I know I just wrote a huge block of text as a reply to Hex's last discussion, and should give you all a sec to catch your breathes, but wanna also have a SPOILER-centric thread(that's this thread) but it's all short stories or snippets that have to do with this world?

I feel like they might get pretty lost if we post them here, so maps, sketches, short-stories/snippets, and maybe language spreads can be put on that thread for us to look over and get opinions on, but we keep the big discussion points over here?

Man, I really wish we could have a discord server right now :/ It'd be so much easier to organise. Unless... do y'all wanna try?? :D

I'm gonna post my response here bc otherwise it'll get all squished and that BOTHERS ME GRR.

Yep, falling frogs! We need some of those. Except maybe not frogs? There aren't frogs in the desert, are there? Falling gummy bears? Falling welded-together gummy bears? (Look, if I'm not being realistic, blame it on the fact that it SHOULD be a Monday—I keep getting Monday vibes from things—but it's a Tuesday instead and I can't seem to internalize that.)

Oh, Central Sands Empire! That makes more sense.

Wait, so I'm pretty tall, so am I more in-touch with heaven than the average person? *thinks* Oh-kay, unless general cluelessness means you're closer to heaven, then I don't think I am. Oh well... 

Ghosts do go well with water. Basically what you're saying is that ghosts don't really like Earth OR Sky, and I assume they don't really like Water either because they're just kind of crochety (tbh all the deities are kind of crochety). Or maybe ghosts (and Water) could like Sky just to spite Earth, kind of like a I-don't-really-like-you-but-I-hate-Earth-more-so-I'm-going-to-pretend-to-like-you-okay-just-play-along-thanks.

Physical, Mind, and Spirit sound good, although maybe we could combine two of them into two main parts? Like physical and mind could combine so it's just Zombie and Spirit—okay wow maybe not. It's a good idea (yours, not mine), but I'm not sure about where it is at the moment—mostly about the names/split, where do we draw the line, etc? And not to be existential, but what are "life" and "death" anyway? There's a pretty fine line between them, especially if there's some kind of afterlife (besides I never understood if they were dead or alive when all the fancy demigod heroes went down into the underworld, like Orpheus). Is there a way to go from death to life? Are you reborn? Can you follow a lute/lyre (I never remember which one he played) player back from death? Or are you just stuck in death ~forever~?

Maybe Life (and Death) are offspring of all three deities, so none of them have a "claim" over it, it's pretty "fair" or at least makes it's own decisions. And I don't think life should be goody-goody while death is evil, I like the idea of them getting along with each other. Maybe some people worship life as the evil twin, reasoning that existance causes inevitable pain and heartbreak, and seeing death as liberation from that? It could be cool to flip the normal way of seeing things.

I'd say probably bury the remains, because that's associated with Earth (instead of fire, which is more minor than earth), meaning each deity would have a part of the death ritual. Lol "wet stuff" yeahhh I know about canopic jars (in 4th grade, I think, I mummified stuffed animals, made a sarcophagus + death mask + etc + canopic jars in which we put the guts—AKA stuffing).

And yeah forensic pathology and true crime are awesome :D (have you heard of the "Nutshell Studies" by Frances Glessner Lee? I find them morbidly fascinating. And The Hot Zone (book) is so creepily good. Okay, I'm getting distracted oops~).

Maybe heaven could be forced on the people, kind of like a "believe this or ELSE" kind of thing, but nobody really believes it, it's just used as a tool to enforce stuff? Idk I thought it might fit with our current elite vs common people dynamics.

I RESPECT YOU WATER I SWEAR CAN I HAVE A PEACEFUL AFTERLIFE? Thx! Anyway... I see your reasoning, and I agree, Earth doesn't seem much like a "heck" kinda deity, Water feels much "darker" (although that's not the right word bc we just agreed that it wasn't really dark/light or evil/good but whatev). And yeah, we should totally have multiple civilizations with their own cultures, so we can save the heaven stuff for a different one where it fits better!

Fusion between cultures is reminding me of the gummy bears again. AFSOIJAD STOP MAKING ME HUNGRY.

Oh. Thoughts. Those are hard to come by around here. I think—nO WAIT I don't think, that's the whole point—my head's mostly filled with spiderwebs by now... 

So what if colors had specific significance?

- Gold/yellow could be sand, maybe sun—heat? Warmth? it could represent eternity, because sand seems to stay forever-ish.

- Blue could be sky or water? Maybe it represents change, like how the sky changes with weather (it's raining nonstop where I live, ugh), and water changes with tides and currents and stuff.

- Black/dark brown could be life/fertility? In my mind this stems from soil, especially the kind I picture as coming from near the Nile in Egypt. Lighter brown/maybe some kind of yellow could represent death, like crops left too long in the sun, which would both tie back to golden sand/sun/heat killing crops and be close to black/dark brown life, which kind of builds on the idea that life and death are close to each other, not opposites.

- White could represent greed—maybe from diamonds? Or from cleanliness—clean robes?—which could be viewed as something only the elite and the rich who don't work as hard as commoners would have.

- Green could be ephemerality/longing, because green plants wouldn't be seen in the desert very often. Or it could be time, like different crops bloom in different seasons.

- Red could be power, maybe stemming off of blood? It could be a color the elite use to build difference between them and the commoners—stuff in red would belong to the elite.

Maybe each color also belongs to a specific job/group/tribe?

Thoughts? 

Going back to colors, I like all of your ideas about white, Jaybells. They make a lot of sense.

I was just thinking, though, what if there is a color (or really anything else, I guess) that these people have never seen? Like purple or something—is there anything purple in the desert? I don't think so...? So maybe it's so unknown to them they don't have a word for it in their language.

This could work with more things than colors, of course, like maybe weapons—in the ancient history of the people, a different group could have invaded with "newfangled" weapons that the CSE people didn't have words for in their language, because the weapons were so new. I believe this has happened in the real world before, too, only I don't know an exact instance.

But on a flip side, maybe they also have words for stuff that no other langauge has, although I don't know what those would be. (Like there's a word in Japanese that means a circumstance couldn't be helped, so why worry about it—basically saying that worrying won't stop bad things from happening, it'll only stop you from enjoying the good things, which English uses as a saying, but doesn't have its own word for it. Or, if you've read Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, there's a moment when one of the characters (Inej) shares something about her culture—that they have no word for "sorry" because they don't believe in apologizing for stuff you've done wrong, they only believe in saying they won't do it again.) Wow, that was a long parentheses.

And yes, Rora, I wish I could meet y'all in person. Sometimes I wonder if I know some of you, and I just don't know I know you. Which would be very sad...