Hidden Face - Threa, Dusk Of Hope

The Writer

Pretty much like in The 2nd String, many worlds are of interest and notoriety in The 9th String. However, already deemed a dead-end otherverse which inexorably drifts towards the stream of improbability, study on the events and happenings taking place at The 9th String have been long forgotten and abandoned by the chronists of the MagnaVerse, and most natives granted the choice to leave depart the otherverse without remorse or desire to keep any memory of it, as someone welcoming the warm light a new day after a long night of nightmares, quickly fading away in oblivion. But nightmares and memories are pretty much alike, and both tend to come back whenever you less expect them. In sum, this has made a proper chronicling of the events and places at The 9th String difficult at best, if not plainly impossible at worst, leaving us with but a few pieces of information regarding one or two worlds of what is supposed to be an entire universe. Is from these very few accounts that we have gotten a clear idea of the hostility of The 9th String as a universe. Nevertheless, there is an important fact we ought to keep in mind when trying to fancy on our own the sinister nature of The 9th String: what we know of it, with it's nightmarish and surreal accounts of vile darkness and utter maddness, is likely to be the brightest aspects of this otherverse, for were these accounts the only things the ones who left this region of reality willed to convey. As such, is hard (if not plainly unhealthy) for us to phathom what could be the true nature of The 9th String and which are it's true limits when all the accounts we have speak of "the best of it" rather than what we could consider "the norm". At this point is very unlikely we could even fancy a passing thought of what could be "the worst" of it.

The present volume focuses on one of the few known worlds of The 9th String: Threa, Dusk Of Hope. Being a Terran Class planet on the third size category, with a gravity factor 2, pressure level 2, a medium rotational range, and being in the third orbital order of it's system, Threa is disturbingly similar to our own world, but in a dark and, perhaps, sinister sense. Having a year of 360 days with each month of exactly 30 days, measured by the lunar cycle of a moon superficially similar to ours (named Elppa), the mechanical similarities in between Threa and our own planet end there. With at least a 37% of it's surface covered by a dense cloud of constant brimstone, Threa is a relatively cold world where surface temperatures rarely rise above 25°C and tend to keep around 10°C, as days last barely 6 hours while nights go on for 18 hours. Once a world fluorishing with life of many kinds, in the likeness of our world, the unwelcoming nature of Threa in the present is slowly and systematically driving most of it's flora and fauna towards extinction as the stronger and meaner are depredating the less powerfull. Without the sun, much of the flora and fauna of an entire continent has been nearly reduced to pockets and, at other locations, insidious infestations of alien origin spread like opportunistic maladies, claiming a world that wasn't theirs.

Is hard to piece together both the natural and cultural history of Threa as most of it's civilizations have been wiped time and again for uncountable centuries. One would guess that the ever ubiquitous humans were the dominant sentient race in Threa at a time, thought that time is long gone, and there is little evidence to prove or dissprove if humans (or any of the other few sentient races that remain on Threa) are native to this world. In the other hand, Threa is a host to other sentient species which seem to trive far better than the evolutionary handicapped humans and who are, decidedly, from a completely outsider nature. This bulk of outsiders is mainly comprised of fiends from the lower planes, whom are relatively common across the worlds of The 9th String, and whose presence, pretty much like an aggresive fungal infestation, seems to gleefully partake in rearranging the enviroment to make it more vile, hostile, and hatefull towards the original inhabitants. Nevertheless, not all the outsiders on Threa are fiends and some come from far stranger (and, perhaps, more mentaly dangerous) places on the cosmos. Given this (and at this rate), is likely all natural life on Threa will be wiped out by this usurpers and, in time, only one kind will prevail over a bleak and scarred surface of little other use but as an staging area for the many gore soaked battles of the Blood War. That, of course, if a far more sinister and inexcrutably alien mindset doesn't shows to silently have the upper-hand on the matter, adding Threa to it's collection of worlds. One way or the other, Threa, aptly named "The Dusk Of Hope", is sentenced to an slow and painfull agony amid the shadows of undead horrors, the flame of outsider wars, and the insanity of alien invaders, until one of three emerges victorious to claim the corpse of this world as theirs... unless something unexpected happens...

- The Writer.