Saltwalkers: Arks of the Wasteland

"Do not look down at the white desert, for that is the graveyard of the past. Keep your eyes on the horizon. As long as the ground beneath our feet is moving, we are still alive. We ride the Apocalypse, and it is the only safe place left."

— Harrin the Guide, First Scout of Glaos

Executive Summary: What are the saltwalkers?

To describe a Saltwalker is to describe the horizon itself. Standing over 240 kilometers high, these Lithic Titans are not merely animals. They are planetary forces. Emerging from the crust of the ancient world, the first Walker consumed the green lands and left a white, saline wasteland in its wake.

Depending on who you ask, they are the greatest enemy of Mornvahl or its only hope. They are the destroyers of the old world and the only sanctuary in the new one. As they have reproduced, their numbers have turned the map into a shifting puzzle of survival. To live in the modern era is to cling to the back of the very beast that ate your history.

When the Earth Hollowed Itself

To see where we are now, we must also see where we came from. The world as we know it is dominated by walkers, but there was an era long before that ever occurred. Lets zoom out now, and see where this started before we delve deeper:

The Green Age

Pre-History Before the Walkers broke the silence of the crust, the world was a place of heavy, settled things. The oceans knew their place, sleeping in deep, blue basins rather than hanging suspended in the sky. It was the Green Age, a time when Mornvahl was choked with life that grew from the mud up, not the shell down. The soil was dark, fertile, and deep, supporting forests where trees grew so tall they scraped the clouds, rooted firmly in an earth that did not move.
In those days, we had the luxury of petty troubles. Kingdoms waged wars over borders, gold, and politics - the beautiful, trivial conflicts of a people who did not yet have to fight for their survival. Men fought for riches because they already had water; they fought for land because there was enough of it to waste. It was a life well-lived, defined by the scent of rain on dust and the security of a horizon that stayed exactly where you left it.

The Saltfall Era

0 AS – 1999 AS The modern era did not begin with a sunrise. It began with a sound. A grinding tectonic bellow vibrated in the teeth of every living thing on the planet. When Glaos, the First Walker, tore itself from the crust, it emerged fully grown and ravenous. It was a force of total geological erasure. What it did not trample, it engulfed, and its massive maw strip-mined the landscape. In its first week, three ancient kingdoms were reduced to memory and dust. We threw everything we had at the Titan, yet arrows shattered against its shell and explosives were swallowed by its silence. Our grandest arcana fizzled out against its salt-crusted hide. We realized too late that one does not fight an earthquake. One only survives it.

With the ground turning to poison salt beneath our feet, the only alternative to death was ascent. Desperate scouts scaled the flanks of the Titan and returned with impossible news. The world was not gone. It was merely relocated. Tucked into the ridges of Glaos’s shell was the missing fertile soil, the vanished wildlife, and the budding of trees thought lost to the hunger below. It was a cruel miracle. The beast destroying our home was the only ark we had left. We stopped fighting the horizon and started climbing it. We traded the stability of the ground for a life of grip, movement, and survival on the back of the god that ate the world.

The Broodwake Era

2000 AS – Present Stability dissolved in a shower of crystalline rain. Dozens of egg clutches fell from the impossible heights of Glaos, striking the earth like glittering meteors. In that thunderous moment, the singular godhood of the Titan fractured into a small, multifaceted birth of a species. It was a sight of terrifying beauty that changed the hearts of every witness. The kingdoms that once dreamed of reclaiming the soil realized the old world was truly gone. In its place stood a goldmine of opportunity. Soldiers and dreamers scrambled to claim the unhatched eggs. They charted the fall-routes of the clutches and raced to build their futures on the backs of gods that had not yet opened their eyes.
The singularity of Glaos became a multitude. Each infant grew with frightening speed, swelling from a boulder to a mountain to a planet in mere years. Yet this age of expansion carried a melancholy price. You cannot predict the wandering soul of a Walker. Each newborn turned toward a different horizon and marched away faster than our maps could follow. The great Titans Cruinlagh and Yarrox carried their cities into the haze, and the lines of communication snapped one by one. History dissolved into legend before our eyes. Now, in the quiet of the modern day, the distance is absolute. We look out at the blinding white waste and wonder if we are the last survivors, or if another Walker still moves somewhere beyond the curve of the world.

