#yes i'm an archaeologist yes i think way too much about what remains. especially stone and ceramics. especially buried ruins and how

[goldentangerines]

Happy WBW!

🏛️ - Does your world have old buildings? Ruins?

happy belated worldbuilding wednesday :-)

and on god i love this question so muchhhh you have NO idea!! i'm an archaeologist so of course asja's world has to have some ruins, mostly based on real-life archaeology facts and observations i made across two continents over the past 3 years. here's whose ruins, and why they're ruins:

three thousand years before asja's time, the people living on the continent were different, more diverse. merpeople, witches, more kelpies and pixies and other fae, more non-human folks. queen lyeann and her healer caleides have just become legends, the fields are thrumming with magic, the sky burns red at sunset.

and then, the wrong humans with more influence than most of them are forced to face the harsh reality — that living in a magic world is hard for the non-magic people. that dying is easier and quicker as they thought. and they won't stand for it. so magic has to go. and it does, at first.

towers fall, castles are abandoned. the crypt where queen lyeann lies amidst her flowered chapel is sealed off and buried, a new temple erected directly atop of it — to make use of the religious mysteries for a new cult. the palace of the god of the hill lies in ruins and slowly vanishes under rolling, lush meadows, the entrances never to be found again. the ruins of the glasswalker's keep on sillave, thmai, more intricate and precious than any human castle could ever be, are still interlaced with the glasswalker's magic woven through it, slowly changing over time — plants grow faster there, children age slower, animals never set foot into it for fear of an untimely death. the rulers of sillave built a school in the keep's bone-white ruins, with stairs winding on the outside of the fallen towers like bracelets, barely-aging child-scholars scurrying about.

but the old ways are coming back, now. at last, humans have bitten the hand that feeds them: for centuries, most witches have helped them (or at least, not opposed them) in their task to end the use of magic, foolishly thinking they'd be excempt from the humans' verdict. when there were barely any common enemies, witches became the new target. and now, they're almost as extinct as glasswalkers and faeries. humans have forgotten that witches used to be the only thing standing between them and the magic beings they tried to eradicate, and exactly these decimated species are making a comeback, and noone's powerful enough to stop them on their way towards emperors and queens alike.

and the scattered ruins will shine and rise again, one way or another.