ISHANYA
World-Treader Ishanya is, by all measures and to all who know her, one of the archetypical scavengers: a far-sayer whose adventures themselves have defined our map of Torn and too blazed the first trails many of us scavengers now follow. For all that skill, talent, and achievement, Ishanya’s personal life is an enigma, and those who have worked with her speak not of a woman emblematic of Akaran virtue but instead an apex predator who does as we ought to.
Do not think Ishanya a kind woman. Read the recordings of her journeys in SCAVENGER: Nomads of Uncharted Worlds and see her attitude towards her companions. Mayhaps Ishanya has always been this way; cold, thinking of those in her ring not as friends or comrades but as resources to be managed and judged solely by their competence and ability to perform. Few wonder if this might be affliction — mental degradation originless as we know it but always does it shadow some scavenger’s unexpected and meteoric rise.
But Ishanya does not have the red-on-black eyes, nor the paled skin, nor the thick, ichorous blood of the afflicted. Over the twenty years she has been scavenging, she has aged but she has not grown old nor is she warp-scarred. Ever more spry, Ishanya. Ever stronger too. When scavengers meet Ishanya now they find her not with another ring, and on no expedition save a globetrot for personal pleasure. In a world filled with Impossibilities that can rewrite reality, a horde of scren that could swallow half a continent, and countless phenomena that would sterilize Akara in a month’s time, this feat alone grants Ishanya her World-Treader title.
She is not the only one to wear this name. The honor of the World-Treader is shared by scavengers who are the architects of sweeping discoveries that forever change life in Akara. Pannor and his Jade Ring, who were the first to circle the Core City Ruins and return; Samua & the Rudthar, discovers of not just the Samua Marshes but too the four inert Monoliths littering Torn; the Obsidian Yog, the last surviving member of a scavenger ring that first traveled deep through the Sea of Myst, discovered the Roads Through the Myst and the Ringmaze Isles and the Tornbloods too — this is the hall of fame for the Scavenger Rings, and Ishanya is only the latest to join it.
If you were to search out Ishanya and find her somewhere in Torn, you could ask her how she has found such success where only so few have before. Sitting across the crackling fire, the sunless sky streaked in magenta and cobalt and gold by the Sea of Myst and light raining in little spirals toy-like from the mirage-pregnant clouds, Ishanya will say that she has become Hyper-Real.
It is not a term native to Akara. The Covenant did not invent it, nor have the Tornbloods sung of it. It is the Entity who has whispered this name to her, and too that Entity, who exists only in the dreams and visions and omens of the Redshift, has named this the first of six Radiant Evolutions. Because of this evolution, Ishanya proclaims, she is aware. Every variant of herself across every version of Torn that could ever exist along the flat plane she calls time is aware of her as their center, their nexus, and in this way she is not just one Ishanya but an infinity of them, and in this way too she names herself unmatched.
At this point, a scavenger ring sharing this story might scoff, snort, clearly not believing her. Others will have a hushed reverence about them, as if Ishanya were some idol to be venerated or feared. They may say that they asked Ishanya to speak more of what being Hyper-Real meant. They will say, looking around as if afraid she listened from the orange grasses nearby, that her wounds disappear with a thought, and that her body never ages more than a year past her apotheosis, and that she can learn the skills of every Ishanya and thus is a scavenger ring numberlessly contained inside a single vessel.
There is a certain class of scavenger who hears this tale and feels their blood run cold. They, in visions and dreams and omens, have heard this thousand-voiced Entity. It has whispered to them, or maybe it has kneaded raw information into their brains, shared secrets of how they might be elevated...how they could better achieve their hopes by evolving...how they could help free the Entity, and free themselves, and free even their loved ones from the suffering and dread and nihilism that so grips them in the shadow of the Great Dying if only they would do this task for it. If only they would do a small thing, easy, almost non-committal.
Some do, and they are never heard from again. Some do, and they tell not a soul what has happened. Some do, and they become as World-Treader Ishanya is, who has walked every place across all of known Torn and whose wisdoms have created the borun tablets we now study for survival.
As the stars have seen, leylehlun, leylehlun
Learn more about Ishanya in our 2022 Kickstarter, Torn & Beyond.