The rivers boiled when they touched the skin of the beast. We thought it was a demon. We were wrong. It was nature resetting the balance.
— First Witness Account

The Anatomy of the end of an era

Saltwalker skeleton by Lou

The Geophagic Jaw

The mandibular pressure of a Saltwalker is less like a biological bite and more like a geological event. Their jaws function as hydraulic crushers capable of pulverizing granite, ancient masonry, and petrified wood into uniform gravel within seconds. While they are indiscriminate grazers that will consume ancient ruins and wild forests alike, they display a total neutrality toward the ecosystems anchored to their own backs.

The Blind Spot

Xeno-biologists attribute this passivity to the Dorsal Sensory Void. The nervous system and visual range of the Walker are entirely forward-focused. They simply do not perceive the world above their own shoulder line.

Furthermore, the root systems of the forests on their backs burrow deep into the shell. This releases trace amounts of calming enzymes directly into the bloodstream of the Walker. The city acts as a biological sedative that keeps the Titan calm.

Metabolic Theory: The Lithic Reactor

Despite their destructive grazing, Saltwalkers do not consume matter for caloric energy in the traditional sense. They are Lithic Reactors. They ingest matter solely to maintain their internal thermal mass. They are living furnaces.

As long as their internal core remains hot, they can survive for centuries without a physical meal. The flora and fauna on their backs act as a layer of vital insulation. This traps the heat inside the Walker and increases its metabolic efficiency.

The Crystalline Slag

This unique physiology solves the mystery of the Salt Flats. A Saltwalker does not produce organic waste. Instead, its internal furnace strips all moisture and mana from ingested matter, super-heating the remaining minerals until they separate. The useful elements are fused into the shell to repair cracks. The useless byproduct is compressed into blocks of sterile, hyper-saline crystal. These are expelled from the underbelly vents as Crystalline Slag - the industrial runoff of a biological engine.

The Archipelago of Bone

To a traveler standing on the white wastes, a Saltwalker looks like a monster. To the life forms living upon it, the Walker is simply "The World." This unique biome is known to naturalists as the Dorsal Archipelago. Because the ground below is toxic with salt, these isolated patches of greenery function like islands in an ocean. Life here has evolved not to spread outward, but to grip downward.

Thermal Micro-Climates

The most vital feature of the Archipelago is the heat. The air of the Salt Flats is often freezing, specifically at night. However, the Lithic Reactor inside the Walker radiates a constant, low-grade warmth through the shell.

This creates a permanent layer of humid, warm air that clings to the carapace about twenty feet high. It allows tropical ferns and mosses to thrive in latitudes where they should freeze. It is a garden kept alive by the body heat of the beast.

The Anchor-Root Adaptation

Normal trees would be shaken loose by the Walker's stride. The flora of the Archipelago has evolved Grip-Root Systems. These plants do not just grow into the soil. They secrete a mild acid that softens the outer layer of the Walker's shell, allowing the roots to fuse directly with the bone.

This provides the unbreakable stability needed to survive the constant seismic swaying of the host. In return, these roots deliver the calming enzymes that keep the Walker docile.

The Remnant Megafauna

The presence of large terrestrial mammals such as bears, boars, and mountain goats on the backs of Titans often confuses amateur naturalists. These creatures did not climb the Walkers. They were saved by them.

The Tectonic Uplift Theory

When a Walker breaches the crust, or hatches from an egg it lifts a massive "plate" of the original landscape on its carapace. This event preserves a pristine cross-section of the Green Age ecosystem.

The fauna living on a Saltwalker are the direct, isolated descendants of the wildlife that occupied that specific patch of forest three thousand years ago. They are living fossils floating above the apocalypse. When a walker hatches, it's first behaviours are burrowing under the ground first to uplift its own back-plate planet before it starts its journey.

Baby Bristle-Boar by Lou

Bristle-boars

These spikey boars are decendents of a specific type of boar that was prevelant in the area that Cruinlagh hatched from. Unlike their ancestors, these bristleboars are partially domesticated, singificantly stockier, and overall lazier due to not having to hibernate or prepare for the cold seasons in any way.

Ridge Ursa by Lou

Ridge Ursas

Unlike their extinct lowland ancestors, Ridge Ursas have developed a form of insular dwarfism. They are smaller, leaner, and possess curved claws adapted for gripping the rough osteoderms of the Walker's shell during tremors. They are still omnivoures, but more opportunistic predators and scavangers than outright confrontational

Pedogenesis: Where does the Soil come from?

A common question is how a shell of solid crystal develops fertile soil. The answer lies in the Dust Trap Architecture. The ridges of a Saltwalker's shell are shaped aerodynamically to catch the dust and silt blowing off the flats.

