Scaena

The Domain of Dread known as Scaena is a ruin of velvet and grandeur, a crumbling world shaped like an opera house with no exterior, no sky, and no true exits. It is a stage without end, where tragedy is destiny and every soul is both actor and audience in plays penned by an obsessive and merciless playwright: Lemont Sediam Juste.

Here, drama is reality—a cruel parody of the theater of life. Every conversation is a script. Every death is a curtain call.

Lemont Sediam Juste once roamed the salons of Dementlieu, a self-styled dramatist with delusions of genius. Though critics dismissed his work as pretentious and formulaic, Juste cultivated a devoted following through grisly, melodramatic horror plays that trafficked in gore and catharsis.

When his final, ambitious work—The Final Masque—was banned for inciting hysteria, Juste performed it alone in a condemned theater. Those who entered to stop him found only the opening monologue echoing through empty seats... and then the Mists fell.

Now he rules Scaena, a world shaped by his unceasing drafts and edits.

Scaena appears as a vast, ruined theater with layers of illusion and stagecraft stretching infinitely inward: prosceniums beyond prosceniums, scenery melting into distant corridors, and lighting that changes with the tone of a scene.

• The Sky is a Backdrop: Paper-thin clouds shift on pulleys. Thunder rolls on cue. When the script calls for it, day breaks—or darkness falls.
• Citizens are Characters: Every inhabitant of Scaena is trapped in a role, often recycled from one play to another. They have memories, personalities, and feelings—but they can never leave character for long.
• Set Changes Warp Reality: The world reshapes to fit Juste’s current play. A quaint village might twist into a haunted asylum. A quiet forest might become the rafters above a cursed stage.

Themes and Horrors

• Loss of Agency: In Scaena, free will is an illusion. Scripts appear in victims’ hands. Their mouths speak lines they never intended. Even murder might be preordained—as though written.
• Narrative Tyranny: Juste sees all as actors. He punishes those who "ruin the scene" and rewards those who perform his horrors well.
• Masks and Roles: Masks are common—both literal and metaphorical. Characters may forget who they really are beneath the roles they’ve been forced to play for years, decades, or longer.

Juste stalks the wings of his domain dressed in a long black coat, carrying a quill like a dagger. He is always rewriting, always watching.

• He cannot bear improvisation or creative deviation. Actors who ad-lib too freely may be erased mid-sentence or rewritten into new, more painful roles.
• Despite his power, Juste is haunted by artistic insecurity. He desperately wants to be admired, even as his plays grow crueler and more unhinged.

He is cursed to never write a work he finds perfect, yet he cannot stop trying.

Key Locations

• The Grand Scaena: A sprawling theater-palace of gilded decay and phantom lights, where the plays play themselves, and the trapdoors lead to nowhere—or worse, to a forgotten scene still echoing with screams.
• The Greenroom: A lush, velvet-curtained purgatory where actors rest, rehearse, or try to remember who they once were. Sometimes, real memories return. Juste despises this.
• The Prop Vault: Beneath the Scaena lies a maze of discarded sets, cursed costumes, and weaponized stage props—some real, some illusions that kill like the real thing.
• The Gallery of Critics: The balcony boxes where ghostly critics leer and laugh. They may offer advice, but at a price: a memory, a finger, a truth.