The Mourning

Fifteen hundred years ago something took the whole of the south. Every city, every road, everyone standing on any of it. Nobody on this continent disputes that it happened, and every account of this world begins on the other side of it.

There is no account of the Mourning itself. There never has been. Not a survivor, not a witness, not one page written by anybody who stood in it. What there is instead is a great many people who were somewhere else that day, and what they saw from where they were standing.

This episode is one of them. His name was Cratten. He was a sailor and a captain, and on the worst day in the history of this continent he was three weeks out from a harbor he had spent his whole life being glad to leave.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Tom

Tom is the creator of Calythera. He is a co-founder of Arcane Anvil, and has spent the last several years building a world that runs on pressure instead of magic.

What is Calythera?

Fifteen hundred years ago, something broke the world. Nobody living remembers it and the record does not explain it.

What stands now was built afterward, by people who had nothing and started anyway. Their cities still run. The machines still turn. The work of keeping it that way falls to people whose names nobody bothers to learn.

Calythera is a walk through that world, one piece at a time. Not a game, not a campaign. Just a place that shouldn't still be standing, and the people who make sure it is.

The cover art and music for this show are AI-generated.