The first part, all those years ago: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts.html
Rations
1: Little meat pies sealed with suet and weevil-killing salts.
2: Hibernating rodents, kept fresh and docile in their slumber.
3: Gelatins chock-full of every expirable foodstuff on hand, gelatins from the dreams of the wildest '50s cookbook, made possible with the extraordinary preservative isinglass of albino cave-fish.
4: A mouthful of symbiotic earthworms that sit in the stomach and allow the digestion of soil for as long as an ordinary ration would last.
5: Dark rye-bread soaked with beer made with another herb than hops that better fends off mold and decay.
6: Little seeds stuck together with sweet nectar, not unlike bird feed.
Weather
1: Indigo flower petals peel away from their branches in the rain and the breeze. Soporific, even hibernagenic - a few clinging to your skin bring drowsiness, too many puts you into a sleep that requires peeling away the petals to rouse you. Some unlucky ones lie buried under piles of the petals for so long the roots of their trees grow into their bodies - inextricable yet undying, occasionally roused for prophecy from their centuries-old dreams.
2: Ash clouds loom dark overhead. Volcanic lightning rip through the clouds, flash-forging iron flakes. The flakes drift down in slow-motion magnetic suspension, cutting through flesh like thousands of tiny razors if you just push through them. Pole-mounted fans are used to beat a path.
3: Countless ballooning spiderlings drifting in like a fog. Each is a tiny bit venomous, enough to leave an angry red bump on your skin - you'll be covered in these bumps if you stand among them unprotected. Hunters collect the spiders with wetted-paper parasols to mash up and put on their arrows, and children chase the lizards that dash through the swarms and gulp them down.
4: God-rays shine down from a cloudless sky - shine through the clear blue stuff of the sky itself. Seek cover, or seek madness - for to be caught in the light of the rays is to be granted revelations that are foolish and dangerous in the eyes of men.
5: Pockets of cold air drift down from the mountains - invisible, unnaturally cold, cold enough to freeze warm flesh solid, cohering like droplets running down a window, spiting thermodynamics all the way (glacier-demons likely responsible). Good thing is they're slow - keep some water-filled gourds out on poles ahead of you, watch and listen for the flash-crystallization, and you should be good. The life around here's adapted to the pockets, can thaw out good as new. The fields of frozen, glistening flowers have inspired many poets, some of them even worth reading.
6: On the anniversary of the lord's death, all must drop their work and pretend to be mourning. If they don't, a reeking, many-handed wind will fling them to their death. It's rumoured that solving the mystery of the lord's death will bring an end to this onerous yearly taboo, yet no one's yet been brave enough so far to open the seals on his castle.
Land
1: A tornado alley - more so, a tornado highway. Twisters whirl around each
other like the stumbling legs of a drunken giant. Travelers and raiders
alike circle around the margins, attempting to predict when a corridor
will open through the clusterfuck maelstrom, then race breakneck through
against the ripping force and wind-flung debris. Old fools with weatherbeaten faces joke about a storm cellar-civilization buried beneath the tornados' reach: "wouldn't that have saved us some trouble".
2: Fractured mud-flats, bulging here and there into hills that sometimes verge on mountains - the whole land is a kiln, the furnace deep down below. Hot winds whisper through its many cracks. Who knows what it's meant to fire.
3: The place was bathed in a flood of potent acid - an accident alchemical or chthonic. Everything has been dissolved to elemental simplicity, or melted together. A land ripe with magical components, but there's always a risk of becoming the meal of some acid-scarred chimera.
4: Great sloppy dunes of silt - the sea withdrew some years ago. Life survives around brackish, stagnant pools trapped within the shells of giant rotting crustaceans and molluscs. Towering in the distance, the face of a fallen moon - waterfalls reversing up its surface in whitewater rivulets.
5: Echoes resound off the water-sculpted faces of karst cliffs and over the
mouths of sinkholes, distorted as if by some hostile and alien
intelligence. The voices of your companions lure you over edges, and
turn to laughter when you fall. Those who remain here long speak with their hands, and trust nothing they hear.
6: The trees here make natural lamps and candles with their oil, to burn away their rivals, give lift to their seed-pods, lure in light-loving creatures, and so on. The owls who live in these trees have learned to cook their food in the trees' candle-flames, and so attained the energy to expand their brains and thoughts. The warring courts of these owls are wise, and hungry - they know far more than they say - and they are the true powers of this land.
Accent
1: Thick, snorting, and phlegmy - their ancestors learned the secret of breathing water like air through their mucus. Few nowadays bother learning how, but the affect in their voices remains.
2: Rough, gravelly - they consume medicinal clay, which often contains throat-scratching grains even as it cures the endemic illnesses of the region.
3: Drawled yet choppy - the resin they favour smoking numbs the nerves of their mouths while making them twitchy.
4: Whispery, whistley - the curse of the Woodwind Goddess has stolen their breath through the generations.
5: Singsong, musical - a local superstition holds that doppelgangers speak in monotones.
6: Droning and nasally - by vocally imitating a mythical creature of their culture, an elephant-snouted devourer of nightmares, they believe they can conquer fear.
Fashion
1: Hats with brims that blend into cloaks and mantles.
2: Ribbons tied into complex knots through hair and around fingers, that constitute a language of their own.
3: Stoat skulls with jaws locked on earlobes as earrings, the skulls engraved and inlaid while the stoat yet lived.
4: Bare arms, tattoos in rings around the biceps - first made simply when they're children, and elaborated on as they stretch and fade. Fat and muscular arms are associated with wisdom, skinniness with immaturity. Sleeves are mistrusted.
5: Work, particularly work for the state, is a high virtue. Elites bear hands so calloused they can't properly close - almost always from means such as rubbing them down with coarse salt or burning them on a stove than from manual labour.
6: Belts and bandoliers hung with the mummified sword-hands of those you've defeated in duels.
Magic
1: Dependent on verbal and somatic components that human organs simply can't reproduce - would-be mages are necessarily heavy on body modification, splicing extra bones, tendons, muscles, and so on to mimic inhuman capabilities.
2: Requires the performance of complex symbolic operations - a simple static scroll or spellbook is not enough to contain it. Tools akin to a zairja or gematria-calculator are needed.
3: Is inexplicably accompanied by glowing circles and runes - scholars believe that decoding these symbols will reveal the source code of the cosmos.
4: Falls from the stars and congeals as jelly. Eating this jelly grants magic, but also exposes the eater's mind and body to the influence of outer powers.
5: Flows only from the gods. Illicit magicians build hideous towers out of stolen temple-stones and blaspheme under the open sky, hoping to survive the lightning - the weapon of the gods' wrath - that follows, and keep a sliver of their power from the experience.
6: Is in the blood - quite literally. Incautious sorcerers might find themselves swarmed by syringe-bearing would-be-mages, and the magically-mighty nobility claim legitimacy with the blood of ancient sages coursing through their veins, passed on from parent to child in a chain of inheritance. Where these sages might've gotten their magic is unknown, yet constantly speculated on.
