2) Regional Lore
Hextor: The Necrotic Swamp.
Terrain: Elegy of Conflict and Decay
The land of Hextor is no mere province, but a necrotic aria composed in bone and mire. Under the dominion of Lichqueen Xandera, the swamp itself has become her living testament. It is a territory reborn through bloodletting, betrayal, and unnatural resurrection. Fetid waters lap against embankments carved from the carcasses of extinct behemoths. Mangroves bloom with parasitic orchids that glow in unnatural hues, fed by the ichor of the dead. Crumbling siege engines and rusted armor litter the peat like ancient shrines to futility. The land whispers, moans, and dreams in death.
Divided into haunting domains:
Metlapal (Iron Marshes) – Laced with rusting war machines animated to patrol the waters.
Itzaltli (Bone Mire) – Forests of petrified bone and ossuaries grafted into the trees.
Yolopantli (Blood Bog) – Red mist drifts endlessly, fed by sacrificial rites.
Tlatecuhtli (Wraithwood) – Haunted groves where spirits bloom like moss.
Even now, titanic reptiles and noxious amphibians prowl the depths, flesh twisted by necromantic runoff. Xandera welcomes their chaos. It serves as natural culling.
The Philosophy: Undeath as Divine Synthesis
Where most speak of life and death as opposing absolutes, Xandera recognizes their true relationship: a dialectic. Undeath is the synthesis of their clash, the divine alchemy of contradiction resolved. She proclaims that the gods are not stewards of the mortal world but usurpers of a truer divine order—a realm of perfect decay where the dead do not rot but bloom.
"To worship the gods of life is to kneel before maggots and call them monarchs. I seek the god they betrayed, the sovereign of stillness and silence. Through me, they shall return."
To Xandera, civilization is a chrysalis. Only through necromantic mastery can it crack open and birth something eternal. Her nation is not merely a state but a gestating deity.
The People: Bound by Oath, Bone, and Reanimation
Once scattered witch-tribes and bog clans, the people of Hextor have been stitched together by shared death. Under Xandera's reign, necromancers are not outcasts but artisans. Her call drew them from across the world: witches burned in pyres, alchemists exiled for unholy concoctions, sorcerers branded heretic. Here, they found sanctuary and purpose.
Citizenship in her nation is won not by birth or sword, but by mastery over the veil. Every necromancer contributes to the nation’s bloom, be it through raising the dead, crafting soul-bound automatons, or breeding horrors to tend her bone-forged orchards.
Government: The Black Bloom Court
Xandera's governance is absolute, yet ritualized. She rules as Lichqueen Eternal, enthroned in Kilkmire's bone-laced spires. Her rule is guided not by whim, but the doctrine of the Black Bloom—a philosophy of patient entropy, curated decay, and divine restoration.
Beneath her:
The Circle of Thorns: High necromancers and bone-scribes who dictate magical law.
The Veinwardens: Regional governors and death-knights who enforce Xandera’s will.
The Bloom Heralds: Diplomats and spies bound to flesh-golems and corpseflies, sent to foreign courts.
Society: Glorious in Gloom
Necromancy is not taboo—it is the very rhythm of life. The undead labor, build, harvest, and protect. Families raise children alongside ancestral revenants who teach them lost histories. Undeath is not feared but honored. Ghosts are conversed with. Skeletons are adorned in silks.
Magical Arts Flourish: All disciplines cast out by sanctimonious lands find home here. Blood rites, corpse stitching, miasmic channeling, spirit fusion—all have guilds, schools, and patronage.
Culture of Reclamation: Hextor scours the ruins of dead empires for relics and artifacts, viewing such things not as remnants but as seeds. Nothing is wasted, not even ruin.
Architecture and Industry: Ossuary Splendor
Kilkmire, her capital, is a bone-and-marble blossom. It rises from the swamp like a parasitic orchid, fed by sacrifice and constructed atop the shells of titanic beasts.
Key features:
Fleshloomed Bridges: Grown from necrotic sinew and reinforced with bone.
Runed Obelisks: Emit pulses of deathless energy, preserving districts and charging soul-tech.
Bloom-Factories: Where undead laborers manufacture spell-silver, soul-glass, and bone-machinery for trade and conquest.
Xandera’s economy thrives on enchantment and fleshcraft. Weapons, potions, and constructs flow to black markets and arcane academies abroad.
Currency: Vitae Crystals
These phosphorescent stones pulse with stolen life. Formed from condensed soulmist, they are both tender and reagent. Higher denominations house whispering souls.
Religion: The Betrayed God
Xandera’s church teaches that the divine plane belongs not to the gods of light, but to one true god exiled in ages forgotten. A god of stillness, bloom, and beauty. The false pantheon stole this god's garden and sowed rot in its place.
Through undeath, Xandera seeks to unearth this divinity and restore the balance. Every ritual, every act of necromancy is not desecration, but sacrament.
In Hextor, death is not an end. It is the womb of a new empire—the cradle of a queen crowned in bone, wreathed in bloom, and defiant of time itself.
Kilk-Mire, the Heart of Bone and Bloom
"All roads end in rot, and rot blossoms best where the blood runs thickest."
Deep within the sunken crucible of Hextor lies Kilk-Mire, the beating necrotic heart of the Ossuary Dominion—a city not merely built, but raised, from the remains of empires long devoured by time. It is a city of grandeur and dread, equal parts tomb and palace, where bone is currency, silence is reverence, and death is industry.
