THE WITHERED LAND: AN INDEX TO AN ALIEN WORLD

The Withered Land: Index to an Alien World

Readers have asked for more detail about the planet Teshiwahur, also known as "The Withered Land", and suggested that it might be a good idea for me to create the equivalent of a FAQ about this distant alien world. From whether or not the Withered Land is an actual physical place in Space and Time to "How large is the planet Teshiwahur?" to "What Races Make Up the Population of the Planet?", this INDEX is an attempt to respond to some of those requests...

These are some of the BASIC things you need to know about the most mysterious and dangerous place in the universe.

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Light-years distant from planet Earth and its solar system, something horrible happened, a cosmic calamity that defied the rules of Reality, something totally contrary to Newtonian and Einsteinian physics..., the people populating the massive fourth planet in a distant solar system of seven planets called that catastrophe "the Long Death". The event created a huge rent, a tear, in the deepness of the sky, literally a hole in space. The people of that massive fourth planet in a distant solar system of seven worlds had named the slash in the universe, "The Wound".

Whole species of plants and animals died within weeks. The polar caps shifted. Weather changed calamitously and regions, in some cases continents, became uninhabitable. The economy of the star-spanning confederation collapsed even as hundreds of millions of its citizens died before the viral and chemo-biological onslaught of new diseases.

And then, wondrously, mysteriously, the land would heal. But it was only a cosmetic healing -- beneath the fading wounds of the repaired soil, something leprous and corrupted took root and grew...

The laws of physics changed... Complex machine technology that once worked flawlessly, suddenly stopped working at all. Gravity suddenly became uncertain, and in some places there were anti-gravity vortices where entire cities had unexpectedly spun off from their planetary surfaces into the cold depths of space. Earthquakes happened more frequently, were far larger than ever before, and occurred in places unused to quakes resulting in devastating, often fatal, after-effects. In some places, Time itself had broken and Relativity had already begun to hopelessly hemorrhage through open interdimensional wounds that acted as doorways for alien monstrosities.

The planet, known to its inhabitants as "Teshiwahur", which means "Kingdom of Dust", became known to a few select Earth-humans in clandestine, government astrophysics agencies as "Brimstone".

But, even amongst its own population, that world was mainly referred to as "The Withered Land".

And it is here that the saga of the renegade, dragon-riding Knight named D'Spayr begins...

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TESHIWAHUR is located in a reflection nebula* inside the Perseus Constellation some 230 Parsecs, (or 750 light-years) from planet Earth. The galactic plane (The galactic plane is the plane in which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles) of the Milky Way passes through Perseus, whose brightest star is the yellow-white supergiant Alpha Persei (also called Mirfak or Mirphak). The best-known star in the constellation, however, is Algol (Beta Persei), linked with ominous legends because of its variability, which is noticeable to the naked eye.

*A reflection nebula is a cloud of gas and dust which does not create its own light, but instead shines by reflecting the light from nearby stars.