The world of Psedhara is vast and chaotic, but on a standard day, the wind wills itself to move through the world with ease, just like anywhere else. Everyone knows though, that even in its unpredictability, the wind doesn’t move without purpose. It changes landscapes, beats against high stone walls, and guides us all on the paths we’re destined to find for ourselves. It’s a tricky thing, to both forge destiny and allow people to find it for themselves, but the winds of Psedhara have their way.
It has always been this way in Psedhara. Long ago, when the great Worldbuilder sought to bring the land from the vast nothing that preceded it, they introduced sixteen deities to create and oversee sentient life in the world, but unlike you might expect, this oversight was limited. According to all the literature regarding Psedharan cosmological history, once the divine entities chose their domains and created their peoples, their actual influence over those people became as miniscule as a king’s rule over his subjects. In some ways, these gods aren’t much more powerful than people; but the world itself was, and is, a different story. The physical things that people interact with are all suffused with the domain of some vast, incalculable entity in one way or another, but Psedhara has always been and will always be just as much the property of the people as it is of the gods.
In a dead language, Psedhara roughly translates to “chaos brought together creates the world”. There’s a lot of merit to that idea; on a metaphysical level, everything seems so isolated, but we also must admit that it’s all connected, too. All woven together into a single tapestry, a single song with a rhythm that makes sense. And to what degree Psedhara seems impossible to control, its parts do come together, and its people do find ways to take the reins. To convince others to be good, to hold true magic in their hands, and to bend the wind to their will. To achieve truly great things in spite of their isolated beginnings, or to connect with the world in ways they never thought they could, depending on their wont.
The planet of Psedhara is fairly young in the grand scheme of things, only just ten thousand years old, with the gods' people having occupied it for less than half that time, but the people haven’t changed all throughout that history. Strong-willed, ambitious, and diverse people and civilizations dot the half-dozen continents on the Material Plane, and just like the wind, they all come from somewhere, and they’re all going somewhere. A world in motion stays in motion, after all, and Psedhara has never been known for being stagnant. A sun, called Nera, keeps the turning of the world on beat, while three moons — Ganymede, Callisto, and Io — revolve around the planet in their own time. The four seasons are split evenly among twelve months, each being five weeks, or twenty-five days in length, and it has been that way since the first gnomes decided to keep track of it. For all its chaos, many aspects of Psedhara are quite neat in reality; the people might consider that more if they weren’t so busy with everything else. But the winds push and pull people along. No one has an unlimited amount of time, and while some have more than others, a ticking clock turns into passion and drive in anyone who would bother to watch it.
On the 13th of the first month of the year, Taluum, in the year 829 After Unification, a gale made its way across the Outer Planes, into the nexus of the Elemental Planes, and finally to the Material Plane to find its focus. Down, down from the clouds above, over the grain fields of eastern Matryoshka, the wind wisped around the singular high peak of Celeste Mountain and shot down through a little trade-post town called Traverse. The town is home to a host of farmers, apiarists, and small-business owners who support the traders who make their way into town on their way north, south, east, and west. That day, the wind picked up the subtle scents of honeycakes and lavender from market stands, and lazily swept itself even further south to at last reach its intended destination.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Just off the road, hidden behind a rock formation in a canvas bedroll lined in wool, lay a young human man. The sun had woken him half an hour ago, but the chill of an early spring morning with only a dead fire beside him had made the man reluctant to rise. Curly and soft sun-kissed brown hair poked out from the canvas, and when he eventually stretched to get himself moving, the breeze brought the familiar scents of home to his nose. He couldn’t have been more than two dozen miles from Traverse, having elected not to stop by on his way south from the monastery at the foot of Celeste, but there was no way that he was really smelling what he was smelling. Just a phantom his mind tricked him with, to remind him of home, and of good tea, which would never fail to get him to start his day. So he reached his hands up high into the air, fingers interlaced, and felt the breeze on his bare chest, a delicacy which he loved treating himself to recently.
As he started his day, taking the time to put on his clothes, rekindle the fire, and fill his tea pot, the man felt incredibly tranquil, more so than even was normal. He always had a sense of serenity around him, even as a kid, but especially after his plentiful years of meditation and quiet reflection. It was that peace that had given him his name, in fact; Pax. As Pax began to steep his tea leaves in the pot, and wandered around the nearby grassland to find something else particular to add to it, he reflected a little more on the breeze that had woken him up. It was perhaps the first truly warm wind of the year, and the memories it had brought with it stuck with him beyond the defogging of his mind after waking. Pax sighed to himself as he thought about having purposefully dodged the town on his trip here, but he knew it wasn’t quite time to go back yet. And furthermore, he didn’t want to. There was something vaguely threatening about returning to your loved ones after having changed significantly. Pax felt like a scholar returning to the family home from his first semester of studies, although an academic he certainly was not. Family and friends would still recognize him as the same person and love him just as dearly, this he had no doubts of, but it was still intimidating to be someone else in the face of people who had stayed more stagnant than you.
Amidst all these thoughts, a smile crept onto Pax’s face as he found a few sprigs of lavender. He quietly jogged back to his fire, where the tea pot was whistling happily, waiting for his return. In practiced movements, Pax moved the pot off the flame, placed the lavender in the liquid with his personal mix of green and black leaves, stirred for a half minute, and poured the tea into his large, circular ceramic mug, the one with the letters "PGP" signed on the handle. Thinking a little further to himself that the wind signified something, Pax took out a small vial of honey that he kept for special occasions, and eased half of it into the mug.
As Pax muddled the sweetener into his tea, he sat back down on his bedroll and smiled. He loved moments like this, where the world was calm, and quiet, and good. Those moments never lasted forever, but unlike some people would have you believe, Pax knew the truth that they did always come. Eventually. So he drank his tea, thought of his mother and sister, and enjoyed the moment until it was time for it to end.
"Pax," he said to himself, standing up, as if affirming the name. "Okay, time to get moving." As he packed up, the light of the morning reflected in Pax's golden eyes, and on the colorless wind, giving it true form if only for a moment, a form which would carry him forward, forward to his destiny; the one meant for him, and the one he would make.