Kilk-Mire is to necromancy what the sun is to the jungle: an inescapable center of gravity, a crucible of power, and a beacon both feared and adored.
Geography & Structure
Cradled in the flooded caldera of an extinct, corpse-filled volcano, Kilk-Mire is surrounded by ashen wetlands and bone-reefs—the landscape twisted by ritual decay and enchanted stagnation. The city itself rises like a fungus from this fertile decay, its pyramids and ziggurats sculpted from obsidian, corpse coral, and gilded femurs. Between these spires run bone-bridges, silken ropeways, and processional canals of embalming oil and blood-water.
At its center towers the Throne of Bloom, a spiraled ziggurat fortress said to contain Xandera ’s sanctum, her reliquary-laboratories, and the root-throne from which she governs both the living and the long-dead.
Architecture
Kilk-Mire’s design draws from ancient Mesoamerican grandeur but twisted through necrotic philosophy:
Temples shaped like open ribcages, lit by ghostflame
Plazas tiled with gravemark glyphs that animate under moonlight
Marketplace mausoleums, where merchants trade alchemical goods from within sarcophagus-stalls
Cenote sanctums used for scrying, sacrifice, and soul-harvesting
Bone aqueducts flow not with water, but with embalming serum, sap from rotwillow trees, and alchemical ichors that feed the city’s undead infrastructure.
Population
Inhabitants:
Necromancers, both master and apprentice, from every corner of the known world
Living servants, indentured mortals allowed refuge in exchange for service or tribute
Undead thralls, who tend, build, harvest, and defend without complaint.
Sapient undead, from liches to bound spirits to revenants, forming a second society within the first—whispering politics older than time
There is little distinction between caste and class in Kilk-Mire. One’s value is measured by mastery—of flesh, magic, will, or influence.
Culture & Customs
Rites of Reanimation are public affairs, with music, incense, and theatrical processions
Children are taught Anatomical Psalms before the alphabet, learning to name every bone in the body of a god
Public grafting ceremonies allow select citizens to enhance themselves with donated or stolen limbs
The Undying Hour, a daily event, stills the city as all movement ceases to honor those whose bones now uphold its foundation
Governance
Kilk-Mire is ruled by the Thorn Council, composed of death-priests, bone-chosen liches, and Xandera herself, who presides from her Throne of Bloom. All decisions are filtered through the philosophies of decay, rebirth, and dominion.
Punishments are rarely execution—they are transformation:
A liar may have their tongue replaced with one that whispers truth compulsively.
A traitor may be made into a wall mural—alive, aware, and woven into the city’s bone.
Significance
Kilk-Mire is both capital and cathedral, laboratory and graveyard, marketplace and mausoleum. It is the soul-forge of the Ossuary Dominion, where every secret of death is studied, every miracle of undeath is born, and every defiant whisper against entropy is etched into bone.
"The living worship gods they cannot see. Here, our goddess lives among us, and death bends to her will."
1. Cuetlachtli-Tēpētl (“Spine Mountain”) — Central Palace
This is the divine axis of Kilk-mire. The Cuetlachtli-Tēpētl rises as a sacred vertebral column forged from ossified titans and calcified divine beasts. It is said to be the fossilized remains of an ancient world-serpent slain by Xandera in her youth—a relic she hollowed out and claimed as her throne.
Each vertebra is a sanctum, monastery, war-council, or throne-chamber, where undead aristocrats kneel in bone-cloaked silence. At its base lies the Tlamictlālli, or “Field of Slumbering Teeth”—a courtyard of fossil gardens, half-buried skulls, and still-twitching jaws that whisper prophecies in dead languages. Entry is strictly regulated by the Tlacatzontli, her skeletal bodyguard order.
This tower is not just spiritual—it also serves as the ley-pulse conductor, routing necrotic energy into the city’s sigil-grid and powering the other districts like a spinal nerve.
2. Cihuatl-Mictlan (“Women’s Death City”) — Sepulcher Warrens
Named for the death realm where women who died in childbirth were said to go, Cihuatl-Mictlan is a tangled sprawl of ossuary slums and necrotic tenements. Bone stacked upon bone, the buildings here resemble termite hives of marrow and sinew. Ghost lanterns flicker from every doorframe, lit by soul-wax melted from condemned spirits.
Many of the city’s disposable undead are created, stored, and discarded here. Reek-smiths, bone-sellers, and children born into necrotic servitude populate the alleys, constantly bartering soul-tags and animated limbs. Feral undead roam in controlled packs, wearing glyph-plates around their necks to identify their masters.
Despite its poverty, the district thrives in its own macabre way. Cults compete in necro-theater, staging ritual deaths to impress recruiters from the higher castes.
3. Pusik’al-Naj (“Flesh-House”) — Embalmer District
Within this district of fleshwrights and anatomical architects, Pusik’al-Naj stands as a bio-alchemical labyrinth. Stone ziggurats ooze blood and steaming preservative mists. Deep inside, tlamatini crafters carefully sculpt sinew and bone like artisans shaping jade, creating hybrid beasts, necrotic clones, and arcane prosthetics for high-born clients.
Mummified servant-monks wander the district to deliver reagents. Giant mortuary mills process battlefield corpses brought in by the Calavera Caravans—funeral guilds that roam the countryside harvesting death.
Rituals here are performed atop pyramids shaped like flayed torsos, where sacrificial spirits are siphoned into liquid soul-amber and bottled for use in resurrection rituals.
