Shyish, the Realm of Death, is the amethyst land where all things come at last to their ending. Its skies are the violet of a fading bruise, its horizons crowded with countless underworlds, one for every people who ever believed in an afterlife, and its magic is the slow, certain gravity of mortality that draws every soul inexorably toward the dark.
At the realm's edge lies the Shyish Nadir, a whirlpool of pure death-magic torn into being by catastrophe, and around it the numberless afterlifes hang like beads on a funeral thread. In Shyish the dead do not so much depart as relocate, and whole civilisations of shades and revenants keep their customs unbroken across the centuries, ruled by shadow-kings who died a thousand years before and reign yet in their silent, sunless palaces.
Over all this presides Nagash, the Great Necromancer and self-proclaimed God of Death, who conquered the realm and bound its underworlds to his will. His Ossiarch Bonereapers harvest the bones of the living as grim tithe, while his broken vow to the God-King unleashed the vengeful Nighthaunt, storms of screaming spirits loosed upon every realm. Beneath his amethyst banner march also the deluded blood-drinking lords of the Soulblight and the mad, cannibal princes of the Flesh-eater Courts, each serving death in their own twisted fashion and adding their legions to the endless muster of the grave.
To read the tale of Shyish is to read the story of Nagash himself, for the realm and its master have become nearly one. Yet even his dominion is not total: rival dead, invading hordes, and the schemes of the living contest the amethyst wastes, and death, though patient, has learned that it too can be defied.
The atlas continues
