Hades Badlands

The Hades Badlands are a hostile and unforgiving piece of Hell right in the middle of Anapat.

The Badlands are commonly referred to as “the desert”, but they are not dry: the winds from the Mairmaid Sea bring clouds and rain in abundance. What it has in common with a desert is desolation: the land is almost devoid of fertile soil, a landscape of clayish hills, sandy dunes, and occasional rocks. The frequent precipitations soak the ground and turn it into mud and puddles. The only vegetation is grass growing in shaggy patches and some timid shrubs.

But what stands out in this nothingness are the Black Cubes (Khoranardik): these objects of an unidentifiable mineral are everywhere and can be as huge as a castle or sit in the palm of your hand.

The Scriptures don’t describe Hades when it was one of the otherwordly realms, but they mention the cubes. They were very special prisons for the Abstract Gods that ruled the Astral Planes, that, as the giants and other beings, tried to subvert the Demiurge’s rightful order. To keep those traitors at bay Belphagor, Lord of Inetria, devised this material able to radiate “uncreation”. Everything put near the cubes would cease to exist and also would be forgotten, with some of their action retroactively erased from history. The Abstract God, due to their divine nature could not be completely “erased” but the cubes would prevent any action on their part: everything they would do would have never been done in the first place.

It’s unclear what is the exact relationship between the Black Cubes and their “counterparts” described in the Scriptures, as the effect of the Collapse on them remains enigmatic.

Reality warps the Mana Field and magic is the ability to make the Mana Field warp reality instead.

The Black Cubes are continually casting magic, but they don’t perturb the Mana Field to change reality, they “flatten” it to erase everything.

Each cube has a different intensity and acts on a specific mana color.

For example, a Cube that acts on the Yellow Mana of Form will progressively dissolve anything into a shapeless ooze. This effect can take minutes or days, depending on the Cube.

The area and intensity of the Cubes’ effects are unrelated to their size, position, color, or any characteristic. After centuries of trials and errors, minotaur guides, the Voronoi, have created maps to travel into the Hades Badlands: there are “safe” paths where the Cubes exert the least influence. They are often counterintuitive and go against natural obstacles, with unexpected turns in open fields or obligatory passages over rocky hills. These paths are known as “the Invisible Maze”.

It is unwise to stay too much in Hades Badlands since the effects of the cubes can be only avoided to a point and are only partially reversible.

Nonetheless, many wizards and scholars adventure inside the Badlands trying to unlock its secrets, sometimes trying to open the cubes to find what is inside them. Some deluded madmen hope to find the Abstract Gods and get their divine spark.

The Black Cubes of the Hades Badlands are a hazard and also a resource. The “erasing effect” of the strange solids is used to create materials with unique proprieties and to put people in special conditions. This is one of the main reasons to venture inside the “desert” and, despite the careful mapping of the Voronoi guides, it is still a dangerous envious that can scar someone for life, both body and mind.
The effects depend on what color of mana a Cube influences: they affect first surfaces and extremities. Once something leaves the Badlands it will gradually go back to normal, but this process can take years and never be fully complete.
Even if all the cubes have similar shades of dark grey, they sometimes are referred to as the color of the mana they influence.

Red cubes — Substance
Near these cubes, matter starts to disappear. People will develop patches of invisible skin that become less and less solid to the point of intangibility. Anything that stays long enough near a Red Cube will eventually disappear into thin air.
Objects are left near these cubes to make them light and translucent: wool clothes can become as delicate as gossamer, and wooden planks become partially transpiring and transparent, so to be used in place of widow pane in some buildings.

Yellow Cubes — Form
Near these cubes, things become shapeless. People will have their skin “melting” and eventually fat, muscle and bones will turn to ooze (and some will survive for a horrifically long time). The first thing to fade away is designs and drawings and books will become quickly unreadable. Putting metal near these cubes will cause a “cold melting” that makes casting exotic alloys possible.

Green Cubes — Vitality
Living things will suffer if in proximity to these cubes. At first, it will be a general malaise, then a sort of lethargy will kick in, and that will turn into a coma and, ultimately, in a total biological stasis. Some very ill people are deliberately left in stasis until a cure for their ailments is found.

Magenta Cubes — Cognisance
As the “mind mana” is flattened people will become more and more forgetful as things around them will be erased from their minds. The more one is exposed, the more the memory will be canceled, until skills and personality are lost. Eventually, those who are affected by these cubes will regress into an animal-like state and, in the end, a vegetative state. Magenta Cubes are sometimes used as a last resort to cure mental illnesses.

Cyan Cubes — Spatiality.
These cubes erase dimensions: things will become flatter and flatter, eventually becoming bidimensional and vanishing into monodimensional lines. In the Hades Badlands, one could meet “living shadows”, living beings surviving in pain before the spatial distortion kills them.
Sense of orienteering and balance is also affected, causing constant and ever-increasing vertigo.
Weaponsmiths will leave blades near these cubes to obtain incredibly thin and sharp edges, able to cut through almost anything.

Indigo Cubes — Metaphysics.
Indigo mana is the color that affects and it’s affected by other mana more than any specific aspect of reality. Near these cubes is therefore basically impossible to cast magic, magical objects become mundane, curses are broken, golems stop working, etc. It is, in a way, the ultimate anti-magic. A prolonged exposure can compromise the relationship with magic causing any spell that targets or is cast by the subject to have unexpected and random effects.