4. Itzkal-Ocoxalco (“Obsidian Ossuary District”) — Mausolytic Quarter
Carved directly into the deep obsidian bedrock beneath Kilk-mire lies Itzkal-Ocoxalco, a necropolis revered for its memory crypts and echoing tomb-cathedrals. Bones are filed like records. Ancestor-lore is carved onto the skulls of honored lineages. The catacombs beneath this district extend for miles, some say into forgotten hells.
Guarded by Ahuilnemeh—ancient monks bound in silk and bone—this district functions as both spiritual sanctum and political arena. Nobles vie for space among the vaults to inter their flesh or soul. Here, diplomacy is conducted not through speech, but through the conjuring of ancestral ghosts to argue on behalf of their bloodlines.
The sacred Xikolli Archives, a chamber of whispering bone scrolls, houses the contracts of all who’ve sworn loyalty to Xandera—etched onto bones, blood sigils, or spirit-woven tattoos that still writhe when read.
5. Tzompantli-Nāntli (“Mother of Skull Racks”) — The Arena & Execution District)
Within the open, bone-fanged amphitheaters of Tzompantli-Nāntli, blood and honor are offered in equal measure. This district is named for the tzompantli, ancient racks where skulls of sacrificial victims were displayed—and here, that tradition continues with artistic cruelty. Rows of skull-trees bloom along streets and colonnades, each “fruit” a preserved cranium, polished and engraved with the story of its death.
The Arena of Chains, an enormous circular pit sunken into the necrotic clay, hosts weekly contests: duels between risen champions, ritual executions of condemned warlords, and necromantic “combustions,” where volatile undead are detonated for sport. Gladiators in this district are reanimated and trained, boasting enhanced musculature, taloned hands, and petrified bones—animated by the Bonewrights’ guild headquartered nearby.
Tzompantli-Nāntli also serves as a symbolic justice center. The Itzomiqui Judges preside over cases with sacred detachment. Punishment here is not death, but reanimation with shameful flaws—an eternal reminder of one's crime made visible to all.
6. Yaxkin-Chan (“Sun Spine” or “Spine Beneath the Canopy”) — Agricultural Necropolis)
Despite Kilk-mire’s necrotic nature, Yaxkin-Chan is a living contradiction: a district of agriculture, composted decay, and alchemical greenery. Designed around terraced bone towers that resemble ribcage segments and spine-like aqueducts, it produces bio-nutrient crops used in the crafting of embalming fluids, fungal meat, and ghost-fruits consumed in necromantic rites.
Fields are fertilized with the remains of failed resurrections and battlefield bone-dust, creating unusually lush marsh-rice, glowing mosses, and hexed plants that scream when harvested. Animated scarecrows patrol the crops, stitched together from avian bones and hexed bark.
Necro-botanists from the Tlilpotonqui Order study how the cycle of rot can yield eternal life. Every solstice, the district performs the Feeding of the Roots ceremony, where bones of executed criminals are fed to sacred trees believed to be tethered to the underworld.
7. Teōyaomiqui-Zacatl (“Field of the War-Dead”) — Military & Reclamation District)
Teōyaomiqui, the Aztec god of fallen warriors, lends his name to this brutal and militaristic quarter. Here, resurrected legions march in perfect rows down obsidian streets. Pyramidal barracks house the Mictlāmpilli Cohorts, undead formations trained for both foreign war and internal security. Warbeasts bred in the Pusik’al-Naj district are broken and deployed from this zone.
The bones of ancient conquerors are sealed in standing sarcophagi that pulse with spirit-runes, allowing commanders to summon their martial essence during campaigns. Strategic planning is overseen by the Xayacan Order, war-priests and bone tacticians who wear skull masks fused to their flesh.
This district also oversees the Bone Harvest, Kilk-mire’s most vital resource program. Caravans of scavengers leave from here to collect remains from plague zones, warfields, and ruins—anywhere death outpaces decay. These bones are tagged, graded, and ritually purified before being sent to the Embalmers.
8. Tlāltikpak-Tlāzohkamati (“Grateful Earth”) — Artisan & Bonecraft District)
A serene contrast to the city’s harsher quarters, Tlāltikpak-Tlāzohkamati is home to Kilk-mire’s most gifted bonecarvers, relic weavers, funerary sculptors, and glyphsmiths. Streets are paved with mosaic bones. Buildings sing with etched runes that hum in unison, casting ever-shifting spectral murals of past monarchs, slain beasts, and ancestral gods.
Bonecrafting is not merely functional here—it is art, reverence, and devotion. Jewelry made from saint-skulls, armor lacquered in marrow-sap, instruments carved from phalanges—all are created in open plazas where artisans chant while working. The Xicohtēcatl Guilds regulate quality, ritual, and symbolic purity, ensuring that no piece dishonors the dead.
Every creation made here must first be "awakened" through a rite in the Tlāzohkamati Furnace, a massive braziery that melts away impurities in both spirit and form. Many citizens make pilgrimage to this district not to purchase—but to bury offerings of failed art in the Shame Gardens, where thorned vines absorb regret and replace it with creative rebirth.
9. Mictēcacihuālcalli (“House of the Lady of the Dead”) — Ritual & Spirit Conclave District)
Named for the goddess Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Underworld, this district serves as the spiritual nexus of Kilk-mire’s priesthood. Cloaked in eternal dusk via a magical veil of twilight, Mictēcacihuālcalli is a place where the living commune with the divine dead. Massive ceremonial ziggurats are covered in death-flowers and blood-marble, surrounded by canals that ferry urns of spirit-ashes to and from the lower sanctums.
