Editing Shattered Sun (section)

===The People of the Soulshard===
[[File:Sacrifice.jpg|150px|thumb|left|An artist's rendition of one of Their sacrifices to the Soulshard.]]
White, short, and stocky in stature, the People of the Soulshard (or as the rest of society calls them... ''Them'' and ''They'') live in a great underground cavern, lit by a single fallen Shard They found soon after the Phoenix's Awakening. While They were primarily an underground people before the Awakening, They required to grow crops and hunt game on the surface in order to survive. But with the Dark fast encroaching Their lands and the flora and fauna around Them dying as a result, They brought the Shard underground with Them to rebuild Their civilization there. The Soulshard, as They had come to call it, would allow Them to continue Their lives uninterrupted by the Dark for many ages.

In due time however, even the life-giving Light of the Soulshard dimmed to but a flicker. In the time of desperation, a religious cult seized power upon Their fear of extinction and introduced a barbaric policy of blood sacrifice. Even though the policy seemed far-fetched and far more radical than most of Them would prefer to follow, it bore fruit at first. The Soulshard miraculously reignited when regularly fed with blood, giving Them the hope they so desperately needed. But the Light of the Soulshard eventually took on a strange, silvery glow instead of its usual golden glory. The Light began to do strange things to Them. Over generations of inbreeding and exposure to the Ghostlight, Their culture mutated into a hive of diminutive albinoid creatures, only just recognizable as people any more.

Very rarely will They come forth to the surface. Even rarer do They interact with the other peoples, who only see Them as utter monsters. Maybe it's Their emaciated appearance. Maybe Their chalk white skin. Maybe Their ferocious battle prowess. But They are a people to be feared in the eyes of those under the Shattered Sun.

====''The Vampires''====
Even with the nourishing Ghostlight of the Soulshard, They still require some form of physical sustenance to survive Their harsh environs. As such, They had to resort to hunting the terrifying creatures which came to exist in the Dark of the surface. However, the creatures of the Dark can be just as fickle as those of the former world under the Cerulean Heavens.

They migrate. They are quick. They are cunning.

Sometimes Their hunters are unable to catch a meal for their kin underground. Long enough of such failure and They become desperate. They sometimes scrape up strange vegetation and fungi from beneath the permafrost. But there is the occasional case of the extremely desperate hunter who spots a stray Strobe or Tanner venturing into the Darklands. Almost assuredly, the hunter is able to capture the stray and bring him or her back to the caves underground to feed the rest of Them.

Despite Their culture of blood sacrifice, They usually use the blood of Their own and frown upon the killing of and especially the consumption of people who have absorbed the Light of the Shards. But sometimes the pangs of hunger overrule Their cultural tenet. They who end up eating the flesh and drinking the blood of such outsiders initially feel far more invigorated than Those who primarily rely on animal food and the nourishment of the Ghostlight. However, a truly horrifying madness sets in over time. The rest of Them have no choice but to exile one of Their own gone mad by such means to the Dark of the surface.

There are as many theories as to the cause of this madness, the Vampirism, as there are scholars and thinkers. But everyone knows the signs of one of Them who has gone Vampire. Her eyes glow a paralyzing shade of crimson as she stalks about her icy environs in little more than a loincloth. Once she springs into action, her speed is truly frightening. And once she strikes, her strength is enough to snuff out the Light from her most unlucky target. Her destruction knows no bounds, seemingly on the hunt for any and all life. Her hunt will only seemingly stop once the world is devoid of any life other than herself.

====''Reaction to the Light''====
While the Vampires are clearly an exiled lot from the remainder of Their culture, They as a whole suffer from a terrible stigma in the eyes of Citizen and Strobe alike. There's of course the issue of the Vampires running around the frigid landscape of the Darklands. And there's the brutal way of fighting They learned through Their hunting of the awesome creatures that roam the surface. But there's also a natural aversion to the Light of the rest of the world under the Shards.

For generations, They basked in the glow of the Ghostlight, which mutated Them somehow into the pale and lithe creatures They are now. The Ghostlight also seems to be of a lesser intensity than that of the Light which the Citizens and Strobes seek refuge under, making for far more sensitive eyes. Finally, despite the Ghostlight illuminating the caverns and nourishing Them in a yet unexplained way, it gives off very little warmth, leaving the caverns almost as cold as the surface above.

