Lunarka, the Moon

[Friendliest]

LUNARKA – THE MOON
(Written by Friendliest and BonaFideNubbin)

To those living on Eternia, the moon is a mysterious place only known to house one of the most mysterious and terrifying entities in all of Eternia - Ba’al, also known as Belial or the Nemesis.

Legend suggests that the moon did not come into being alongside Eternia itself. Instead, after Archangel Kraus’s spark of life had spread across the known galaxy, the first of the Divine Beings of the realm slowly began to take form: The Divine Dragons.

The Dragons took up Kraus’s great work of creation, but were troubled by the intrusion of a sudden force of discord – Ba’al, whose meddling with the flow of reality would give birth to Hel himself.

Unwilling to allow Ba’al free reign over the world, the Dragons forged a great prison to hold it confined. A crystalline sphere of beauty, reflecting the sun in all its glorious light, to show the nascent lifeforms of Eternia that good shines even in the darkest places.

Yet chaos is a hard thing to lock away. Ba’al’s energies constantly eroded its prison walls, warping away their strength. In time, the Dragons were forced to expand the structure into three levels of seals – and then to create wardens to guard it. Winged sentinels to navigate its low-gravity corridors, charged with the task of cleansing Ba’al’s influence wherever they might find it.

Now, countless years later, many of the citizens of ‘Lunarka’ – as the denizens of the moon call their homeworld – have forgotten their solemn duties. The society has become secularized in many ways, with a caste system made brutally real by the dangers of proximity to the inner prison. Yet there are those who remember the reason for which they were made…
 

The Realm within the Moon

The three rings of the seal act as three separate planes of existence, each laden with their own cultures and their own way of life.
 

The Primis Ring (Outer Layer)

The Primis Ring is the ring furthest away from the core where Belial lies. Made as the original space for the Lunarkans to inhabit, it is a strange and beautiful land, supporting gardens and grottos aplenty. Nowadays, only the powerful reside here, their way of life governed by an oligarchic system based on little but wealth. The Primis ring is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of The Line – the transportation system of waygates that allows people of Lunarka to travel between the three Rings of the realm. (Only privileged Lunarkans, or those on particular business, may enter the Primis Layer at all.)
  
 

The Halo Ring (Middle Layer)

The Halo Ring is a large and airy space, something of an insulation zone between the Primis and the heart of the prison. Its name is derived from the many shining bands that rotate slowly through it, etched with countless ancient sigils. The bulk of the population resides on these bands, moving constantly through the Halo Ring across them. For many, this nomadic life is a simple attempt to avoid the amalgamations of chaos that drift through the Halo. For those faithful to the cause, however, it is an active quest to purge chaotic influences from the area. Either way, most all inhabitants of the Halo Ring must contend with the fight against chaos in their day-to-day life.
 
  

The Delve Ring (Third Layer)

The Delve Ring is the immediate outer ward of the prison. It was never meant for long-term inhabitation, originally. However, lesser Apostles of Ba’al and his servants have found their way into power here, leading many small cabals that seek to terrorize the people of Lunarka in an attempt to open the seals. Between this high rate of violence and the wild fluctuations of chaos this close to the core, only two types of people live in the Delve Ring. The first, predictably, are the dregs of society – which includes a majority of the infamous Batkin. The second are the most devoted crusaders, tirelessly seeking to thwart Ba’al’s plots.
 
 

The Core

Even most Lunarkans know very little about the Core; information about it is kept on a strict need-to-know basis. All that’s public record is that Ba’al’s Greater Apostles, the 300 Primals, are locked up here to plot and await the day that their lord Ba’al can escape perdition.
 
 

The People of Lunarka

As the moon’s creation is tied to the power of the divine, the structure itself effects the denizens of the land, similar to how the spires shards of Agartha affected the Agarthans. With the population of Lunarka being a whopping 95% magi, being non-magical is viewed of something as a disability, and magical practices and procedures infuse every bit of Lunarkan life.
 
 

Faiths of Lunarka

Children of the First Born (Drakanites)

The major faith of Lunarka is the Children of the Firstborn, who worship the Divine Dragons as the original divine beings born in Eternia. Devoted to the mission to keep Ba’al sealed, the faith emphasizes the power of order and abhors chaos of all forms, going so far as to create order sigils from pieces of the moon itself to aid their efforts. The Children typically scorn both holy and occult magic, viewing them as dangerously unstabilizing, and preach an ascetic and duty-focused lifestyle. Between that and the danger of fighting Ba’al’s forces, their numbers are on a slow but definite decline.


 
  

The Apostates

Those who have given into chaos worship Ba’al and its end goal of Entropy – the dream of a world where all natural law has been abandoned and the world is returned to the raw, unformed state of creation. Entropy can be seen as the end result of chaos, if all order was utterly destroyed. Only in Entropy, the Apostates believe, can humanity approach a state of true and genuine freedom. As such, they labor to escape Lunarka’s prison in order to finish Ba’al’s mission.

 

 

The Caste System

Lunarka’s caste system is the result of the gradual growth of its population beyond the numbers it was ever intended to hold. Limited resources and space led to the least well-off being pushed into the inner layers, first the Halo and then the Delve itself, and exposure to raw chaos further cemented the system. The closer one lives to the Core, and the longer they do so, the more they’ve been changed. The unluckiest Lunarkans are heavily mutated creatures, in mind, body, or both.

This has led to the establishment of a ritual to observe the level of chaos corruption in someone’s essence. Those who demonstrate high levels (as shown by the angry red runes that shimmer on exposed skin post-ritual) are condemned to remain in the Delve, further intensifying inequality over time.