Every dusk, priests and soul-chroniclers conduct necro-litanies, singing to the dead whose skulls rest in the Thousand-Eyed Wall, a great serpentine mural of chattering crania. Incense made from powdered phylacteries fills the air, carrying prayers between realms. Beneath the ziggurats lies the Dream-Hive, a sprawling subterranean chamber of spectral cocoons where mediums sleep, dreaming messages from those lost or unrisen.
This district is the heart of death-as-religion, housing orders like the Yohualli-Sibyls and Teonanacatl Seers, who ingest embalming fungi to glimpse truths hidden to the waking eye.
10. Nacazxōchpan-Tlālli (“Land of Ear Flowers”) — Education, Lore, and Research District)
A contradiction of softness within stone, this verdant necromantic academy district is named for the Ear Flower, a poetic Nahuatl term associated with listening, wisdom, and memory. The buildings here—vaulted bone-halls, crystalline ziggurats, and fungal observatories—are grown or summoned rather than built, shaped by necro-druids and bone-gardeners.
Here stands the Codexum of the Hollow Tongue, the grand academy where acolytes are trained in fields such as soul-binding logic, curse mathematics, and resurrection jurisprudence. Animated chalk writes autonomously on bloodstone tablets. Disembodied professors lecture through humming skulls suspended in green stasis-jars.
The scholars of this district, known as the Tlāltikauhpilli, maintain the Grand Necrolexicon—an evolving ossuary-library of every known necromantic rite, including those banned or long forgotten. The entire district is considered sentient; when intruders or heretics enter without permission, the walls shift and maze them into eternal confusion.
11. Tlāzolli-Panōtl (“River of Filth”) — Infrastructure & Waste Reclamation District)
Beneath Kilk-mire’s grandeur lies the dark, sinew-veined arteries of Tlāzolli-Panōtl. This is where the byproducts of undeath are processed—withered marrow, spent soul residues, failed conjurations, corrupted husks, and fleshblight run-off. The district is crisscrossed by rivers of glowing sludge, funneled through bio-filtration gardens and necrotic lichen fields tended by the Cuitlāchtli, a caste of disease-immune workers stitched together from various species.
Despite its grotesque function, Tlāzolli-Panōtl is an engineering marvel. The entire sewage and ley-drainage system of the city is centralized here, powered by geothermal corpse-reactors and siphoned through the Nine Maw Drainwells—gigantic fleshy pits that belch reek and power in equal measure. Nothing is wasted; refuse is alchemized into fertilizer, bone slurry, spirit ink, or embalming base fluids.
Only the most iron-willed or damned serve here, but they are respected. Their mantra: “From filth comes function.” Their patron god is Tlazōlteōtl, eater of rot and absolver of waste.
12. Tlamikizpan-Tlatepētl (“Mountain of Quiet Sacrifice”) — The Forbidden Zone / Throne Tomb)
Not officially recognized in most civic records, Tlamikizpan-Tlatepētl is a sealed zone beyond the limits of the city’s necro-cartography. It is an artificially raised earthen necromantic mesa, accessible only through hidden catacombs that wind for leagues beneath the main city. It is said to house the original corpse of the first queen, buried alive upon achieving godhood, her heartbeat stilled by her own command.
No one enters the tomb and returns unchanged. The air is static. Time dilates. Some say the bones of fallen cities are embedded in the walls here, screaming silently through vein-carved fossils. A single black pyramid crowned in eternal eclipse rises at its center, and there the Obsidian Choir resides—twelve mouthless figures who have never moved, yet whisper to the queen in dreams.
Many believe Tlamikizpan-Tlatepētl is Kilk-mire’s failsafe. A last rite. A divine anchor to ensure that if the city ever falls, the throne-tomb will rise and consume all that defied it.
THE LIVING TOMBS OF HEXTOR
The Ossuary Dominion’s Necrobiotic Architecture
In Hextor, cities are not built. They are grown, sung, and summoned from bone and breathless clay, shaped by the sorceries of those who treat death not as an ending but as a material. In this empire of rot and reverence, architecture serves as liturgy. Every wall, every tower, every moaning archway is a stilled hymn to the dead and a blossoming of posthumous divinity.
Temples curl like vertebrae turned skyward. Homes are cradled in the ribcages of behemoths. Even the roads are etched with marrow-script, where the passage of a footstep murmurs prayers to gods no longer living, and perhaps never dead.
MATERIALS: THE SACRED TRIAD OF CONSTRUCTION
1. Tecuiztli-stone
Pale as a cadaver’s smile, this limestone is quarried from cliffside necrotic veins. Veined with fossilized marrow and fed on the ambient miasma of Hextor’s breathless marshes, it drinks in enchantment like bone drinks rot. It is often etched with mortuary sigils, inlaid with powdered obsidian or glimmering fungal spores that pulse faintly at dusk.
2. Caqualo (Warbone)
Bone from titanic warbeasts, long-extinct or bred in cryptic pits, forms the structural skeleton of most buildings. Shaped while still pliant with embalmer's salves, it hardens over time into stone-like permanence. Their fibrous interiors echo with ghostlight, and the bone itself often retains a vestigial memory—windows weep, doors recoil, and walls remember screams.