Over centuries, this trapped dust mixes with the decaying leaves of the Plants and the moisture from the Walker's vents. This creates "Shell-Loam," a dark, nutrient-rich soil that is arguably the most fertile substance in all of Mornvahl.

The Cities That Wander

A walker with civillisation on its back by Lou

Time and Motion

Life on the back of a Titan is a rejection of the static world. There are no winters here. The Lithic Reactor beneath the shell ensures a perpetual, humid summer that defies the latitude. Because the sun is constant and the weather artificial, the people of the Shell do not measure time by the sky. They measure it by the tremor.
A "Stride" is the standard unit of time. It marks the heavy, seismic lurch of the Walker lifting a limb and placing it down. For a mature Walker like Glaos, a single Stride takes roughly seven standard days. The week ends not with a sunset, but with an earthquake. Church bells ring to warn of the "Sunday Shudder" and tea cups are secured in padded racks. To be "three steps late" is to be nearly a month behind schedule.

The Rolling Cities

Civilization here is defined by the Molting Cycle. A Saltwalker grows from the head backward. New shell calcifies at the cranial ridge and slowly migrates down the spine over the course of a decade, eventually flaking off at the tail as dead slag.
This means no city can stay in one place forever. To live on a Walker is to be on a slow-motion conveyor belt toward oblivion. Every dozen years, the "Tail-End" districts crumble into the salt wastes. Society is in a constant state of Forward Migration. Buildings are designed to be disassembled. Stone is rare. Wood, canvas, and light metals are preferred. A Shell-citizen does not mourn a lost home. They simply pack it up and march toward the headlands to rebuild. This culture of impermanence makes them adaptable, unsentimental, and fiercely communal. You cannot survive the migration alone.

You Are What They Eat

The geography of a Saltwalker is not random. It is a digestive result. The phrase "you are what you eat" applies quite literally to the civilizations anchored on the backs of one. Because the Walker acts as a massive biological refinery, the materials available to the people above are dictated entirely by the diet of the Titan below. This creates a phenomenon known as Material Determinism.

This biological link means that a city is never truly independent of its host. A famine for the Walker becomes a resource crisis for the city. If the Titan walks through a mana-dead wasteland for a decade, the magical spires on its back will sputter and fade as the ambient energy radiating from the shell dries up. Politics, architecture, and even religion are downstream effects of the Walker’s grazing path.

Glaos: The Silica Sovereign

Tech Level: High / Crystal-Punk

Biological Cause: Glaos is a selective grazer. It favors the high-silica sands of the Quartz Flats. Its internal furnace burns hotter than any other Walker, vitrifying this sand not just into shell, but into high-clarity Living Glass.

Cultural Result: The shell of Glaos acts as a natural fiber-optic network. It conducts light and heat with near-perfect efficiency. The citizens discovered early that they could tap into this. They developed "Lumen-Tech," using the Walker's own shell to power solar furnaces, light-based communication arrays, and complex glass-work machinery. They look "futuristic" because they are mining a super-computer

Cruinlagh: The Verdant Manalith

Tech Level: Medieval / High Magic

Biological Cause: Cruinlagh hatched near a major Ley-Rupture. Its diet consists of mana-saturated bedrock. As a result, its shell is not just stone. It is Resonant Arcanite. The background radiation of the Walker amplifies magical fields by a factor of ten.

Cultural Result: Technology was never needed here because magic is too easy. Why invent a lightbulb when a simple whisper makes the air glow? The civilization is ruled by Mage-Lords who bind their towers directly to the shell to siphon its power. It is a place of floating spires, heavy robes, and grand spells, locked in a stasis of tradition because the magic solves every problem.

Yarrox: The Rust-Bucket

Tech Level: Scavenger / Blackpowder

Biological Cause: Yarrox is the "Runt." It was forced to feed on poor-quality sandstone and grit. Its shell is porous, crumbling, and unable to hold water. It has no high-grade crystal or mana.

Cultural Result: Life is hard. Water drains right through the shell, leading to constant drought. The crumbling terrain makes large buildings impossible. The people rely on drilled wells and salvage. This scarcity bred a culture of "Take or Die." The discovery of unstable salt-nitrate deposits in the shell led to the invention of primitive firearms. It is a land of dusters, six-shooters, and water-barons fighting over a dying rock.

A Stride Measured in Seasons

To observe a Saltwalker from the ground is to watch a mountain change its mind. To live atop one is to exist in a state of constant, rhythmic instability. The movement of a Titan is not locomotion. It is locomotive geography. They do not trot. They drift.

