Anákó

The landscape of Anákó is littered with the corpses of fallen structures: skyscrapers brought low by the shifting earth. Or perhaps they age and die like everything else, for these buildings later rise from the ground, appearing one day where there was naught but open land the night before, already succumbing to rust and moss as if they had been there for centuries. The closer one gets to the ocean, the shorter and more sparse the buildings become. Structures a bit like houses, gutted and crumbling, dot the landscape. It is here where supply caches arrive from god knows where to supply the people with food and essentials: one act of supposed kindness from the land to its residents. Beyond the drop zones is the ocean: thick, black, and filled with hungry yure unable to breach the surface. Jùrén storms will churn the ocean into unforgiving maelstroms of lifeless water.

The most chaotic yet entirely predictable aspect of this world are the jùrén: colossal godlike birds whose presence changes the seasons.  The eagle of summer soars across the land, torching everything in its path as it evaporates all the moisture brought by the spring jùrén. The albatross of autumn brings with it wind storms that send anything not strapped to the ground soaring into the air. The owl of winter is the harbinger of ice storms that freeze solid anything that moves. The pelican of spring drags the ocean along behind it, flooding the landscape with water nearly as high as the skyscrapers themselves. Fortunately for those souls living in the ground, these events only last a few long hours each time before returning Anákó to a state of relative calm. However, seasons only last thirteen days before the next jùrén appears.

The only creatures known to be native to Anákó are the jùrén. The spirits who serve them likely came later, once people started arriving from other worlds only to die and become slaves of the jùrén. It is unclear where the jùrén reside outside of their torment of the landscape, but it is theorized that they simply fly around the whole of Anákó in a cycle that lasts 52 days. The spirits, known as yure, hybernate inside the clouds and in the ocean, only awakening when a jùrén arrives or they are disturbed by a mortal. The bite of a yure is fatal and will turn the bitten into a yure in mere seconds. More physical than an average spirit, yure can be killed (but only by decapitation) and they cannot phase through things.