These are self-contained worldbuilding excerpts from my Nanowrimo project, Reaper.

The Order of Propriety denoted duty with hands shaped into their ornate helms: the Seekers had covered mouths but opened minds, the Watchers were deaf but felt fate itself, and of course the Fury—blind to the world and their own death—were the most feared warriors in the Reach.

Meje Anathasa Silvaire, Third Blade of the Imperium, felt her heart beat for the third time today as she pulled her scythe through the man that had just killed her.

With such power, her wounds would heal within the span of a breath. It didn’t matter, though. The white-masked figure’s scythe continued its spin through Anathasa’s chest, severing her dagger from her heart. A body could not heal once a reaper claimed its souls.

Nivilai had even perfected the art of taking a nap while standing—the house adepts simply had to stand behind the Patriarch with their heads bowed while all the pomp and circumstance unfolded, and what was the point of having a hooded robe if not to hide one’s sleeping eyes?

“Emperor-elect Gian Kemyas II thanks House Berenjal for their loyalty,” the messenger said. Nivilai could have sworn it was just Gian Kemyas I last year. “And of course, for House Berenjal’s tribute in souls. The emperor-elect will be pleased with these twenty.”

The golden sun still hung four fingers above the southwest horizon. How was there so much day left? The Kemyas entourage had arrived while the sun had peaked high in the south, and the ceremony was so long it felt like it had aged Nivilai to her twentieth birthday.

Aside from the simplicity and separation from the main palace, nothing marked the reaper annex as unique among all the other Berenjal buildings aside from a simple sigil of a heart pierced by a dagger: the phylactery. Nivilai thought it looked more like a bean being bisected.

It was easy to forget the man’s heart was pierced almost a century ago, freezing his body in its prime and healing all the scars and ailments that came after. “The arena. Thirty minutes. Your scythes don’t grow themselves.”

A reaper’s dueling harness wasn’t meant to protect from the scythe as honed voidmetal could cut through almost anything with the same force it took to cut through a pound of flesh. They were, however, significantly easier to move in than ceremonial dress.

Meje Viur Kraval, at least according to the mosaic, was a broad man with dark skin and a strong jaw. Most striking about the mosaic were the eyes: they were set with citrine, and while the other mosaics so too had gemstone eyes, Meje Kraval’s were aflame under the golden gun.

Oummi finished lighting the last crystal and gestured for both adepts to the center of the arena.

“Salute.”

The adepts held their respective scythes first to the side in attention, then simultaneously swept their blades behind themselves. They bowed to each other.

“Approach.”

Nivilai slapped her blade against Ranja’s. As blunted metal clanged against blunted metal, Oummi pulled his hand into a fist. The muted grey ghostlight dominating the room flared into cascades of silver, like moonlight reflecting off a lake but with a thousandfold intensity.

“No,” Oummi said. “When two duelists with disparate masses of souls step beyond the Veil, only one vessel comes back. Mortals cannot see what reapers do this side of the Veil besides flickers of ghostlight. So who is to say how honorable the fight was besides the winner?”

All things considered, a scythe is one of the most awkward weapons to use in a normal (for some definition of normal) duel to the death; however, reaping a soul requires not only cutting the soul from its seat, but pulling it into a phylactery lest it dissipate outside the body.

The world of Mendasan is the second planet orbiting a small orange sun. In the grand scheme of the galaxy, it is not notable—for as time goes to billions, most moons become locked to their parent and so too do planets become locked to their star. Mendasan is no different.

Outside the terminator is not a story of humanity: we are too fragile for these extremes, and so we must stay where the sun is shallow and the land is red, and where the great rivers travel from dark to light and carve deep valleys wherein we can hide from the scouring winds.

The young man was also dressed in Kemyas green dueling robes and wore a jade mask carved into an eju’s gaping maw. Curiously, his entire face—soft cheeks and softer nose, icy eyes, and a slight frown—was visible as his mask only encircled the sides of his head.

Receiving a sliver of soul felt like being caught in the wind plains and getting hit by a full grown binye tree’s 10ft scale at 100mph, like every bone crushed to fine pulp, like every vein filled with fire. Then it passed and Nivilai was just aware of how sweaty she had gotten.

Historical record indicates that practice of covering one’s facial birthmarks with a mask started around 1500 years ago, and prior art even suggest that such birthmarks were rare before then. It is not lost that the Veil was first breached around this time, as well.

Kadjasi are strong, and though they have a rich history of plow and milk and meat, they have just as rich a history of walking into the rivers laden with goods with no one able to stop them, as well as stubbornly refusing to drive even a few miles from where they were spawned.

The most prominent life above the canyons on the scoured surface are the binye trees: spires that reach from ground to sky for hundreds—sometimes thousands—of yards, covered in black and red airfoil scales that drink the sun and protect the main body from the wind and debris.

The deck was a mess of activity centered around the two dozen or so kadu that would be driving the barge upstream. The lead rider was checking his mount’s yoke, while another keeper was throwing clouds of pulverized grain at some of the kadu waving their feeding gills about.

The gallery was not large, but its four walls all featured windows so broad and so clear that Nivilai thought she’d stepped outside for a moment. She’d only ever seen colored glass in vases and small, distorted panes.

Of course, Nivilai’s first thought was to touch the window.

In the late indigo light, the masses of kadjasi were hard to make out as individual silhouettes in the mud. One of the kadjasi shifted aroudn in the pile, getting as far as pulling its first four limbs over another then giving up and lying back down to sleep.

The ravine walls were 3–4 miles high, yet the chasm had been carved so wide by the River Jandu that Nivilai wouldn’t have guessed that they were any taller than the Berenjal valley’s. The river itself could have been mistaken for a lake if not for churning whitewater.

On the third day, the barge happened to pass a school of salmon making their way upstream. The crew had a specific winch and powder-launched harpoon on deck for reeling in the powerful fish that swam the great river, and they had managed to catch four of the gigantic creatures.

Nivilai’s ceremonial robes split only from neck to navel, and somehow, the Berenjal tailors had fit fifteen steel clasps that, as far as the adept was concerned, required a deep understanding of celestial mechanics to tighten and close.

“Oh yeah, kadu are incredible—those big wings aren’t for nothing. Same for all those gills. Makes it real easy for them to figure out which way the gusts are going and to get lift without having to flap so furiously like all the bugs and bats we got down here in the ravines.”

With easy to traverse water and such high cliffs, the city that formed along the Ryngsinoya thrives along manifold layers of strata, growing denser and denser until finally reaching the Imperial Palace on the nightward edge of the river’s source lake.

The tall vaulted ceilings and the exterior walls of the imperial temple were made of impossibly large slabs of clear quartz set into an irregular iron lattice, allowing the golden midday sun to filter into the ziggurat.