The scouring waged on, and we were plucked in our millions from our homeworld and dumped here. Ogskal. It means ‘pit’ in their language. Once a thriving paradise world eight times the size of our humble homeworld, it’s now a seething mess of over-capacity urban sprawl and industrial wasteland. It’s the place the Vhal drop all their captive species from their ever-expanding warfronts. Most believe the original intention was for Ogskal to serve as temporary holding while the Vhal figured out what to do with billions of captives from a dozen species. But with its administrative abilities stretched beyond capacity by their many one-sided wars, the mixed populace here has been left to its own devices. In the decades since the first prisoner colonies were first established, enormous self-sufficient city-states have cropped up under the rule of various factions, barely overseen by the occasional Vhal visits. It is within the teeming mazes of these cities that a dozen species and a thousand cultures struggle for daily survival on a planet devoid of all its natural riches.
Paddy Dobson
30th May 2023