The Badlands
The Badlands of Pazunia, a place where even the ground beneath your feet wants you dead. It’s a realm of desolation that stretches as far as the eye can see, and then some. You know, if the Abyss had a backyard, this would be it, a place of scorched earth and burned bones, where careful cutters watch every step, and every breath stings the lungs. They say that the Badlands are the parts of the Pazunia that were too unpleasant for anyone to build a burg, and once you’ve gotten lost in them yourself, you’ll understand why they say that.
Crossin’ the Badlands ain’t for a cutter who’s faint of heart. It’s a place where the cursed sun beats down like Hephaestus‘ hammer, pounding the earth into a mosaic of cracked clay and broken stone. The wind carries the stench of burnt flesh and the distant screams of the damned, a constant reminder of the countless poor sods who’re meeting their end in this forsaken place.
If these are the badlands
— A first-time traveller in Pazunia
then where are the good lands?
A stroll through the Badlands, it’s more like traversin’ the mouth of some great beast, with whirlwinds of bone and grit ready to strip the flesh from yer bones faster than ye can cry “Mercy.” You see them dust devils whipping across the plain? They ain’t your run-of-the-mill wind gusts, oh no. They’re the restless spirits of the damned, trapped in an endless dance of death, spiralin’ and whirlin’ in a frenzy of hate and malice, eager to tear you limb from limb and add your bones to their morbid tornado.
And just when you think you’ve seen the worst of it, that’s when the sky opens up and the chaos-storms roll in, a cataclysmic display of the Abyss’s terrible temper, a maelstrom of fire, acid, and frost that sweeps across the land with a voracious appetite for destruction. And pay attention, cutter: That’s not fire ‘or’ acid ‘or’ frost, berk, that’s all three at once! Oh, they’re a sight to behold, these storms, with lightning that sears and rain that burns, a symphony of destruction that engulfs everything in its path, leavin’ nothin’ but scorched earth and smolderin’ bones in its wake. And you know what, unlike the storms on other planes where you’re unlucky if you get caught out in them, these Abyssal storms actively seem to track you down, changing course to chase you out of the Badlands. Told you there were bad, didn’t I?
But amidst the horror and the hellfire, there’s a sort of brutal beauty to the Badlands, a raw, untamed power that draws you in and holds ye in its grip. It might a place where every moment can turn into battle for survival, a place where only the strongest survive, and the weak become part of the landscape, their bones ground to dust and their flesh fed to the storms… but it’s got a stark elegance to it. Or perhaps I just got caught in one too many lightning storms, eh?
So, if you find yerself in the Badlands of Pazunia—and if you’re trekking across the Plain of Infinite Portals from one burg to another you surely will—you’d best keep yer wits about you, cutter. It’s land of danger and desperation where the only law is survival of the meanest, and the only rule is kill or be killed. So strap on your boots, grab your blade, pull tight your cloak of protection from fire-acid-frost storms and step into the maelstrom, cutter, because in the Badlands of Pazunia, it’s every fiend for themselves.
Source: Jon Winter-Holt, mimir.net