As mentioned above, the step cycle of a mature walker takes roughly 7 days. It begins with the Ascent, a three-day period where the horizon tilts visibly as the leading limb lifts from the salt. This is followed by the Hang, a day of breathless suspension where gravity feels slightly wrong and water sits at an angle in the well. Finally comes the Sunday Shudder. This is the footfall. It is a massive, resonant impact that rings every bell in the city and sends a cloud of salt dust billowing up from the wastes below like a nuclear winter.

The Thermal Imperative: Why They Move

A common question is why the Walkers never settle. The answer is thermodynamic. The Lithic Reactor in the centre of the walker requires constant friction and intake to maintain critical temperature.

If a Walker stops moving for more than a month, its internal core begins to cool. The tropical micro-climate on its back fades. The jungle withers. Snow begins to fall on the ridges. To stop is to freeze. The Walkers march not just to eat, but to stay warm.

Passive Navigation

Because the citizens cannot steer their host, navigation is a passive science. The Guild of Pathfinders does not chart where they want to go. They chart where the Walker is going. They analyze the grazing patterns, the density of the salt drifts, and the magical resonance of the horizon to predict the Walker's route.
This makes "travel" a complex gamble. If you want to trade with a neighboring Walker, you cannot simply steer toward them. You must calculate the intercept trajectories of two independent mountains. You must wait for the weeks, or sometimes years, when their grazing paths naturally intersect. This event is known as a Conjunction. It is a massive festival of trade, marriage, and exchange that lasts only as long as the two Titans walk side-by-side before drifting apart into the white again.

There has not been a conjunction convoy, or trade network since 5012, nearly 3000 years ago. Seeing another walker is a bucket list item very very few tick off.

The Great Green Blooms

Death for a Saltwalker is not a quiet event. It is a biological detonation. When a Titan finally collapses, usually due to extreme age or catastrophic injury, the Lithic Reactor at its core fractures. The heat, mana, and untold tons of fertile soil hoarded within its shell are released in a singular, explosive rush.

This event is known as a Green Bloom. Within days of the collapse, the surrounding salt flats are overwhelmed by an aggressive explosion of flora. Ancient seeds dormant in the Walker’s gut flash-grow into towering forests. Springs of fresh water burst from the shattered vents. For a few glorious decades, the corpse of the Walker becomes a lush, verdant continent amidst the white waste. It is a localized resurrection of the Green Age.

The Restorationists (The Fellers)

The Fellers believe that the Walkers are not saviors. They view them as parasites that stole the world's life. Their logic is brutal but mathematically sound. If one dead Walker creates a continent of life, then killing all of them would restore the planet.

These communities actively hunt the Titans. They use massive harpoons and siege engines to target the leg-joints in an attempt to fell the beast. To the city-dwellers on the back, these hunters are terrorists. To the desperate tribes of the flats, they are freedom fighters trying to reclaim the earth.

The Hermit-Crab Cycle

The tragedy of a Bloom is its impermanence. The explosion of greenery attracts other Walkers. Adults will migrate thousands of miles to graze on the lush remains of their fallen kin.

Even stranger is the phenomenon of "Plate-Claiming." Juvenile Walkers, still soft and vulnerable, will burrow into the rotting carcass of an adult. They detach the massive, pre-grown back-plates of the dead Titan and graft them onto their own bodies. A Bloom often ends not with death, but with a new, smaller Walker standing up wearing the ancient armor (and sometimes the surviving ruins) of its ancestor.

When the Mountain Shivers

To build a home on a Saltwalker is to build upon a living fault line. While the Walkers are generally docile grazers, they are not statues. A sudden sneeze, a stumble over a hidden brine-pit, or a territorial ramming contest with a rival can register as a Magnitude 7 earthquake to the civilization on the back.
Architecture in the Shell-Cities is defined by Flexible Engineering. Stone mortar cracks, so buildings are lashed together with rope, leather, and flexible sapwood from the ridge-forests. Everything hangs on gimbals. When the bells ring the "Brace Alarm," it means the Walker has found difficult terrain. A citizen of the shell does not run during an earthquake. They simply strap themselves into their hammocks and wait for the mountain to stop shivering.

The Great Molt: The City Must Move

The greatest threat to any city is the Shedding Migration. As the Walker grows, new shell is calcified at the head and slowly pushed backward along the spine.

