JUNRAN YANG

World of Khurganor

“

The beasts cried low,
a sound carved from fear and loss.
Their swarms cloaked the free lands in shadow.

Yet, the warriors stand still,
silhouettes obscuring against the horizon.
Their notes of courage long rhymed at the land of Khurganor.

"

i The world I

I Character/Creature I

Eclad

A half-cyborg—metal legs, reinforced hydraulics. A frame built from a disconnected past, like the standards of the war lost to history. Or perhaps a sacred medallion of an ordeal.

Folks couldn’t read his face or make sense of the scripture he muttered beneath the golden visor. Nor did they recognize such resolute in any man they had known. A man, or a machine? An exile, or an exemplar of his tribe? The ascetic offered only a name, Eclad, that he came from the far western Rim, marching across the continent toward the other end. He didn’t say why. The walker didn’t stop—day, night, dust, rain. Pilgrimage or penance? No answer followed.

His passage kicked grit into the air, shaking those who dared walk beside him. Yet he stopped in the village for one night—to recollect, perhaps. Something about these lifted yurts stirred a glimmer beneath his cold breath. When dawn finally peeled the grief in front of him, the engine whirred. The machine took over. He left.

“Please help us—we could really use a man like yours—those monsters—”

Eclad paused. And for the first time, faces back to the west.

Wargor the Beast

No one in the village knew when they first came, nor where they were from. Chimeras, some said. Monsters of flesh. Yet truth had a twist from the corpses gathered over generations. Botanical veins pulsed beneath their skin. Vicious seeds twitched in the underbelly—too erratic to be alive, too precise to be random. Limbs barely clung to torsos. Roots seemed to stitch one part to another.

And then the ribbons. The icons. The relics sprawled across their forms—intricate knots, etched metal, golden blades. Too deliberate and too human. Artifacts that scraped at the edge of thought: Wargors were made. But by whom—human, something ancient, or even aliens—no one had answered, not in generations.

They came in many shapes. They moved fast. They tore through every breath and bone alike. Villagers raised barricades. Thousands gave their lives to keep the horror at bay for their loved ones. But each year, the same creeping mist lurked at distance—silent, pale, and slow. And when it touched the gate,

Wargor had come.

Nogoo (Green-walker)

It keeps count.

Twenty, maybe thirty sheep-things. One girl. One machine. That is the unit. That is the task. It shoulders crates, lifts the tent, checks for cracked valves and frayed wires. It even leads trails the locals have yet to walk. “It’ll be a good service bot,” folks said, back when it was brought in pieces and patched together.

Nogoo likes stars.

It can feel the edges of something—like a password nearly recalled, a fading telegraph mapping out a constellation just beyond its sensor range.

But morning comes. The girl whistles. The herd moves. And it follows them both.