Ch. 2: In the Body of the Devourer.

The first place all who are devoured are greeted by a great marsh filled with the blood and corpses of the Devourer’s victims . A ceiling of rusting steel and half lit, red lights enclose the marsh. Lurchs, beasts, and flatboat scavengers patrol the area looking for their next meal. Surrounding the marsh are doors, vents, tubes leading to the City of a Thousand Faces and the Guts.

Overveiw

Around 1,400 square miles on its surface and reaching over 10 miles deep, The Knot, sometimes just called “The City”, is the main home for those who survive within Devourer. The Knot is made of a shell of Ichor hemacite below which is an almost Earth like surface layered on top of a great sphere of calcium phosphate. The surface of the Knot has largely been transformed by its residents into the only sustainable area of agriculture for the survivors of the Devourer. The Devourer eats not only people from all walks of life across the world but all ideas and memories and this reflects in the city. The inner city itself is an endless knot of streets, tunnels, rooms, and complexes within the great sphere. While more consistent in nature than the rest of the Devourer the layout of the city is still very dream-like; major passages interrupted by random plaster walls, old fashion half-timbered buildings that somehow hold the weight of soviet era concrete apartment blocks, Sod roof style homes made of astroturf & playground plastic laid out like a suburban cul-de-sac, and painted skies that look more and more real the longer you stare at it. Even the laws of physics are not always consistent with doors that lead to places they logically shouldn’t, areas where gravity pulls could pull people in one direction but objects in another, and rooms containing less than nothing. The deeper you go the more stable but less human the Knot becomes. Near the bottom the walls return to the calcium phosphate of the lower ‘crust’ but much more porous and honeycombed, the gaps filled with a strange gel.

Governance

The expansive nature of the city and the great mix of peoples has led to a diverse settlement with no central governance outside organizations like the Green Staff, Amber Rangers, and the Trade Union.

The Civilization

In The Devourer the term civilization has been taken back to its roots as the society of the civitas, the society of the city, for without The City there can be no lasting human society within the Devourer. Outside the Knot the constantly shifting environments, hostile creatures, and unpredictable anomalies make settlement difficult and large scale settlement impossible. Even without these problems or general problems of logistics, areas of relative safety and stability are not safe from the biggest problem, that of Soulless Birth.
Soulless Birth is a condition where newborns go catatonic after their first independent breath.