The Dominion of Vey Chask

Far from the borders of Antioch and the Concordat, beyond swamps where even the air feels rotten, lies a kingdom spoken of only in whispers. The Dominion of Vey Chask is not a nation in any familiar sense. It is a living abattoir, a sprawl of hive-cities where flesh itself is currency, and bodies are clay to be broken, bent, and rebuilt.

The Dominion does not worship gods. It worships the Act of Remaking. Its rulers, called the Flesh Regents, believe the Severance was not an end but an invitation: proof that the world itself must be remade. They see the body as a prison of old design, and their sacred duty is to tear it open and build something stronger, stranger, and more obedient.

The Flesh Regents

The rulers of Vey Chask are not one dynasty but a council of surgeons, sculptors, and vivisectors who call themselves The Collegium of the Knife. Each Regent holds mastery over a different craft: the weaving of sinew, the reshaping of bone, the grafting of hide, the splicing of bloodlines. To be seated in the Collegium, one must produce a work that endures for ten generations, whether that be a breed of beast, a strain of chattel, or a servant that never dies.

They do not rule by decree, but by demonstration. Each Regent’s creations walk the streets, command the armies, and plow the fields. Authority comes not from crown or blade, but from the proof of flesh remade.

A People of Clay

In Vey Chask, there is no distinction between civilian and soldier, farmer and slave. Every person, every creature, every beast is a project. Children are born, but few remain as they are. By adolescence most have been cut, stitched, or spliced. Extra limbs for laborers. Enlarged eyes for night watchmen. Fused jaws for soldiers so they need not waste breath on speech.

The lowest caste are called The Raw, unaltered bodies regarded as unfinished failures. They are fodder for experiments, consumed in trials until their remnants can be reforged into something else. Above them are The Shaped, those who have endured a Regent’s knife and survived into function. They are workers, soldiers, breeders, or tools, defined entirely by what they were built to do. At the top are the Artisans of Flesh, who cut and craft others in turn, always competing for prestige within the Collegium.

To outsiders, Vey Chask is a vision of horror. To its people, it is survival. The body is weak, so it must be changed. The body fails, so it must be rebuilt.

Cities of Meat and Bone

The Dominion’s cities are not built in stone but in sinew, hide, and cartilage. Walls flex with muscle fibers, pulsing faintly in the heat. Doorways are ribcages. Roofs are stitched hides. Streets are paved with hardened marrow, slick when it rains.

The greatest of these cities is Chask-Moro, the Spinal Keep, a fortress built along the length of a colossal spine thought to have belonged to something slain in the Severance. Each vertebra has been hollowed and filled with laboratories, breeding pits, and courts where the Flesh Regents display their works. At its heart grows the Great Viscera, a mass of living tissue fed constantly with new grafts, revered as both temple and archive of the Collegium’s craft.

War Without End

The Dominion’s armies are not conscripts, but chattel bred for slaughter. Quadrupeds with human eyes, giants swollen with redundant organs, swarms of small, eyeless feeders unleashed to strip fields bare. They march not in disciplined ranks, but in tides of deformity, each creature a weapon designed for one purpose and discarded when it fails.

Neighbors fear more than their armies. They fear their raids. Whole villages vanish into Vey Chask, their inhabitants dragged screaming into the flesh pits, never to return whole. Sometimes broken versions stagger back across borders, too warped to be recognized, left as a warning.

Faith of the Knife

Vey Chask preaches no salvation, only transformation. Their creed is simple: The world is flawed. Flesh is flawed. Only through unmaking can truth be found.

Priests, called Chirurgeons, wear masks of flayed skin and carry bone knives as sacraments. Their sermons are demonstrations: a body opened on the altar, a beast remade before the eyes of the faithful. Worship is not prayer but participation, the offering of flesh to be cut and shaped.

To them, divinity is not distant. It is immediate. It is the knife in the hand, the scream of the subject, the silence of something new born from ruin.

Relations with the World

Antioch despises the Dominion as abomination, but campaigns against it falter. To kill a Dominion soldier is meaningless; their bodies are reclaimed, reforged, and returned. The Concordat avoids open war, but its Shieldbands patrol the borders constantly, ready to burn entire settlements at the first sign of Chaskian corruption.

And yet, whispers persist of secret dealings. Alchemists covet Dominion grafts. Warbands pay dearly for beasts bred to slaughter. Some Concordant villages that should have fallen long ago instead stand strong, their warriors suspiciously altered in ways no honest healer could explain.

The Dominion’s Threat

The Dominion of Vey Chask is not conquest in the traditional sense. It does not seek to rule neighbors, to tax or to govern. It seeks only material. And to the Regents of the Knife, all flesh is material.

They do not see enemies. They see unfinished work.