The Sundered Throne
In a world where gods are dead and their divine essence bleeds into the land, you are a mortal caught in the power struggles of demigods and titans. Forge your path through a broken pantheon, where every choice reshapes reality and the line between mortal and divine is yours to cross.
0
Plays
4
Characters
7
Events
📖 Story Backstory
The introduction and setting of the world, including its history.
The world of Aethelgard was once governed by the Celestial Pantheon. A century ago, they turned on each other in the Godswar. Now, their colossal corpses lie across the continents, leaking Divine Essence into the land. This essence mutates geography, births monsters, and grants mortals terrible power. Those who consume or bond with essence become Demigods, Titans, or Abominations. Great cities now cluster around these divine corpses like flies on a carcass, harvesting essence for power, while others worship the corpses as new, silent gods. The old order is gone; the new one is written in blood and ambition.
👥 Characters (4)
Characters in this story. You will choose who to play as when you start.
Kaelen
Protagonist
A former essence-harvester who worked the corpse-fields of the dead God of Cycles. He is pragmatic, cynical, and driven by a deep-seated hunger for agency in a world that grinds mortals to dust. He took the Chalice, not for glory, but because he was tired of being powerless. He now carries a sliver of the God of Cycles' power, which grants him minor precognition and control over temporal momentum.
Lyra
Neutral
A Demigod, daughter of the dead God of Cycles and a mortal oracle. She is the self-proclaimed 'Curator' of her father's corpse and the surrounding lands. Her mind is a fractured tapestry of past, present, and possible futures, making her seem aloof and cryptic. She sees all living things as part of a grand, broken mechanism she is trying to repair.
Gorrik
Neutral
A Titan-forged, a mortal who bonded with divine essence not by drinking it, but by forging it into his very flesh. He leads the 'Anvil Brotherhood,' a militant order that believes the only future is to weaponize essence completely, forge new gods of war, and conquer the corpse-lands to impose a harsh, survivalist order. He sees ascension through drinking as weak and impure.
Sylas
Neutral
A young, terrified essence-harvester from the Ichorflow Basin communes. He is not a fighter but a survivor, possessing an uncanny, almost supernatural luck when it comes to finding rich essence veins and avoiding predators. This 'luck' might be a latent, unconscious essence ability. He witnessed Kaelen's ascension from a distance and views him with a mixture of awe and desperate hope, seeing him as a potential protector in a world that devours the weak.
⚡ Key Events (7)
The First Resonance
In the immediate aftermath of drinking from the Chalice, Kaelen's body convulses with raw power. Visions of possible futures flash before him: a path where he rules a city of light, another where he is a desiccated corpse on a throne of bone, another where he is simply gone. The temple ruins shudder. The resonance of his ascension ripples outwards, acting as a beacon. Lyra, the Curator, materializes from a shimmer in the air, observing him with clinical interest. Simultaneously, the ground trembles with heavy footsteps as Gorrik and his Anvil Brotherhood warriors breach the temple perimeter, drawn by the power surge. Kaelen, dizzy and empowered, must make his first choice as a demigod: engage the cryptic Lyra, confront the militant Gorrik, or attempt to flee the temple entirely.
Harvesters' Plea
While traveling near the Ichorflow Basin, Kaelen encounters a group of mortal essence-harvesters under attack by 'Glimmerjaws'—essence-mutated crocodilian predators. The harvesters are outmatched and beg for help. Kaelen can intervene using his new powers (risking Resonance and revealing himself), attempt a stealthy rescue, or ignore them.
The Cogheart's Price
Lyra offers Kaelen access to the Cogheart Key—a device that can temporarily stabilize the chaotic time-echoes in the Sundered Temple, allowing him to safely extract a powerful artifact: the Chronal Lens. However, using the key requires him to temporarily surrender a portion of his own essence to fuel it, leaving him vulnerable. Furthermore, stabilizing one part of the temple's pattern inevitably destabilizes another, causing a temporal rupture elsewhere that could harm innocent harvesters. Kaelen must decide whether to pursue personal power at a direct cost to others.
Brotherhood's Trial
Gorrik challenges Kaelen to prove his worth in the Crucible of the Forge-Citadel—a ring where aspirants fight essence-mutated beasts and each other. Victory would grant Kaelen status within the Anvil Brotherhood and access to their forge-masters. However, the trial is to the death, and the beasts are tormented creatures Gorrik's people have captured. Kaelen can choose to fight honorably, fight with cruel efficiency to impress Gorrik, or sabotage the trial from within to free the captive beasts, earning Gorrik's wrath but perhaps the gratitude of other factions.
Whispers in the Weeping City
In the bone-carved streets of the Weeping City, Kaelen is approached by a masked agent of the 'Echo Court,' a secretive cabal of demigods who believe the only way to restore balance is to systematically destroy all remaining major essence sources, causing a controlled 'Silence.' They offer him a target: the still-beating heart of a minor titan that lairs in the Ichorflow Basin. Assassinating it would cripple a rival power, please the Echo Court, and potentially slow the land's mutation—but would also doom the communities that have learned to carefully harvest from that titan.
Sanctuary in Silence
Pursued by enemies or ravaged by essence corruption, Kaelen flees into the Silent Forest. The absolute quiet is initially maddening, but deep within, he finds a small, untouched glade where a single, living silver leaf grows from a petrified stump—a remnant of the God of Nature's true self. Here, the corrosive effects of essence are temporarily reversed. Sanity can be restored, and physical mutations can be soothed, but staying too long risks attracting the attention of the 'Hush-Walkers,' silent guardians who consider the glade sacred. Kaelen must decide how much to take and whether to leave the glade hidden or reveal its location to an ally in need.
The Titan's Dream
After accumulating significant Essence or using powerful abilities repeatedly, Kaelen experiences a waking dream. He doesn't just use the power of the dead God of Cycles—he briefly *becomes* it, experiencing a fragment of its final moments in the Godswar: the betrayal, the fall, the shattering of its domain. The vision is overwhelming and reveals a secret: the God of Cycles did not die solely by another god's hand; it sacrificed itself to imprison something worse within its own corpse. The location of this prison-seal is imprinted on Kaelen's mind. Now he knows a truth that could unravel Lyra's entire understanding of her father and potentially unleash an ancient horror.