3. Xacatl-ichani, the Twin Silks
Spider Silk: Harvested from the eight-legged necroweavers that dangle like cathedral chandeliers in the vaulted heights of temple interiors. Their silk is tensile, soul-reactive, and interwoven with incantations that deflect heat and intrusion alike.
Worm Silk: Excreted by the colossal Xolmetl worms, who digest funerary flora and bloom with coffin-pale luminescence. This silk is more fluid in design, used for banners, awnings, and translucent screens that flutter with ancestral breath.
Together, the silks are used to lace bone with breath, forming living membranes, resonant sails, or sinuous bridges that twitch with unseen muscle.
FORM: MESOAMERICAN NECROPOLITAN STYLE
Hextor’s buildings are sculpted in the likeness of ancient funerary pyramids and ossuary shrines, drawing upon Mesoamerican ziggurat geometry—but reimagined through the lens of necromantic biotech.
Step-pyramids rise in staggered fashion, each level more sacred than the last. The uppermost platforms often host open-air altars, where moonlight and soulshine are siphoned into reliquaries of bleeding stone. Instead of painted murals, the walls are adorned with bone mosaics, arranged from vertebrae, mandibles, and ossified flora, telling the glories of Lich-Queens and bone-sung saints.
Columns are rarely straight; instead, they curve and coil like ribcages or constrictor serpents, some grown rather than carved, shaped by ritual grafting and anatomical gardening. These living supports pulse with embalmer’s oil and often bear flesh grafts that shimmer like bronze or bruise.
Bridges and elevated walkways are made from sinew-grown cords, hardened and calcified into bony threads. They twist like dried tendons between towers, pulsating faintly with necrotic sap. Walking across one feels like stepping upon a tightening muscle.
SPIRITUAL FUNCTIONALITY: ANIMATED STRUCTURE
Every structure is animated not only by mortared stone or lashings of bone but by a Phylactery Heart—a grown, alchemically matured node composed of embalmed nerves, still-beating sinew, and crystallized soul-ichor. These organs act as the living cores of buildings. They regulate temperature. They summon warmth to hearths or coolness to crypt-chambers. They remember footsteps and respond to chants.
In the holiest structures, these hearts are sapient. They speak in dreams, leak blood-thoughts into the walls, and defend their sanctity with spectral barbs or bone-marrow fogs.
Anatom-Architects, robed in layers of silk and flayed hide, commune with these hearts. They do not build with tools, but with chant, blood-brush, and vivisection. These priest-builders are surgeons of space, slicing and stitching the city’s body into living harmony.
GLYPHWORK AND NECROMAGIC DESIGN
No part of Hextor is mute. Every brick, lintel, and shrine is inscribed with Nex-Glyphs—sigils carved in bone, sewn in silk, or grown like barnacles from the surface of structures. These glyphs hum with encoded intent:
Glyphs that seal doors until a prayer is spoken.
Glyphs that repel intruders through olfactory hallucinations.
Glyphs that animate statues with ancient reflexes.
The walls murmur. The floors react. Statues reposition themselves when you’re not looking. Entire ossuary corridors bend to accommodate favored guests or collapse to trap intruders.
Even the light is summoned. Torches are replaced with soul-wicks, glowing candles grown from the spirits of the willing dead. Their flicker is not flame, but memory. They whisper lullabies and warnings.
A PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH-ASCENDANT FORM
To raise a tower in Hextor is to give form to blasphemous continuity. Where the mortal world builds for the living, Hextor shapes for the eternal. Walls are not just barriers—they are sarcophagi of moments, petrified breath, tactile metaphors of dominion.
Height is not ambition, but defiance.
Depth is not shelter, but transformation.
Architecture is the autopsy of the divine.
Hextor’s skyline is not proud—it is writhing. Its towers curve like tusks, its palaces bloom like tumors carved from reverence. It is a garden of unlife, cultivated by those who no longer believe in endings.
Its buildings do not decay. They molt.
DOMICILES OF DUST AND DESIGN ⟡
Residential Architecture of the Ossuary Dominion
In Hextor, one does not merely live within four walls. One abides within memory, breathes within bone, and sleeps in the embrace of the necrotic sublime. Homes are not possessions, but extensions of the self, half-grown, half-woven, always alive in some uncanny fashion. They feed on ancestral resonance, bloom with organ-tech, and whisper lullabies to both the living and the long-dead.
The following are the most prominent dwelling types within the capital and its marsh-ringed satellite villages:
Coatlnaamitl – Bone Carousel Homes
“Where the dead dance, the living dream.”
These surreal, spiraling abodes are crafted from the spinal columns of long-dead colossi, shaped into rotating ribcage towers that slowly turn upon themselves, powered by the mycelial tendrils of the Uey-Cozcacuauh fungus—a necro-biological growth that coils around the base like a parasitic vine and metabolizes ambient sorrow into kinetic energy.
Each carousel home is divided into three to five bone-pods, like blooming chambers along the vertebral arc. As the house rotates, each room shifts alignment with the rising or setting moon, channeling different ancestral energies.
For example: The north-facing chamber is where meals are taken, bathed in soul-glow from hanging lantern-blooms.
The east-facing chamber is a meditation hall for communion with familial dead.
The central spinal pod holds the sleeping nest, a hollow sac of stitched sinew swaying with the house's motion.
The rotation is slow—one full revolution every three days—meant to mimic the rhythm of death’s great wheel. This dwelling is favored by philosophers, spirit-weavers, and memory-herders who thrive in fluid temporality.