Every twelve to fifteen years, the rearmost plates of the shell die. They lose their heat, turn gray, and slough off into the salt wastes below. This creates a society of perpetual motion. A district built on the "safe" shoulders today will be in the "dead zone" of the tail in a lifetime. The entire city is built on skids and rails. It is a slow, generational crawl toward the headlands to stay ahead of the crumbling edge. To stay still is to fall.

Hazards of the Skysea

The danger does not only come from below. The Skysea hangs directly above Mornvahl. While gravity usually holds the oceans in place, "Sky-Drips" and "Torrent-Bursts" are common.

The Saline Rain: When the Skysea weeps, it drops super-concentrated saltwater. This brine is heavy enough to crush roofs and toxic enough to wither the lush gardens of the Archipelago.

The Downfallen:

Downfallen Rainlancer by Lou

Sometimes, marine life falls out of the sky. A Downfallen Rainlancer (a swordfish-like predator with an aero-dynamic beak) can reach terminal velocity before striking the shell. These impacts strike with the force of ballista bolts. A falling school of Rainlancers can shred a market district in seconds.

Drownmoth by Lou

The Drownmoth Swarms: Drownmoths are small mothlike creatures that exist both at the seam of the highsea and the flats, and the flats themselves. One or two on its own is harmless, but large swarms of them are dangerous enough that they can strip the fluid from a walker within minutes, exposing it to the freezing atmosphere and risking freezing the life forms above.

Field Notes: The View from the Ridge

Entry 4: The Ascent for Elara

They told me the climb would kill me. They said a Flatlander has no grip. But when the salt-cough took Elara's voice, I stopped listening to them. The medicine she needed does not grow in the dust. It only grows in the green ridges of the Titan

I packed her onto my back and I found the ladder-rutes cut into Glaos's shin. The ascent took three days. My hands are raw and the wind nearly took us twice. But looking at her now, sleeping in a hammock that sways with the beast, it was worth the blood. The air up here is sweet. It smells of damp fern and iron. For the first time in years, I can hear her breathing clearly. I look over the edge at the white hell we left behind and I do not miss it. The ground down there is dead. Up here, even the stone is alive. We are moving. We are safe.

— Jorran, New Citizen of the Glaos, dated 4627 AS

Resource Yields

Titan-Bone: High-density calcium composite mined from the cranial ridges. Used for city foundations and ship hulls.
Walker-Salt: Hyper-pure saline crystals excreted from the vents. Used in alchemy and food preservation.
Shell-Loam: The fertile soil trapped in the ridges. The most valuable agricultural commodity in Mornvahl.

The Nymph Harvest

Illegal under the White Concord.
While the cities above farm the soil, the desperate tribes of the Salt Flats hunt the young. Known as "Cracking," these Flatlander groups ambush newborn hatchlings or excavate unhatched eggs before they reach impregnable size.

The act of Cracking produces plenty of meat and materials that the tribes can use, and if the walker is in its adolescent stage or older when it is cracked, it can cause a smaller green bloom event to occur.

The White Concord

Punishment for violation is Exile to the Flats.

Law I: No citizen shall drill past the Sub-Dermal layer. To draw Titan-Blood is to risk a frenzy event.

Law II: No structure shall be anchored to the Cranial Plate. The head must remain free for molting.

Law III: The venting ports are Sacred Ground. Do not obstruct the heat release.

Law IV: None shall actively go out of their way to hunt, wound, or kill a walker at any stage of their life.

The White concord is an oath made in 1314 AS with the arrival of Glaos. It detailed instructions laid out to protect the walker. The fourth law was then added in 2021 AS during the shellrush event to reduce harm to the beasts

The view from here is terrifying // "Live at the Ridge" (Bootleg)

Humanoid Perceptions

Depending on who you ask, the perceptions of the saltwalkers changes rapidly from person to person. One thing is clear though, these beasts have left a huge impact on the world, and with that comes a huge impact on people.
One band on Glaos, named "The View from Up here is Terrifying" writes songs almost exclusively about the saltwalkers. This teenage indie band is surprisingly popular, and some of their cassettes even made it down to the salt flats in one piece, where the communities on the ground try and make sense of them.

First Gig Polaroid by Lou

Species Classification: Titanus Halite

Common Name: Saltwalker
Classification: Lithic Mega-Fauna
Diet: Geophagic (Stone/Mineral)

Avg Height: 240 km (at shoulder)
Lifespan: Indeterminate (Geological)
Status: Apex Keystone

Threat Assessment: Catastrophic. Do not approach from ground level. Safe entry only possible via aerial docking or authorized climbing routes.

The full History

8167 AS
History of the entire mornvahl, I guess

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