The continent is a graveyard
Four hundred years ago the Titans were struck down in a judgment. Not defeated in a war they might have won: judged, and ended. The world woke up to a changed map, and to a winter of food for every village on it.
They rot on a geological clock. A dead Titan takes three centuries to go cold, and in that time it becomes a country. Villages cling to the ribs. Towns of wagons, cranes and boiling houses follow one corpse for a generation, then move on when it is spent.
You are a cutter. You go inside the bodies.
A Cut is a dungeon nobody designed
Sinus cavities read as catacombs. Ossified marrow runs as cobbled corridor. Ribs vault a hall the size of a cathedral. The cold ones have frosted through from the lungs outward, the hot ones still hold fire in the deep channels, and no two are laid out the same, because every Titan was different and every one died differently.
They are inhabited. Death-cults built shrines in the skull galleries and left them standing. Older tenants took the wounds. Whatever the Titan was carrying when it fell is still down there, and it has adapted to the dark.
The descent
Measured in fathoms, from the hide inward.
- The Hidethe outer layers
- Muscle Wallsred corridors
- Ribcage Vaultsbone halls
- Marrow Channelscobbled runs
- Skull Galleriescatacombs, shrines
- Lungsfungal bloom
- Heart Chambersstill and vast
- Frozen Reachesice and crystal
- The Corewhat is left of it
What you actually do
- Pick the cut. Choose who leads, who goes and how deep to push. Only the leader’s specialty is live, so who holds the lamp is the choice that matters.
- Let it run. A cut takes days and works whether or not you watch. Come back to a full hoist, or step in mid-descent when it turns.
- Buy what you know. Charts, old cutters’ testimony, surveys, scouts sent ahead. Every Titan has a body plan, and the more you have cut the better you call what lies past the diaphragm.
- Know when to turn. The corpse runs out. Burn what cannot travel and walk your people to a fresher Kill with nothing but the Marrow.
Down there with you
cutter
bog body
squatter
burrower
ooze
pale growth
Shipped tile art, shown at size.