Common Name: The Withered Lands
Deity: Yrdriss
Type: Divine Realm
Origin: Once-fertile preexisting realm claimed and degraded by Yrdriss
Native Inhabitants: Small surviving populations deliberately prevented from complete extinction
Yrdholm, more commonly known as the Withered Lands, is the divine realm of Yrdriss. It was once a fertile preexisting realm whose ecosystems and native civilizations supported substantial populations before the goddess claimed it and gradually turned scarcity, disease, contamination, and failing systems into its defining conditions. Life still persists there, but nearly every community exists close enough to some form of collapse that a new affliction can become catastrophic.
Yrdriss has not destroyed the realm completely because extinction would deprive her of living systems capable of suffering from the next plague, famine, or blight. The few native peoples who survive do so partly through extraordinary resilience and partly because the goddess prefers them endangered rather than gone. Their continued existence is therefore both an act of resistance and a condition Yrdriss deliberately preserves for her own purposes.
Appearance
Yrdholm contains the remains of a landscape that was once far more productive. Dry riverbeds cross fields whose soil retains evidence of ancient cultivation, abandoned irrigation systems lead toward reservoirs now contaminated or unreliable, and ruined cities stand near roads built for populations many times larger than those currently living there. Forests survive in thin or diseased forms, while grasslands can shift rapidly between brief recovery and blight.
The realm is not uniformly barren. Productive valleys, clean springs, healthy herds, and successful harvests still occur, which makes their later failure more consequential. A community can spend decades rebuilding an agricultural system before one fungus, contaminated water source, insect swarm, or wasting disease pushes it back toward crisis.
Disease is visible in the landscape as much as in bodies. Trees carry lesions, fungal growth spreads through grain, animal populations periodically collapse, and stagnant waters support organisms capable of transmitting unfamiliar illness. Some afflictions are natural to the realm, while others are creations of Yrdriss or her servants. Yrdholm continually approaches recovery without being allowed to stabilize into abundance.
The Surviving Natives
Only small populations remain from Yrdholm’s native civilizations. Their cultures preserve memories of periods when the realm supported larger cities, reliable agriculture, and trade networks that did not treat every shipment of food or medicine as an emergency. Some communities maintain archives specifically to prove that the current condition of the realm is not natural or inevitable, directly rejecting the theology Yrdriss’s followers use to justify her rule.
Survival has made these peoples exceptionally skilled in sanitation, crop diversity, quarantine, water management, preservation, medicine, and the rapid reorganization of communities during crisis. Their expertise is not romanticized as a blessing from adversity. Most understand that generations of suffering forced them to learn skills they would gladly have developed under less lethal conditions.
Yrdriss tolerates their success because a population that never recovers cannot experience another fall. When a settlement becomes too secure, a new problem often appears: an unfamiliar fever, a blight resistant to existing treatments, or a contamination that bypasses precautions developed over centuries.
This pattern has produced religious movements devoted to Anadesia, Mezra, and other gods whose concerns directly oppose the conditions Yrdriss cultivates. Direct divine manifestation remains all but impossible after the Sundering, but faith, divine magic, and institutional knowledge still give communities ways to resist her influence.
Scarcity and Trade
Scarcity organizes much of Yrdholm’s economy. Food, clean water, medicine, healthy seed, uncontaminated tools, livestock, and reliable information about disease can all become more valuable than precious metals. Trade routes form around regions temporarily producing surpluses, only to collapse when one area’s recovery fails or a new epidemic makes travelers unwilling to approach it.
Markets therefore include extensive inspection rituals. Goods may be quarantined, washed, magically examined, sampled, burned, or rejected based upon signs invisible to inexperienced outsiders. Merchants who can maintain trustworthy supply chains gain enormous influence because reliability is more valuable than low price.
Yrdriss’s servants exploit these systems by introducing uncertainty. A rumor that one caravan carries disease can destroy trade even when the goods are safe, while one genuinely contaminated shipment can discredit procedures that worked for generations. The goddess understands that scarcity worsens when people no longer know which resources can be trusted.
Hoarding and profiteering emerge repeatedly. Communities under pressure often create ration systems and public stores, while opportunists attempt to control access and sell relief at whatever price desperation will bear. These conflicts make Yrdholm a realm of social adversity as much as biological suffering.
Plague and Recovery
Epidemics occur frequently enough that settlements classify them by transmission, symptoms, season, and the precautions most likely to contain them. Some diseases are recognizable recurrences, while others appear only once before being replaced by something different. Yrdriss takes particular pleasure in afflictions that exploit whatever defense proved successful against the previous outbreak.
Recovery is nevertheless real: people survive, immunity develops, treatments are discovered, contaminated districts are cleaned, crops are replanted, and trade resumes. A realm where nothing ever improved would eventually contain only exhaustion and extinction, while Yrdriss wants communities capable of hoping that this recovery might finally last.
The interval between crises can therefore be surprisingly pleasant. Festivals mark successful harvests, births, reopening of roads, the end of quarantines, and years in which no major epidemic occurred. These celebrations matter precisely because inhabitants know what their absence would mean. Yrdrissan theology treats the cycle as proof that hardship is necessary to prevent weakness, while the surviving natives more often interpret it as proof that life repeatedly repairs damage the goddess keeps inflicting.
Souls in the Withered Lands
Jhadric sends souls to Yrdholm when deliberate disease, exploitation of scarcity, famine, contamination, or the belief that suffering should be inflicted as a means of purification became defining relationships in mortal life. Being a victim of those conditions is not enough to create affinity. Many people who survived plague or famine formed stronger relationships with healing, community, preparation, or resistance and would be suited to very different realms.
Souls arriving in Yrdholm can join existing communities, become profiteers, healers, raiders, farmers, researchers, servants of Yrdriss, or participants in the endless work of keeping living systems functional. Some discover that the conditions they once imposed upon others feel different when experienced without the protections of mortal status or wealth.
Change remains possible. Souls may eventually reject the relationships that brought them there, reincarnate, become divine servants, fade over ages, or be reincorporated into Creation’s broader energies as individual identity weakens. Yrdriss continually attempts to prevent that change by giving inhabitants reasons to believe scarcity justifies selfishness and suffering proves her teachings correct. No ordinary feature of Yrdholm creates an eternal contractual obligation, so its cruelty can continue for ages without becoming metaphysically permanent in the manner of the Eightfold Depths.
Yrdriss’s Presence
Yrdriss has no need to make every crisis visibly divine. She is most often encountered in moments when several manageable problems become one systemic failure: the healer falls ill while the grain store is found contaminated, a caravan is delayed by damaged roads, and frightened leaders close a district before food can be distributed. Her servants watch for these intersections and introduce the smallest additional pressure capable of making the whole system fail.
When Yrdriss appears personally, she is often described as grandmotherly and calm rather than monstrous. She may walk through a sickroom, ask practical questions about stores and water, or praise a community for surviving the last plague while already considering what weakness the recovery created.
The Withered Lands endure because life there is stronger than Yrdriss wants to admit and because she refuses to let that strength become final victory. Its inhabitants continually rebuild enough of the realm to give her something new to threaten.