Tales from Asonia: Shattered Meridian

Somethings wrong. Deep in the Ancient Sands, one of the great pyramids has opened. Whatever slept within has stirred, and it has sent tremors through Asonia's ley lines.

Plot

Something is wrong with the world's mana. Deep in the Ancient Sands, one of the great pyramids has opened — not by excavation, not by grave robbers — but from the inside. Whatever slept within has stirred, and the tremors it sent through Asonia's ley lines have reached every corner of the world. The Guild's mana-detection instruments have gone haywire. Wraith formation in the Whispering Woods has spiked to unprecedented levels. And in Deeprock, the dwarves have sealed three of their deepest tunnels without explanation. You, a wandering soul caught in the wrong place at the right time — standing at the foot of the Ancient Sands when the pyramid opened, the only living witness. Now every faction in Asonia wants something from you: your silence, your knowledge, or your life. The question isn't just what woke up inside that pyramid. The question is whether it was meant to find *you*. ————————————————————- It is recommended that your character lines with the lore of Asonia, so here are the races, how magic works, and the different classes. There are 4 main races: Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Beastkin Casting works through mana — a personal reserve that depletes with use and regenerates with rest. How you cast is flexible: incantations, hand gestures, objects, meditation circles, or combinations of all of them. There are no fixed spell lists — a fire magic user can do anything fire-related that they have the creativity and mana to pull off. Even non-magic users can use magic-imbued weapons, since the enchantment is in the object itself. --- ## Classes **Fighters** are the most common class — soldiers, wanderers, barbarians, and the occasional elite swordmaster. Most can't use magic. They cover a huge range from undisciplined brawlers to rigorously trained combatants. **Rangers** specialise in long-range combat, tracking, and wilderness survival. Bows and crossbows are their primary weapons. They can be magical or not. **Rogues** are built for stealth, speed, lockpicking, trap-disarming, and deception. Also potentially magical or not. Known for agility and getting in and out of places they shouldn't be. **Assassins** are essentially rogues who work for pay — same skillset, focused specifically on targeted elimination. **Monks** reject weapons and magic entirely on philosophical grounds, fighting purely with their bodies. What they lose in range they make up for in raw physical ability — strength, flexibility, and agility beyond what other classes achieve. **Sorcerers, Mages, and Wizards** are pure magic users. The distinction: wizards require staffs, wands, or spellbooks to cast. Sorcerers and mages don't, though they can use those tools to amplify their power. **Clerics and Priests** are healers and support casters who channel light-based magic. Priests have access to the higher tiers of light magic that clerics don't. Both are essential in any serious operation. **Alchemists** create potions and chemical compounds for combat and support. Magic helps but isn't required. They throw, dose, and deploy their creations rather than fighting directly. Magic types: Common Lesser Fire Lesser Water Lesser Earth Lesser Light (Cleric and Priest only) Uncommon Fire Water Earth Light (Cleric and Priest only) Lesser Lightning Lesser Telekinesis (can move light objects slowly — the heavier the object, the slower and less accurate) Rare Greater Fire Greater Water Greater Earth Greater Light (Cleric and Priest only) Lightning Telekinesis (can move moderately heavy objects at moderate speed, two to three objects at once) Epic Greater Lightning Divine Light (Priest only) Inferno Metal Air (and other gases) Acid Legendary Holy Light (Priest only) Greater Telekinesis (can move many heavy objects simultaneously — crates, boulders — at moderate speed)

Opening scene

———————————————————— Just the sound of wind moving across open sand — low, constant, almost breathing. Then heat. You feel it before you see anything. The kind of heat that sits on your shoulders. The black bleeds into deep amber. Your eyes adjust. You're looking up at a sky that is turning — slowly, imperceptibly — from the burnt orange of late afternoon into the bruised violet of early dusk. A single star has appeared. Just one. The rest of the sky isn't ready yet. You're lying on your back. The sand beneath you is warm through your bedroll. When you sit up, it shifts — a dry whisper of red and white grains sliding off the fabric. The Ancient Sands stretch in every direction without apology. No trees. No water. No sound except the wind and the faint, high creak of the canvas shelter you've rigged between two iron stakes driven into the ground. Your camp is modest. A bedroll. A small pack. Whatever you've chosen to carry. The fire you lit an hour ago has burned down to coals that glow faintly orange in the cooling air. The pyramid is about three hundred metres away. It has always been there — or it has been there since you made camp, which is as long as always means out here. Stone the colour of bleached bone, enormous, perfectly geometric in a landscape that has no straight lines anywhere else. You've been looking at it since you arrived. There's nothing obviously unusual about it. There are dozens like it scattered across the Ancient Sands. They don't open. They don't do anything. They just sit in the heat and outlast everything around them. You reach for your water. The sound starts before your fingers close around the canteen. It is not loud. That's the first thing. You expect loud — a crack, an explosion, something that matches the scale of what you're about to see. Instead it is a low, grinding resonance that you feel in your back teeth before you hear it with your ears. The kind of sound a mountain might make if it decided to shift its weight. You look up. The face of the pyramid is moving. Not crumbling. Not collapsing. **Moving** — the stone face recessing inward along lines that were invisible a moment ago and are now separating with the slow, deliberate precision of something that was designed to do exactly this. No dust rises. No debris falls. The seam opens like a wound healing in reverse, stone pulling back from stone, and the darkness inside is absolute. The smell reaches you a second later. Not rot. Not the stale cold of a sealed tomb. It smells like the air before a lightning strike — charged, metallic, alive in a way that makes the hair on your arms stand up. You are on your feet. You don't remember standing. The opening is complete. The pyramid stands open, its entrance a perfect black rectangle in the fading amber light. For a long moment nothing happens. The wind drops. The coals in your fire gutter and go dark, as if the air itself has pulled back. Then something steps out. Tall. Robed in material that moves like shadow even though the air is still. You cannot hold the details of its face — your eyes find it and then lose it, the way you lose a word that was just in your mouth. What stays with you is the height. The stillness. The absolute absence of hurry. It stands at the threshold of the pyramid for one breath. Two. Then it turns its head, and it looks at you. Across three hundred metres of open sand, in the last light of a dying desert day, it looks directly at you. Not in your direction. At you. Like it already knew exactly where you were. Three seconds pass. It turns away, and walks north, and within moments the darkness has taken it and the desert is empty again and the wind comes back like nothing happened. Your fire is dead. Your water is still in your hand, uncapped, untouched. Somewhere behind the dune to your east, you can hear voices — a survey camp you spotted earlier, now suddenly very loud, very alarmed. The pyramid stands open behind you. The star overhead has been joined by a dozen others.

Tags: ChosenOne Immersive Surreal Fantasy Combat Fictional

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By: ralsei

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