Old'lye Sludgepit

Place

Place Name:

Old'lye Sludgepit

Biome:

Sludgepit

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

The oil rigs all over Old’lye are what made a city the size of Kehalral-Darka possible. And at some point after the beginning of the Third Era, somebody came and destroyed them all, so that now the oil just gushes everywhere except where it’s supposed to be. This has caused many lakes of sludge to form in Old’lye. Formed from the oil, and the rain, and the chemicals, and the nuclear residue, and everything else, sludge has its uses, such as in dropping on your enemies, but they’re fairly limited compared to the uses oil would have. Speaking again of oil, it is still possible to find actual oil lying around in some pool somewhere in Old’lye.

But it’s much rarer and often not in large quantities. It’s still possible to pump oil out of the places where it was once pumped, but no one really has the technology needed to repair the machinery that was once used to pump the oil in Old’lye. If someone were to come across that technology again, though, undoubtedly they could make a fortune in Old’lye if they didn’t get murdered by kin’tonis while coming here. The subway system of Kehalral-Darka didn’t just span across the city, even though the city was massive. It also went to every one of the dozens of oil rigs, and to the villages in between them.

The zu’aan have forgotten about the subway system, and no longer realize that it exists, but the Estard kin’toni clan is well aware of it, since they live in it. The subway lines are often full of sludge, refuse, and broken subway trains, but the lines are so complex that it’s almost always possible to get around any obstacle you find, if you just know the right paths. The Estard kin’toni have also dug tunnels of their own, further increasing the complexity of this abandoned labyrinth. The lights down here aren’t functional for obvious reasons.

Bring a light if you want to explore — but don’t bring a torch. These tunnels are still full of gaseous fumes; the mostly useless sludge of Old’lye still explodes if you set it on fire. Of course, you may also want to bring your own supply of air to breathe. Breathing gaseous fumes is generally considered unhealthy, and the people who don’t consider it unhealthy are either dead or some specialized kind of kin’toni. (It’s worth mentioning that the Estard kin’toni have neither night vision nor the ability to breathe these fumes and survive. They still bring their own light and air into the more dangerous of these tunnels.

I’m sure that some kin’toni clan somewhere would pay you very handsomely for this information.) Above ground, in Kehalral-Darka itself, the zu’aan are getting along. They’ve begun farming, since, for a sludgepit, Old’lye does have a surprising amount of arable land. Other zu’aan are undertaking the tasks of repairing collapsing buildings in the city, or of attempting to repair the technology which can be found scattered about the city. Few weapons have been discovered, but there are many damaged tools lying abou t, which can be repaired and put to good use. Sometimes even to the use of weapons.

Plants

As might be expected, the vegetation in a land full of sludge is… a bit off. Any part of a plant that grows here that should be green, isn’t. It’s probably a murky greenish-grey instead. Sometimes just grey. The sludge has infiltrated the soil and it’s basically impossible to get the sludge out of the soil without also ruining the soil. The crops grown in Old’lye still manage to grow regardless, helped along by a large amount of fertilizer and lessened amounts of sludge. Never do they look all that healthy, even on days with a bright sun and clear skies, but they do manage to grow, somehow.

Crops are mostly grown on the hills of Old’lye, since those are the places with the least amount of sludge. After a few decades of crop-growing have passed for a particular hill, it starts to look slightly greener than its surroundings — it’s said that you can tell roughly how many harvests a field in Old’lye has had, by how green it is. This particular phenomenon is caused by the plants grown on the hill eating up the sludge in the soil. When the plants are harvested, some of the sludge gets removed from the hill by means of hitching a hike into the food cooked with the harvested plant.

While that’s not a particularly pleasant thought, that is sludge that isn’t going back into the soil, when all the other parts of the harvested plant rot and go back into the ground. Still, even by this process, some of the sludge is converted into healthier materials — but it’s going to take a long time for the whole of Old’lye to turn green again by this process alone. There is one weed that’s willing to help purify Old’lye, though. It’s called the kmisrikia. Unlike what might be implied from the name, Sludgedaisies don’t actually have any flowers.

But they look practically identical to daisies in all other aspects but colour, so perhaps why they were so named. kmisrikia drink up a very large amount of sludge, so much that they tend to turn black. The trick to clearing a field of sludge is this: get some kmisrikia weeds, let them scatter their seeds over the field you want cleaned, let the new weeds grow up in the field, let the weeds spread their seeds, and then uproot the kmisrikia before they rot. Don’t pick them. Uproot them. Then take them far away, because when they decompose, they will decompose into sludge.

(I was going to say, they decompose into almost completely pure sludge, but that’s a bit of an oxymoron. Still, if you throw a kmisrikia into a bucket and wait for it to rot into liquid, ninety percent of the liquid will be sludge that it gathered from the soil.) It’s common practice for new farmers in Old’lye to plant thousands of kmisrikia on their fields before they begin to plant other seeds there. You can tell when it’s about time for other seeds to be planted when the grass on the hill starts looking a little bit green again.

Animals

Sludge isn’t lava, or toxic nuclear waste. You can swim in it if you really want to, and survive, though you might get a strange disease or two in a week. (Still, you should be able to shake those diseases off.) But most people just don’t want to swim in something so disgusting. daavya, however, kind of like it. A daavya is a large, bulky beast, comprised of mostly fat, which explains how they’re able to float so well on sludge when everyone else has trouble swimming in it. When they’re not floating around in sludge, they’re devouring huge tracts of grass.

One daavya can empty a house’s whole yard of grass in a single day, and leave it lifeless dirt. One daavya can decimate a farm of all crops. A group of daavya are the bane of farmers. There are those who hunt daavya, because of their thievery. Unfortunately, daavya are not the placid animals that they seem to be when they’re thoughtfully munching the contents of half your garden or casually floating in a pool of sludge. They’re fierce, and they’re surprisingly quick, considering their bulk — and considering their bulk, you do not want to be charged by one.

The force of a daavya charging is enough to put cracks in the mightiest tree and snap the bones of the mightiest beast. It is naturally also enough to plow through any man-made wall and more than enough to plow through any man-held shield. Add to this purely physical force an astonishingly quick-learning intelligence, and you’ll be hard pressed to slay a daavya without ranged weapons and distractions at the ready. Hard pressed, that is, unless you’re a certain kin’toni farmer named Xenisor Yachrolio. That clanless loner whose lands run along the southern edge of Old’lye drinks daavya blood for breakfast.

He has mastered the art of sneaking up on daavya with his axe in hand, and felling them in a single mighty blow. Either Xenisor is twice as strong as the average kin’toni or his axe is twice as sharp and heavy as the average weapon, because others have tried to replicate his method of getting rid of daavya and failed. Well, not entirely — the daavya usually die afterwards. They just don’t die instantaneously, and have enough time to crush the bones of the men who attacked them. Despite the amount of hunting they suffer, daavya seem to be in no danger of dying out.

There aren’t many other grazing animals in Old’lye to contest their food source, and there aren’t any shortages of female daavya. No one’s ever yet seen a baby daavya. Presumably they’re cute. Hunters have tried for long and in vain to create a recipe that involves daavya meat that isn’t disgusting. The meat and the fat is just so… sludgy. And even if the daavya fed on better, less sludgy foods, it doesn’t seem like it would taste all that much better. The best recipe that the hunters of Old’lye have come up with is a kind of soup with daavya fat in it. Even this isn’t that tasty, at all.

You can’t even make the claim that it’s healthy, because it clearly isn’t.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Estard Kin'toni Clan

Place

Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

Old'lye Sludgepit

Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.