Dursos

Also known as the Dark Realm, the Dead Kingdom, and the Cold Kingdom, Dursos is a nation dedicated to death. Its ruler, a being known as the Necromancer, is obsessed with unlocking the secrets of life and death. Its aristocracy, known as the Death Mages, perform endless experiments to learn about death and how to control it. They are far more adept at communing with and controlling spirits of the dead than any other known people.   Their territory consists mostly of white dwarfs, pulsars, and other dead stars. They access these dead systems using Ghost Keys—Anima-tech that allows them to open a gate directly from the Fulgent to a nearby dead star, bypassing the Between (as there is no Between in these systems). This is a feat no other civilization understands. The Dursosi have even begun experimenting with the idea of colonizing rogue planets.   Their ward technology allows them to cloak their presence from the Dark Ones who slither past their silent worlds. No known ward can block out the song of the Dark Ones, but Dursosi are trained from childhood to resist their call. To this end, all children are raised on Nursery Ships until they are old enough to ignore the Dark Ones' song, at which point they join their parents in the Dark Realm. Dursosi grow food in massive, automated hydroponics farms.   As An is scarce in the Void, Dursosi have learned to harness Ur, the energy that sustains the Dark Ones. This has given them strange powers unknown to practitioners of Xa'an. They have learned to see through Ur, rather than through conventional An as Eisthar usually do. Those Dursosi who travel into Havens often take time to adjust to seeing through An since Ur does not exist in sufficient quantities there to allow them to see as they normally would.   Dursos uses its death magic to learn about forgotten histories, and the great library of Xothan houses copies (along with written synopses) of the memories of countless beings stretching back millennia. Dursosi historians travel the galaxy studying the spirits inhabiting ancient ruins.   The flag of Dursos is half white, half black. The two halves meet in the center with a jagged diagonal border zig-zagging down from the top to the bottom (starting from one third of the way left of the upper right corner and ending one third of the way right from the bottom left corner).   The stereotype about Dursosi is that they are dark, brooding, morbid, and humorless. While this is true for some, there are just as many Dursosi who eschew this stereotype. Many Dursosi view humor as an integral part of enduring in the Void. As such, while their humor tends to be on the morbid side, many Dursosi come across as friendly and cheery.