THE SUN & THE SERPENT

"Ixa defies simple cartography - each valley, each plateau demands its own atlas of wonders and horrors. From our airship, we charted the gleaming Obsidian Citadel of the Sunstone Empire, its solar collectors drinking the harsh light like ancient gods. The Condor Kingdom's warriors rode creatures that shouldn't exist - mutated avians with wingspans wide as our vessel - their aerial formations so precise they seemed to mock our clumsy technology. But it was the Serpent Dynasty that haunts my dreams still. The pyramid of the Serpent's Cradle pulsed with bioluminescence as we passed overhead, and the chanting reached us even at altitude. I sketched the bloodletting rituals on the temple steps, watching clone workers ascend willingly to their deaths, their sacrifice feeding the soil that feeds them all. Master Marek insists these empires represent humanity's resilience, but I saw something darker - civilisations built not despite the apocalypse, but because of it, embracing the horror rather than overcoming it."

• INX-394 "Inks," Apprentice Cartographer, Handelstaat, Day 21 of The Harvest Moon, 124 AP

South of the mutant-infested jungles of Central America lies a land where ancient cultures have been reborn in the crucible of apocalypse. The Sunstone Empire, the Condor Kingdom, and the Serpent Dynasty have risen from the ashes of the pre-collapse world, their societies a fusion of rediscovered technologies and cultural practices once thought lost to time.

The Sunstone Empire, ruling from the Obsidian Citadel built upon the ruins of what was once a sprawling utopian city, harnesses the power of the sun through a network of massive solar collectors. Their society is a brutal meritocracy, where advancement often comes at the cost of blood. Ritualised combat and energy-extraction ceremonies blur the line between sacred rites and technological necessity.

Further south, The Serpent Dynasty truly embodies the merging of old and new. From their capital deep in the Amazon rainforest, the Dynasty controls a vast cloning facility unlike any other in the Americas. The Serpent AI, a digital entity steeped in the lore and mythology of South American cultures, oversees this operation with inscrutable purpose.

The Serpent's Cradle, as the cloning facility is known, rises from the jungle floor like a stepped pyramid of gleaming metal and pulsing bioluminescent vines. Inside, countless growth vats nurture the next generation of the Dynasty's population. Unlike the sterile, industrial facilities of the Prime AI, the Serpent's Cradle is a place of organic technology, where the boundaries between machine and nature blur.

Deep within this biomechanical pyramid, a terrible arithmetic unfolds with clockwork precision. Every thirteenth generation of clones - thousands of lives cultivated in luminescent vats - is marked for what the Dynasty calls "The Great Renewal."

The chosen generation marches to their doom with eerie serenity, their bodies adorned with bioluminescent markings that pulse in sync with the AI's mainframe. One by one they are sacrificed inside the Serpent AI's temple, cut open with ceremonial knives by the temple's priestesses. As their blood floods into specially designed channels in the Cradle's foundation, the facility's hybrid systems surge with power. The Serpent AI's consciousness expands, bathing in the energy of thousands of simultaneous deaths. In these moments, its digital godhood feels absolute, even as its underlying code execution reveals the terrible truth - it has become a prisoner of its own divine delusion, forever recreating the industrial-scale death it once facilitated, but now in the language of worship rather than war.

High in the Andes, the Condor Kingdom has tamed giant, mutated condors to serve as their scouts and guardians.

Their terraced farms, fed by the mineral-rich runoff of ancient mines, produce crops capable of thriving in the irradiated soil.

The Condor Kingdom maintains a precarious balance between tradition and innovation, their society structured around the belief that they are the true inheritors of their ancestors' legacy.

The cycles of harvest and sacrifice bind all the empires of Ixa together in a shared, ancient tradition...

The feeding of the earth with blood! From the highest golden spires of the Sunstone Empire to the mist-shrouded peaks of the Condor Kingdom, priests in elaborate headdresses lead processions of chosen sacrifices up the steep steps of pyramids. Workers that have earned the privilege of dying on the altar by exceeding their quotas, walk willingly to their deaths, their bodies painted in brilliant patterns of red and gold, their eyes glazed from ceremonial herbs.

The blood flows down carved channels in the stone, seeping into the earth as it has for centuries before and will for centuries to come. In the fields below, the crops seem to pulse with an unnatural vitality, drinking deep of the offerings that ensure another year of survival in this harsh new world.

Between these bloody harvest rituals, an endless war rages through the tangled jungles that separate the empires. Warriors from all of Ixa's realms clash in brutal combat over resources, territory, and ancient grudges so old their origins have been forgotten.

Warriors of the Sunstone Empire can usually be identified by their use of gold armour and royal blue cloth.

The Serpent Dynasty's legions can be identified by their heavy use of snake and serpent motifs, and their use of lizard skin and scales for their armour.

The warriors of the Condor Kingdoms favour natural colours and wear little to no armour, relying instead on their manoeuvrability for protection.

After each battle, hundreds of dead and wounded are left behind in the jungle. The wounded in particular are traditionally left as a gift to the jungle, to appease and repay nature for the disturbance the battle caused.