemental.

And then, to hear it from the renegade daos of dust, geniekind was betrayed. They were made to bow to the gods' mortal creatures, greatly inferior to themselves, and even to dim the light of creation they bore within to grant these mortals' wishes (to hear them tell it, divine magic and miracles are a cruel trick - prayers do not even reach the gods' languid ears, but are outsourced to the loyalist genies, lessening them more every time).

There are gods here too, desperate things, primordial and protean, dead gods too with boundaries blurred who refused to lie still, gods of domains excluded from the reigning Order, all who fled into the territory of their wrathful former servants because they too feared encroaching mortalkind, and the unwanted definition and chains of their theology. These gods cower in stolen temples and fulgurite-palaces, encysting themselves in enigmas, shadows, mysteries, contradictory symbols, and suchlike to defend against any attempts to pierce through to their core being - they make that core so obscurant and confused that it becomes nothing but madness, a homegrown pocket of the Far Realms festering inside the Order of the cosmos.

At last there is Nowhere - where the dust itself begins to disappear, crumbled to sub-Planck scale particles that don't and can't really exist. It's precisely because this super-fine dust doesn't really exist that it is so coveted - its nature allows it to be woven into works that go beyond reason.

It is here that the camellipede caravans aim for, and here that the phantasmagoria of fateful and prophetic dreams are woven, to be slipped into the eyes of sleepers, and it is here that the wretch-smiths of Ysgard draw out the sighs of cats and the blood of rainbows with which they can forge horns that drink up oceans and chains that bind titans. There is nothing that can keep the dust here out, not tar-paper and not ankheg-wax, and even moments here will leave you a little bit impossible - a hole through your chest where your heart should be and butterflies for blood, a shadow cast of light instead of darkness, an eye flying from your head and expanded into a nigh-invisible moon.

Do you know how hard it is to find decent pictures of dust

"I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons."