A wagon creaked forward beneath the moon's cold gaze, its wooden wheels parting the deep snow to reveal the porcelain-like roads beneath. These roads, remnants of the fallen Umbrax Kingdom, stretched endlessly across the northern and southern continents, indestructible yet forgotten. Most had no names. Most did not even appear on maps,
Buried beneath snow and time, just like the kingdom that built them.
Inside the wagon, four men huddled against the cold, two in the front, two in the back. The emaciated horse pulling them forward let out a weak breath, its ribs visible beneath a patchy coat. The man holding the reins, Judas, kept his gaze on the road, his brown hair dusted with frost.
A deep voice broke the silence.
"Kazimir… it isn't true, is it? What they say? That you southerners are responsible for the famine?"
Kazimir, his bronze skin and black eyes marking him as a foreigner, sighed. He did not look up. "Judas, how many times do I have to tell you? How do you expect us southerners to be responsible for a continent-wide famine? If we were capable of such power, we would have done it decades ago, when your people crossed the sea and conquered our lands."
Judas glanced back at him, then shrugged. "Yeah, you're probably right."
The man beside him, a broad-shouldered warrior with rough blond hair, snorted. A silver crescent moon pendant hung from his neck, glinting faintly in the pale light.
"Don't go blaming the southerners," he said. "It's those damned cultists. If they stopped their sacrifices, their prayers to that nameless god, none of this would be happening." His voice was filled with scorn. "To think anyone could be fool enough to worship a god without a name."
Judas nodded grimly. "Hunger drives a man to unthinkable things."
Aldrich, so the blond blacksmith was called, shook his head. "Unthinkable? Maybe. But this?" His voice hardened. "Didn't these fools learn from history?"
His eyes drifted to the road beneath them. "We're riding on the bones of a kingdom that once ruled the world, and it fell for the same madness. The Umbrax built wonders beyond imagining, yet they were destroyed when they summoned that nameless god. And now these cultists are trying to summon it back."
From the back of the wagon, a pale, red-haired man shifted uncomfortably. "Aldrich… how do you know it was the nameless god?"
Aldrich turned, narrowing his eyes. "Are you blind or just stupid, Jake? Have you ever seen a famine like this? Animals dropping dead overnight without cause. Plants withering before they sprout. The rivers thinning. The forests empty of all life." His voice grew quieter, colder. "If not the cultists, then who?"
Jake hesitated but did not argue.
Aldrich sighed and ran a hand over his face. "You don't even know the story of the Umbrax, do you?"
Jake frowned but said nothing.
Aldrich raised an eyebrow. "Haven't you been reading the goddess's scripture I gave you?"
Jake looked away. "….No."
Aldrich exhaled sharply. "Then listen carefully, because you need to understand,"
He leaned forward slightly, his fingers tightening around the silver pendant he wore the shape of the moon.
"The Umbrax, the kingdom that built these indestructible roads, these wonders, once ruled the entire world. But they weren't always so mighty. In the age of darkness, before the goddess blessed this world with her moonlight, they were just a small kingdom.
The world was chaos. Countless prayed to forgotten, monstrous gods. But the Umbrax remained faithful, worshiping the moon through the long night.
And so, the goddess blessed them. She granted their royal family a divine blessing, Moonfire. A white flame that could burn and heal alike. It destroyed all that the wielder hated and mended all that they cherished.
With it, they conquered the world.
They paved these roads beneath our feet, raised cities that touched the sky. But the king of Umbrax was not satisfied. He had everything, power, wealth, dominion. Everything but eternity.
And so, he asked the goddess for immortality.
She refused.
Consumed by his greed, the king sought another way. He scoured the world for forbidden knowledge, searching for something older, something darker.
At last, he found it.
In the ruins of a kingdom long since turned to dust, he uncovered a crypt. And within, he discovered whispers of a god without a name, a being of boundless power. A god that granted wishes.
All one had to do was summon it.
The king, blinded by his lust for eternall life, followed the rituals, blood sacrifices, immolations, countless lives burned away to call forth the nameless one.
And the god came.
But it did not grant him his wish.
It twisted the world, unmade it, devoured it, The Umbrax kingdom fell in mere days. The roads remained. The ruins endured. But the people?
Gone.
Had the goddess not intervened, had she not sealed it away, we would not be here now. She cast it out, locked it within the ruins of Umbrax's own castle, and banished it from this world.
But the cultists… they want to bring it back."
Aldrich's voice was quiet now, but heavy.
"Who else could be responsible for this famine?" he murmured.
No one spoke. The only sound was the slow creak of the wagon and the distant howl of the wind.
Aldrich exhaled and clasped his pendant the shape of a crescent moon. "Now, because of these fools, we have no choice. The forests are empty, the fields are dead. The only place left to hunt is the ruins of Umbrax itself."
He closed his eyes. "May the goddess's moonlight guide our path."
With that, the conversation ended, and the scrawny horse trudged on, pulling the wagon along Nameless roads.