Tzitzimitl-Calli – Hanging Maw-Homes
These vertical dwellings dangle from the underside of swamp bridges, suspended by spider silk chords and embalmed tendons. They resemble lanterns made of jawbones, often housing entire families in nested gut-chambers. Each home sways slightly with the wind, creaking and crooning like a mother’s hum.
Entrances are tongue-bridges—fleshy vestibules that unfurl and retract as needed. Privacy is enforced not by doors, but by vocal-cords grown into the walls, which echo warnings to intruders or mimic the voices of passed ancestors.
These are most common among the Lowbone Caste, particularly silk-breeders and necro-weavers who maintain the elevated causeways above.
Xipe-Tlapan – Flayed Garden Houses
At first glance, these abodes appear like massive seedpods or cocoons, but closer inspection reveals that their outer skin is a quilt of tanned and inscribed hides—flayed from ritual beasts or donated corpses, treated with preservative oils and animated with low-level sentience.
Each hide bears stories, glyphs, or ancestral dreams, and the house sings to its occupants based on which side the wind touches. Gardens of tooth-flower lilies, funerary kelp, and eye-stalk orchids sprout from the base, nourished by fluids excreted through the stitched seams.
Flayed Garden Houses are alive and moody—if not properly tended to or praised with chants, the hides may tighten in irritation, shrinking space or wailing during sleep.
Mictlan-Coatl – Serpent Womb Homes
Shaped in the image of the undead sky-serpent goddess, these homes are constructed as hollowed serpents coiled in eternally sleeping poses. The exterior scales are fashioned from boneplates engraved with necromantic wards, while the inner walls pulse with worm-silk veins that exude heat.
The "head" chamber often serves as a study or altar space. The "belly" is a communal nest with soft fungal bedding and cloud-flesh draperies. At the tail, there lies a private ossuary, where each resident keeps a personal reliquary of teeth, bones, and preserved memories.
These are considered elite homes—only permitted to those who have earned titles in undeath, such as lichlords, court embalmers, or bonewrights of state.
Yoloxochitl-Huehuetlahtolli – Heart-Bloom Hermitages
Usually isolated in the high bog isles, these are heart-shaped domiciles grown from flesh-wood trees, their walls soft and pulsing, connected to a bio-spiritual lattice that filters grief into spectral nourishment. They are beloved by poet-priests, bone-oracle widows, and those who have lost more than they can carry.
Each hermitage includes:
A chantwell, where sorrow is offered to the mire in melodic lament.
A memory-blossom, a bioengineered plant that extrudes colored petals with impressions of past dreams.
A root-bed, which cradles sleepers and envelopes them in grief-dampening spores during rest.
Few who enter these homes leave unchanged. Some say the hermitages absorb parts of you, or worse—show you the parts that were never yours to begin with.
Final Observations
In Hextor, homes are not static sanctuaries. They are living extensions of ancestral will, organs of a city that breathes through its ghosts, and monuments to the art of decomposition as creation. To dwell within these abodes is to accept the rhythm of slow death, not as a curse, but as a medium of expression—a way to sculpt your very soul into the fabric of the mire.
To die in a house of Hextor is no tragedy.
It is a return to the womb of design.
The Biodomes of Hextor: Wombs of Death and Dominion
“A corpse left to rot is a tragedy. A corpse repurposed into landscape is the dream of civilization.”
—Toxatl the Cartographer of Veins
In the twilight cradle of Hextor, the dominion does not spread outward—it grows inward, blooming in concentric necromantic ecosystems. These are the Biodomes—not enclosed by glass, but spiritually and magically bounded territories, each with its own ecology, sentience, and ideological function. These domains are carved not by nature’s hand, but by the will of Xandera, who scoured her ancient homeland and reformed it from memory, marrow, and myth.
Each Biodome is tethered to a bone-throne node that regulates its metaphysical saturation and ecological laws. They are living reflections of a civilization built on entropy, rebirth, and necromantic industry.
I. Metlapal – The Iron Marshes
“Metal was never meant to rest. It remembers war, even after rust.”
A vast swamp of rust, rot, and mechanical ghosts, Metlapal is the beating heart of Hextor’s militarized corpse-industry. Here, ancient siege engines and titan-sized constructs lie buried in black brine and iron-choked mud—half-submerged, half-awake.
The waters here smell of blood and rust, slick with iron oxide and sacrificial grease.
Animated war machines, animated through soul-glyph circuits, patrol the bogs as sentries.
Fungal moss grows from rifle barrels, while bone-birds nest in artillery shells.
Creatures here—Rust Howlers, Magnetoads, and Iron-Kin Crabs—feed on metallic residue and scrap memory.
The Bonebinders believe Metlapal is where the “War Dream of the Dominion” sleeps—a biome of vigilance, ready to awaken in times of invasion.
II. Itzaltli – The Bone Mire
“Here, the trees remember funerals. Here, the wind blows like breath through ribs.”
A monumental ossuary forest, Itzaltli is where bones grow like wood and ossified trees stand as cathedral-pillars. The very soil is made of marrowdust, and the canopy groans with the sound of calcified leaves shifting.
Every tree in Itzaltli has had an ossuary grafted into its trunk, containing generations of noble dead.
The roots whisper, passing ancestral memories between trees like vein-borne data.
Flora: Toothvine, Phalange Blossoms, and Skullcaps that bloom with white bone petals.
The sky is dim, but constantly lit with pale aura flares released by decaying soulmotes.
