The Red Shift

You wouldn’t know of it if you lived in Akara and never once set foot in the World Torn Apart. You wouldn’t know that between the realms of the living and the ever-sleeping dead there is a place where light is all there is; light that is red, crimson, the sanguine of blood or the oranges of fire, light so distinctive that you’d know it only if you were a scavenger in true for this is the light of shardstones.

Behold the Red Shift. 

The air smells of blood, copper, and that unplaceable odor that invokers acquaint themselves with by their shardwork. In your ears there is a sound utterly foreign to Akarans, a static or noise that drones on and on and on. Touch a flower bloomed from red lumes and it feels like petals, moves as buds should, and waves on a wind that does not blow. A mist descends from the sky and falls over all this silhouetted land and in it you see the white-flame reverberations of those thought dead and your mind in its bewilderment calls out to these phantasmagoric should-not-be’s.

They never answer. Your chest hurts. You think you are bleeding, but you are not; you remember being stabbed, being run through by some rival’s spear, or mayhaps blasted by a sentinel’s shardlight ray, but that pain is as distant an echo as those voices you catch now screaming something that might be your name or mayhaps someone else’s. 

You wouldn’t know of it if you lived in Akara, but those who walk Torn’s sunless roads are well acquainted with this Red Shift. They know where they go when they lie savaged in the orange grasses; they know that here they can find another chance at life for here in the Red Shift, somewhere between weal and woe, yes, here hope can still be found.

Learn more about the Red Shift, and a new way for dying scavengers to succeed against all odds in our 2022 Kickstarter: Torn & Beyond!