When introduced to the Light of the Shards, They show the signs of an extreme allergy to such energy. First, Their eyes become blinded and throb in pain from the sheer intensity of the Light. Over a short period of time, Their skin will show growing fields of blisters where the Light touches the most, giving the illusion of Their skin boiling to an observer. As exposure continues, Their internal temperature will rise to dangerous levels, making Them suffer not unlike an overdose of Stardust to a Citizen or Strobe. In the final stages, They will suffer similarly to that of a stroke, all while dehydrating to fatal levels.

====''The Lurkers''====
Despite the fact that most of society under the Shards see Them are mere monsters and nothing more, some of Them do grow an enormous sense of curiosity about the world of the surface, especially the world beyond the Darklands. Most end up perishing the thought, either through the needs of Their society, the danger of the creatures above, or the greater danger of the exiled Vampires. But there is occasionally one of Them who ventures out, never to return to the caves of the Soulshard.

They soon become nomadic and follow the Shards above, much like a tribe of Strobes. However, They travel in the Dark between the Light of the fleeting Shards, lurking just outside the Light's reach of a tribe at times. They are always at the peril of being noticed by a traveling tribe of Strobes, given their enmity toward the Their kind. Instead, They would try to meet a scout from the tribe if at all necessary. Most of the time, such a meeting is ill-fated, always ending up in a fight to the death. However, there has been a few recorded instances of a more peaceful meeting.

These Lurkers, as They have come to be called seem to be the only way the scholars and thinkers of the civilized world under the Shattered Sky learn anything about Them and Their culture. Monsters though They may be.

====''The People''====
[[File:Them Raider.jpg|150px|thumb|right|An artist's rendition of one of Their raiders.]]
The surface-dwellers know this much about Them - blood-thirsty creatures of a cult mentality who sometimes splinter off from their cult to better understand others around them. However, this knowledge is only the tip of the iceberg about Them. As a matter of fact, They consider the Vampires and Lurkers to be extremely fringe elements among Their society. The following is anecdotal knowledge of Their culture, passed on by a rare Lurker who made successful, peaceful contact with a Strobe tribe.

=====''The God of the Sun''=====
Long ago in the world under the Cerulean Heavens, long before the age of Kings and even longer before the Awakening, existed one People. This People looked up to the Sun in the sky above them and saw it as a mighty God, a God who bore the People from the mud of the world with only his benevolence. In return for the God's gift upon the People, the People brought forth gifts upon the God as thanks. Over time, the People recognized the greatest gift of all to their God, the blood of the God's children. Only through the blood could the God understand the lives and experiences set upon His children and find joy in His existence.

The God's joy brought forth lesser Gods to govern the wilderness around the People, Gods in which the People could more directly come into contact with. The God had hoped that delegating His responsibilities would give Him more time to understand his People better. However, some have come to ally themselves with these lesser Gods, who they found kinder and more peaceful than the God who required their blood for appeasement. The splintering of the People brought the God into a righteous anger, commanding His People to quash their heretical brothers and bring them back under the God's fold.

=====''The Shattering''=====
Witnessing the merciless, divine fury of the Sun God, the People continued to drift apart. Some of them further allied with the lesser Gods who grew in power thanks to their worship. There were others who sought to reform their worship of the Sun God to make peace with their splintered brothers and sisters. Others still sought to eschew their bonds under the Gods' control altogether. The Sun God found Himself growing weak from the dwindling devotion of the People, watching them disperse across the corners of the world. The weakness turned into loneliness, and the Sun God could only watch the very People be borne grow into their own, shedding their ties to the Sun God altogether.

In due time, even the lesser Gods felt the backlash of an increasingly disparate People, watching them splinter off into peoples of their own before they succumbed to a terrible slumber. However, the peoples continued to exist alongside the lesser Gods' domains of nature, allowing them to continue existing despite their slumber. The Sun God however met a far more awful fate. So drained of His power from the complete and utter lack of devotion, He would not merely fall into a slumber as did His counterparts. Instead, He would die in a brilliant flash of Light, His vessel shattered in countless pieces. But only the very few who still recalled the old days of His glory saw it as such. The heretics would only come to know of this as the Phoenix's Awakening.

