The World of Oerus

The Severians call it Oerus (an old word meaning Everywhere and Everything, Tamed by Oetra, Left Wild), people of the New Continent call it thousands of different things according to their own beliefs. The world is similar to the one we are most familiar with, except for certain differences that force us to call it a fantasy world.

The planet lives

Oerus is rapidly increasing in size. The growth is sporadic and tends to be unnoticable to individuals. . As plantlife and fauna very quickly take advantage of and cover the new patches of soil that emerge from the stretching ground, people mostly don't notice. But sometimes they will look at old maps and wonder why the things don't include well known landmarks, and all the villages on them are placed closer to each other than they should be. Farmers notice their plots have grown in size (and therefore value) from when they bought them. Forests with only young trees in, and plains appear that no-one ever remembers being to before.

The planet reproduces

The world is only scant years away from a massive upheaval, what could loosely be termed as a doomsday. These tend to take place at random intervals from a thousand to millions of years, depending on how quickly the world is growing. Gods and ancient Royal Imps who have witnessed this climatic event before, call it the Collecting and tend not to tell anyone about it. It will be, as they say (or in fact don't say), the end of the world as everyone knows it. Put in simple terms, everyone on the planet experiences the need to travel to certain areas in the world, mountains and other landmarks in the center of the planet's tectonic plates. Then almost overnight, massive fissures appear around each country and the whole plate breaks away from the world and soars into space. These mini worlds and their colonies develop their own atmosphere and soar through the galaxy, collecting space matter and growing into planets which will finally settle in a solar system and orbit the sun as if it had always been there. Meanwhile, back on Oerus, the planet settles back from its painful birth and gets on with the task of recovering and growing once more so that it can bud again.

Conflict on Oerus

The fact that Oerus always grows means there's never a shortage of land to go around. Indeed, quite the opposite, there's a furious, never-ending race for every species to keep up with the growth, to take advantage of the constantly appearing new resources and therefore remain ahead of the other species in the battle for survival and dominance.

Plantlife compensates for this simply by reproducing like mad, taking up new earth as it appears. Animals respond by rapid reproduction amongst their own species and by taking over others. They do this with transformation, as one species changes whole populations into their own kind so they can have more mates and mothers. Sentient creatures, human or otherwise, have elevated these conflicts into 'wars', using transformation to turn whole villages of people into their own kind, and being changed themselves with counter-strikes. These are no deaths in these wars, and the idea of causing them would horrify any side. Some villages have 'suffered' border disputes which have caused their residents to change species over twenty times a generation, even several times a year!

Conventional wars on the planet simply don't happen, but they are described in unpleasant detail in some fairy stories, so at least one war may have happened in the long past. War is a repulsive word for a pointless thing. There is simply no concept of glorious battle, as the words seem to contradict each other. Sentients here wouldn't go to war for what they believe in, or to overthrow a tyrant, or to defend the nation they love. They make their fights personal. For example, if a tyrant does comes into power and tries out a reign of terror he would probably be imprisoned or killed by his own personal guard, who would be disgusted enough at him to replace duty with treason. There are of course no disputes over territory or resources because there is so much to go around.

There is still conflict on an individual level, but usually it is subdued. Carnivores still need to hunt and their victims will fight back because they must. But sacrifice, intelligence and non-violent alternatives are always sought first amongst sentient creatures.

Famine and disease (or rather, disease that doesn't cause transformation) is also rare.

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