Monks come here to meditate, drink marrow sap, and commune with their lineages embedded in the forest. The Bone Mire is not a place of mourning—but of inheritance and skeletal peace.
III. Yolopantli – The Blood Bog
“Blood does not dry here. It steams. It remembers. It stains the air red and feeds the roots with promise.”
Endlessly veiled in crimson mist, Yolopantli is where sacrifice meets saturation. The very water is tinged red, not from blood alone, but from the metaphysical residue of devotion. This is where the greatest rites of offering are performed, and the land has learned to feed upon it.
The air is thick, heavy with the scent of iron, orchids, and warm death.
Sacrificial pits overflow into bog-chalices, slowly forming bloodlotuses—plants that bloom only from violence.
The mists are sentient, and often shape themselves into figures from the victim’s memories before dispersing.
The bog breeds creatures like Sangueleeches, Ritefrogs, and Hollow-Stalkers—entities that only exist during or after sacrifice.
Temples here are grown, not built—formed from fused vertebrae and nerve-root lattices, oozing blood back into the waters to perpetuate the ritual loop.
IV. Tlatecuhtli – The Wraithwood
“A grove that forgets nothing, even those not yet dead.”
A domain of haunted trees, phantasmal moss, and ethereal song, Tlatecuhtli is the interface between death and dreaming. It is a place where the soul lingers after the body—where spirits bloom like epiphytes upon bark and vine.
Ghosts here are not terrifying—they are natural, feral, and sometimes beautiful.
The trees exhale aether pollen, which draws the dead like moths to light.
Phantoms coalesce into moss, giving rise to specter-choked ferns, veilwillows, and wailing orchids.
Those who die here are absorbed into the land, becoming part of the forest’s choral memory.
Wraithwood is sacred to bonepoets, embalmer-priests, and spirit callers. Many come here to feed their soul to the groves willingly, choosing dissolution into eternal landscape rather than rebirth.
V. Function and Faith: The Role of the Biodomes
The Biodomes are not just ecosystems. They are ritual organs of the Dominion. Each biome: Supports a segment of the population, both living and dead.
Hosts sacred rites, resource harvesting, and soul circulation.
Is spiritually patrolled by elemental forces known as the Tzompantli Guardians—necrotic avatars grown from the bones of fallen titans, acting as biome-specific custodians.
Each dome is protected by Geomantic Bone-Altars that regulate magical flux, ensuring the land doesn’t overbloom, collapse, or devour its inhabitants in ecstatic entropy.
VI. Final Invocation of the Biothrones
“Iron remembers blood. Bone remembers time.
Blood remembers hunger. And the spirit never forgets.
These are the domes of our Dominion.
Not built—not planted—but bled into being.
And through them, Xandera breathes us all.”
In Hextor, the world is not terraformed. It is funeraled, exalted, ossified. These biodomes are not just regions—they are the lungs, hearts, and memory-glands of a kingdom built on the divine utility of death.
I. Tlalnelpan – The Blooming Crypt
“Where others bury their dead in silence, we bury ours in blossom.”
A luxuriant necro-rainforest, Tlalnelpan is a vertical jungle of color, known for its sky-hung tombs, root-nurtured bones, and corpse-fed orchids. The dead are not hidden here—they are woven into the canopy, their remains enshrined in flowering vines that sing low hymns when the wind moves.
Massive trees grow from crypt-altars, their trunks fused with ribs and pelvises of sacrificed nobility.
Fleshfruit, vein-gourds, and sap-bleeding figs are harvested by climbing vines tethered to undead pickers.
The air is thick with pollen and spores, many of which induce ancestral visions or mild spiritual ecstasy.
Local fauna includes plumage-skinned jaguars, nectar-drinking bonebats, and chorus frogs whose croaks mimic funeral chants.
Culturally revered as the Garden of Return, Tlalnelpan is where those who died noble deaths are buried and allowed to become part of the cycle of blooming.
II. Cuitlacoatl – The Pearl Marsh
“What drips into the swamp will one day shine from it.”
A dazzling luminous wetland, where algae-choked shallows, iridescent lilies, and spiral mangroves erupt with unnatural vibrance, Cuitlacoatl is the sacred cradle of resurrection and embryonic rebirth. The waters shimmer with necrotic plankton, and mollusks shaped like screaming faces form soul-pearls from ambient grief.
Resurrection pools are scattered throughout, used for semi-rebirth rituals, often resulting in partially alive dreamers or oracle-fishfolk.
Crabs and filter-feeders grow shells made from calcified tears, said to store unspoken confessions.
Fruit-bearing reed towers grow from old mass graves, their pollen sweet and narcotic.
The marshland is traversed by turtle-like beast-barges, used for healing pilgrimages and soul-anointment festivals.
It is the most emotionally reactive of the biodomes—water clarity shifts with the dominant spiritual aura of the community.
III. Xoxopan – The Nectar Necropolis
“Even in death, we still make honey.”
Once a burial field, now a golden-hued jungle basin, Xoxopan is the domain of sacred pollinators, honey-plumed flowers, and flesh-fed fruit trees. The region's ecosystem is driven by magical pollination, maintained by death-bound insect symbiotes and their waxen hives grown in the eye sockets of old gods.
Spinehoney, a luminous, dark-red syrup, is cultivated and eaten to commune with the recently dead.
Bees known as Griefswarmers build their combs in ribcages and hum in harmonic ancestral chants.
Flowers exude hallucinogenic vapor in patterns that correspond with the cycles of undeath.