=====''The Orthodoxy''=====
With the Sun God destroyed, the few who still carried faith in Him saw it as their ultimate forsaking. The Sun God has finally rejected his People in return for their rejection of Him. With the darkness and cold growing around them, the true believers went underground with a piece of Him they came across in their journeys in hopes of rekindling His glory. This piece of Him would become commonly known as the Soulshard, and its story would become well known through the world's travelers and adventurers. However, They (as the true believers would become known as to the outside world) would live through the Soulshard's demise and the further degradation of Their culture. As the bards of the surface recall, a cult would take over and bring forth a policy of blood-spilling to feed the dying Soulshard.

This cult claimed to have the knowledge of the Sun God from the People's earliest days. While the idea of spilling blood to feed the Soulshard understandably was met with resistance, the results were undeniable. They increased Their numbers and Their underground territory over time with the newfound powers of the Soulshard, even growing lush forests and jungles within the otherwise dark caverns with the Soulshard's Ghostlight. They even started to expand into underground Cities of their own, some of which rivaling even the mightiest Cities under the Shardstreams. The Orthodoxy, as the cult would come to call themselves, soon found themselves in a position of power beyond their wildest dreams.

=====''The Rebirth of a God''=====
Though They grew and prospered under the rule of the Orthodoxy, They also came to understand that They could only go living on under the Soulshard and the other Shards They would come to take underground from the surface for so long. A more permanent solution was required for Their survival. Facing this inevitability, the Orthodoxy presented an idea which most would consider laughable, at best. For a dying People however, the idea was so crazy that it had to work.

They had to reassemble the Sun in order to resurrect Their God.

They had to find all the Shards they could, for starters. Fortunately though, enough of their blood spilled upon a Shard would allow them to grow, so they didn't have to find every single Shard in existence, which would pose an impossible task. While this part was possible, there is always the problem about putting the Sun back into the sky. This part would require a great deal more muscle than They could collectively muster. For this task, They would require the assistance of the slumbering lesser Gods to put the new Sun into the sky.

=====''The Enemy Above''=====
As the true believers of the Sun God, They came to the realization that the lesser Gods would not reside with them underground, as the heretics above allied with them during the Shattering. Instead, the lesser Gods would most likely reside within the spirits of descendants of those who originally worshiped them long ago. They would have to venture above and find those who house the lesser Gods and free them from their bodily vessels. Given Their already present disdain for the Enemy Above, this was an idea that They could get behind - slaughter the heretics above and resurrect their God in one fell swoop.

There are circumstances which make Them pause before going out to do so, though. For one, there is the surface itself, an Enemy of its own kind. Cold and relentless compared to the incubating warmth of the Soulshard-lit underground, the Darklands above makes for challenging terrain for the People, requiring many layers of clothing to combat the cold and, if they make it there, resist the piercing Light of the Shardstreams. Then there are the detractors. They exiled the Vampires, which incidentally made them a second Enemy on the surface. More importantly, there are the Lurkers who seek peace with the Enemy Above. While largely unsuccessful given the Enemy's bias against the People, there are likely to be a few who are successful in Their endeavors. Such as the one who gave this information to the passing Strobe tribe.

=====''The Enemy Within''=====
Though They are largely united for Their survival, there is one issue which divides Them - the practice of sacrifice. Those in the core of Their civilization are very willing to give Their own blood to the Soulshards as there are more of Them concentrated there. Besides, Their blood is far more pure for the Soulshards' needs and indeed grow the Shards' power much better than that of outsiders. For the communities on the fringe however, Their relatively scant numbers limit their ability to feed their own blood into Their Soulshards. They have to resort for hunting for others to sacrifice to Their Shards, which in turn slows down Their progress compared to those in the core.

The disparity between the core and the fringe, as well as the factors above ground, force Them to bide Their time before launching Their assault on the surface. The quandary thus becomes as follows: bide too little time, and They will become too weak to succeed above; bide too much time and They may die off before They can get the chance to attack. They must figure out how much time They need to take before launching the offensive, especially before the Enemy Above catches wind of Their plans.