28
28
Ul-Dora possessed mountain ranges that breathed.
The sacred mountains were ancient creatures, each with its own soul, shaping valleys and seas with a slow, millennia-old pace.
The humans of Ul-Dora built temples on the backs of these creatures, worshipping them as gods.
But over time, they began to exploit them, piercing their mineral skins to extract energy and sacred metals.
One by one, the giants fell asleep, wounded, until the planet became still, the atmosphere stopped, and the cities, once suspended on cliffs, fell into the silence of a dead mountain.
When Bruce heard the echoes from the mountains, he realized those were voices whispering beneath the ground, pleading with everyone else not to wake the world.
3\. Nyxtra — The World of Singing Shadows
This was a planet that lived without light, where its creatures perceived through sound, and its cities were built with minerals that resonated with melodies; even so, a scientist attempted to create the first artificial sunbeam, a crystal that would emit eternal light.
When the crystal was activated, the shadows—which were conscious within it—revolted and swallowed their creators.
Even today, where the planet is divided, with one half living in perpetual light and the other half existing in pure darkness, in the center, a thin line, is where Bruce found the Fragment of Balance, which they collected; it was the first of the Seven Artifacts.
4\. Solarith — The World of Shadows and Perfume
In Solarith , each living being produced a unique aroma, and society was organized by scent: the pure exuded jasmine and incense, while the corrupted exuded sulphur and iron.
Then, amidst all this, when the alchemists discovered the formula for artificial purity, everyone wanted to smell the same.
As the natural balance of the world continued, it collapsed, then the air became toxic, and then the sense of smell became a curse.
It was when the planet still existed, but no one breathed, when they lived through filters and masks, that the flowers, out of shame, stopped blooming.
When the plants began to die—rice, grains, all the vegetables, the food—then they starved, and the animals that fed on them died afterward. Famine was one of the factors that led to the extinction of this planet. There is no life, nothing grows, there is no life, nothing lives. Everything has a disgusting, rancid, repugnant smell. A dead, decrepit planet, smelling of carrion. A rotten smell is in the air. Everything is corroded, as if it were rotting. A smell that pollutes the air, a thick fog. There are no flowers, no grass. The soil looks like rotten soil, cemetery soil. The bodies hanging from dry trees, skeletal remains, had nowhere to run. He left the ship orbiting in the planet's atmosphere, far from the disgusting stench.
The technology, what remains and hasn't been so corroded, like a decomposing body, is underground; there's a lot of information there. The bodies are kept refrigerated, along with an environment so cold it's like a refrigerator, a glacier at the North Pole.
When he returned to the ship, he spent hours in a hot bath to get rid of the smell. That planet, by itself, kills insects and scares away animals. He left behind a series of small animals on the surface, rats in cages. It was no more than 5 hours before he returned. The recorder and the videos themselves had rotted, and with them the animals died. The glass shattered, filled with a liquid of dead viscera. The glass was all corroded as if it were swamp mud, like blood.
5\. Teryon — The Planet That Stopped Spinning
It was one half eternally in light, while the other was frozen in darkness, where that was the border—the Twilight Line, an endless desert where time stood still.
It was there that civilizations arose, grew, and died, while trying to move the planet with titanic machines, then attempting to make it spin again, even though each attempt worsened the instability.
Then, one day, the core cracked, then gravity betrayed them, and that's how the planet exploded silently.
This planet floated unstably in orbit amidst other fragments, the planet in tatters, technologies aboard spaceships, floating bodies scattered in laboratories, all unsuccessfully attempting to survive or buy time until help arrived, which never did.
Bruce found fragments of metal floating, still gleaming as if time had stood still.
He found among the wreckage, spaceships, fragments, data, computers, laboratories, lost documents, data, spaceships, everything they tried to save, or save themselves, but they couldn't even call for help.
6\. Ilyra — The World of Pure Sound
This planet had no matter, only sound, where the inhabitants were conscious vibrations, traversing that place, in which they created symphonies capable of generating solid forms, such as bridges, towers, even oceans of notes, even when they tried to create absolute silence, when they discovered that silence was a being, then came the silence that devoured them.
A series of caves whose echoes contain fragments, shadows, beings trying to escape the echoes, strange creatures that roam the citadels, an environment like a huge dark cemetery of shadows, under the open sky, where spectral beings roam what appear to be ruins in rocks.
Bruce gazed curiously at ancient monuments and libraries, at what he thought were shadows, dusty environments. He tried to access another universe in his research, but they became trapped between two worlds, neither leaving nor entering, stuck between cracks.
They were magicians, necromancers, sorcerers, shamans, none of whom had left, lived, or entered; there are no bodies, no life, a sterile, desolate environment; staffs, works of art, everything there was lost, an environment whose dark fog covers every inch.
Today, Ilyra is a void echoing with distant music.
7\. Aethra — The Mirror Planet
This was a planet of liquid mercury seas, where each reflection created a living copy of whoever looked at it, and these copies wanted to exist, so they began to consume, they began to replace the originals.
Then came the wars between reflections and humans that lasted for millennia, and in the end, no one knew who was who anymore, which is when the planet was isolated by the galactic orders.
Upon arriving there, Bruce entered in disguise, saw his own reflection, and, attempting to kill it—he succeeded with a blade that could only cut what wasn't real; they were reflections from other worlds and other dimensions, they weren't them, they couldn't leave, they were ghosts and even irritating shadows. People couldn't stand talking to themselves, they went berserk, then killed themselves, thinking they were killing others, they went to war, killing each other amidst illusions.
These were spells that turned to create reflections and illusions; everything there was designed to deceive.
"Nothing is more dangerous than seeing yourself completely."
8\. Myr — The World of Solid Clouds
Given that these clouds were solid, and the cities floated on them, even though the elites pierced the air with steam mines, they were stealing the lightness from the world.
Then the clouds fell, and so it was with them, the skies, when Bruce found among the wreckage the Scepter of Mists, the artifact that controlled the density of the air.
People were crushed, imploded, and died because they couldn't control anything there, even with warnings.
9\. Veerion — The Planet of Ice and Fire
This was a planet with two living poles: one made of eternal flames, while the other was made of sentient ice. In the center, the races had been warring for ages, until Bruce discovered that balance would only be possible if both united. Even then, it was no use; they would never be able to cover up ages of hatred, hatred that was older than life itself.
And in the end, the ice melted, the fire went out, and finally, when the two planets became a sea of steam, a smoking vapor that came like lava from the center of the earth, they were geysers, as if they had hot springs, that boiled anyone who entered, the water never cooled, the steam in the air cooked people.
So, the steam burned the creatures that lived there, and to move around the environment, they needed special clothes that cooled their bodies.
10\. Luxra — The World of Luminous Cities
That was a planet powered by pure photonic energy, where the cities shone so brightly that they became stars visible from afar, even though their light burned through the atmosphere itself.