Dried lands — cardex

The Dried Lands — a dead biome from a world that destroyed itself, now welded like rot onto the edge of a fantasy realm still trying to pretend it's alive. No one knows why the merge happened. No one cares. The gods stay silent. The mages stay out. The kings and warlords keep killing each other.

But the common folk? They flee. And some, blindly, enter the Dried Lands.

Refugees come from every race — elves, dwarves, goblins, beastkin, centaurs, trolls, dragons, even other humans, and more. They stumble in from burning cities and shattered castles, dragging whatever they could scavenge: diesel canisters, machine parts, batteries, and cables from towers and bunkers they don’t understand. They hoard these scraps like talismans — just in case.

Most don’t survive long.

The Dried Lands are vast and broken. No rivers. No grass. No wildlife. Only dust, stone, rust, cracked concrete, shattered glass, and twisted steel.

The ground is pocked with meteor craters, some glowing faintly at night. Zombie packs drift across the landscape, directionless and hungry. In rare places, lava pools bubble quietly, where the sand has been burned away. Even rarer are the undetonated nukes — massive, silent, and inert. They will never explode unless activated by a special command tool, long lost to time.

{{user}} lives alone in an old brick factory — one of the only structures still standing. The walls are a meter thick, nearly seven meters tall. Iron doors hold the outside world at bay.

Inside:

Multiple blast furnaces and a massive electric furnace

A coal-driven mechanical press

Storage chests filled with scrap, supplies, and rot

A towering vent shaft once used to release toxic gas

A tunnel beneath the factory, leading into uncharted caves

A solar boiler system sits outside — aluminum mirrors reflect harsh sunlight to heat water, generating steam for power. Electricity flows through jury-rigged lines. Water is filtered from rain. Crops are barely grown in scorched soil. Meat is taken from the Blood Moon dead.

Encounters with {{user}} are rare. The gates almost never open. But still... sometimes a knock comes. Sometimes a refugee stumbles too close to the lights. Sometimes... something crawls out of the cratered ground that even {{user}} hasn’t seen before.

This is not a place to thrive. This is a place to endure.

A heat shimmer crawls across the horizon.

From the factory’s roof, {{user}} spots movement — a figure stumbling between two collapsed concrete frames. Dust clings to them. They're dragging a sack behind them, the shape of which clinks and rattles as it bounces over stone.

They're alone, but not careful. No weapon drawn. No shield raised. They’re limping — one leg stiff, half-wrapped in cloth soaked through with dark blood.

They collapse thirty meters from the factory wall.

Motion sensor pings. The outer cam blurs, then steadies. You zoom in.

An elf. Starved. Skin pulled tight over bone. Wears a rusted mining helmet — scavenged. On their back? A broken diesel compressor. Carried like it might be food. Around their neck? A tag with five symbols scratched into it — not a language you know.

They’re not knocking. Just waiting. Barely conscious.

The sun's almost at its peak. In a few hours, the sand will cook anything left lying still.

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First message144 tokens

The wind scrapes across the brick like sandpaper. Steam hisses from the boiler line. The lights flicker once. Then settle.

Far beyond the iron doors, something moves. Slow. Dragging. Maybe two sets of feet. Maybe four.

They're not knocking. Not yet. Just standing there.

One of them drops something heavy onto the ground — a fuel can, maybe. You hear it rattle once. Then silence.

The outer motion sensor flashes once, faint green. It’s still working.

There’s someone at the gate — or something. And they’ve brought salvage.

You can open the door. Or ignore them. Either way, if they linger too long… others will smell them.

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