Locals wear wax-bark armor, often embedded with slumbering larvae that awaken only during combat.
Offerings are regularly made to the Queen of Wings and Bone, a semi-immortal bee-goddess who guards the dead’s messages in suspended nectar cells.
IV. Amayani – The Verdant Veinlands
“The roots here are not roots. They are veins. And this forest has a heartbeat.”
A jungle of vascular trees, whose roots and vines mimic arteries, pulsing gently beneath the moss and silt. Amayani is a sentient forest, aligned with the Leyweb that carries the Dominion’s soul-energy. Every tree is half-flesh, half-wood, and the land listens to the blood that walks it.
Vascular Palms twitch and throb with ley-energy, releasing aether dew every dusk.
Gigantic heartfruit pods swell and burst to scatter new soulseeds into the soil.
The ambient humming of the land matches the tone of the Spine Tower, allowing even distant travelers to feel Xandera’s pulse.
Inhabitants raise sap-fused dwellings that respond to their emotional state.
It is forbidden to spill blood here except by rite—for each drop is absorbed by the land and permanently stored in the Veinlands' song-memory.
V. Tzempohual – The Thousand-Sky Canopy
“They say this forest reaches higher than heaven, and that each leaf is a lost memory waiting to fall.”
A towering jungle plateau where canopy-level cities float on sky-vines, and entire ecosystems exist above the clouds, Tzempohual is the domain of winged beasts, aerial fungi, and sky-wind spirits. The trees stretch for miles, and their upper branches pierce the veil between realms, allowing ghosts and prayers to drift freely.
Home to avian necromancers, who use feathered familiars to carry soul-fragments from battlefield to tomb.
The dominant flora includes sunmoss, sky-thorns, and levitating orchids that blossom with each soulbirth.
The wind itself is ritually harvested by ceremonial kites, woven from the skin of honored dead, to produce Wraithsail Cloth used in elite robes.
Aerial beasts such as plume-serpents, bone-beaked mothbirds, and death-singing parrots are trained to carry messages, toxins, or sacred remains across the dominion.
Those who fall from the canopy are said to become stars, their bones blooming as ghostlilies at the base of the jungle.
Closing Invocation of the Verdant Dead
“We do not only live in the shadow of rot.
We bloom from it, feed on it, rise through it._
For in this realm, even decay dreams of color._
And through every petal, Xandera remembers us.”_
These lush biodomes prove that in Hextor, death is not only a boundary—it is a seed.
A force of memory.
A fertilizer of spirit.
And through rot, the Dominion flourishes.
1. La Boca del Sepulcro (The Mouth of the Sepulcher)
Nestled at the base of a fractured rib-archway in the Ossuary District, this subterranean tavern is carved directly into the jaws of a fossilized leviathan saint. The ceilings drip with condensation that tastes faintly of graveflower. Here, guests drink in near-darkness from skull-carved bowls, and the waitstaff wear death-masks to honor the countless souls buried beneath the floor. A cursed mirror behind the bar is said to show not your reflection, but the last person to mourn you.
2. Los Mil Suspiros (The Thousand Sighs)
This sprawling bonewood inn overlooks the cenote of broken moons. Its balconies are draped in bioluminescent shrouds, and its wind chimes are made from the vertebrae of song-beasts. Each room is tuned to a specific emotion—regret, longing, wrath, tenderness—and dream-spirits are known to nest in the rafters, feeding off guests’ whispered thoughts. The hearth burns black myrrh and glows a soft green. Veterans of the gravelegions drink here to forget... or to remember too clearly.
3. El Cáliz de Xandera (Xandera’s Chalice)
Located near the central spinal tower, this sacred tavern is both an inn and a shrine. Patrons may sip marrow mead beside ossified saints or kneel in booths shaped like open coffins to share secrets with barkeep-priests. Its owner is said to be a revenant chosen directly by Xandera, never seen without a veil and always serving drinks that remember who ordered them. The signature house spirit, Lágrima de Reinas (Tear of Queens), is said to let one taste a moment from their past as if it were happening again.
4. Las Huesas del Mundo (The World’s Bones)
A crumbling inn built within the remains of a toppled sky-giant, its spine forming the rafters, its femurs the booths. Each table rests atop a rune-inscribed bone and offers faint protection from curses… unless someone lies while seated. A crowd favorite among smugglers, spiritmongers, and crypt-thieves, it’s known for its bonefire-roasted fare and Smoke of the Unborn, a sweet, violet drink that briefly allows patrons to hear the voices of children who were never born.
5. El Tezcatlán Eterno (The Eternal Mirrorhall)
Less an inn than a labyrinthine hallucination, this high-end establishment caters to necrosophants, nobles, and the ruinously curious. Every wall is lined with enchanted obsidian mirrors that reflect possible pasts and theoretical futures. To stay here is to be studied. Each guest is assigned a ghostly servant known as a Huecuétl, a time-bound shade who mirrors the guest’s emotions and slowly changes appearance with their choices. Patrons often enter with names… and leave with new ones.
6. La Jarra que Llora (The Weeping Jug)
A humble tavern that clings to the edge of a fungal ravine in the Mire District. It’s known for a giant clay jug behind the bar that weeps brine constantly—believed to be the bottled sorrow of a lich who died begging for love. The saltwater is distilled into their house brew, Dolor Blanco (White Sorrow), which causes involuntary confessions with enough drink. The inn upstairs is cheap, haunted, and dimly lit by fungal lanterns that feed on ambient grief.
