THE TORN
The Torn. A scar upon the world, a wound that never heals. It stretches from horizon to horizon across the continent of Jeffran, sundering the frozen north from the southern realms like the gaping maw of some ancient, dying beast. Its edges crumble with jagged rock and shifting shale, forever threatening to slide into the abyss. Loose stones tumble endlessly downward, devoured by a depth no mortal eye has ever measured.
From that unseen maw breathes an unbearable heat, thick and unnatural. It wafts upward in slow, choking waves, carrying with it the stench of charred stone and something fouler still, like burning flesh. The very air here hums, a constant, low vibration, as if the world itself groans in protest against the wound carved into its heart.
The lands that cling to the edge of the Torn are barren of life, seared clean by its eternal heat. The earth there is a wasteland of jagged stone and broken ridges, its surface cracked into burnt-red sands where nothing naturally grows. Fossilised bones jut from the ground like accusations, remnants of an age devoured when the chasm first tore the world asunder. Across the Rift Plains to the south and the Witherlands to the north, twisted things prowl—beasts warped by the Torn’s corruption, their bodies reshaped into nightmares. Some walk on four legs, others on two; the Clattermaws, shrieking scavengers that chitter through the night as they hunt the unprepared, and the Gharisk, reptilian horrors with serpent skulls and barbed spears, haunt the desolation under moonlight.
Beyond this scarred heart, the land recoils as though in pain. Where the earth once lay smooth, it heaved and buckled at the Torn’s birth, rising into mountains vast and cruel. To the south, the Bluefire Mountains rear up, their peaks of icy stone veined with volcanic fire, belching smoke and snow in equal measure. To the north, the Frostspires claw at the sky, frozen monoliths of jagged stone and endless ice, cold citadels looming above the wasteland.
Across its vast length, the Torn shifts in scale. In some places a long arrow might find the other side, in others, the southern edge stares out into nothing, an unbroken blackness, too far for all but elven eyes to glimpse the northern side. And yet, where the void should deny all passage, stone paths remain. Bridges. Murderveins.
They thrust across the abyss like the bones of some colossal corpse, veins of red rock fused with shard magic that no storm, no army, no weapon has ever been able to even scratch. The Kalfori elves and their armies use them, as blades use arteries, carving their way into the southern realms to raid, burn, and defile. Each has a name, whispered in curses by rangers and soldiers alike, but none more dreaded than the Bridge of Bones.
The bridge sprawls as wide as a large village, wide enough for three hundred men to march abreast with shields locked. From its southern approach, the northern end is little more than a smear against the horizon, vanishing into heat shimmer and shadow. Its name is no metaphor, bones litter its span, bleached pale by sun and wind, remnants of centuries of blood spilled upon its back. The wind carries their fragments, scattering them like dust across the abyss.
Sometimes, when the world stills and the quakes subside, Rangers swear they hear it, the screams. Faint, broken cries echoing from far below, borne upward on gusts of unnatural heat. They rise with the dust, with the ash, with dark power and the despair of all who have fallen into the endless depths.
The Torn is a promise. A promise that the land itself remembers the cruelty and lust for power that birthed it. A promise that what festers in its depths will one day rise and return the gift.
PRE-ORDER RIFT SCARS
