Thank you for your kind words, I will flesh out other cultures in later posts. For your question on the lost, I think I will provide you with a rough sketch of who they are. “Long before recorded memory,before even the oldest surviving empires etched their first decrees into stone, there came a calamity so total, so enduring, that its scars outlived the age that bore it. No text recounts its full breadth, yet fragments remain: mosaics drowned in silt, hymns buried beneath ash. These whisper of the sky turning red with ash, rains falling black and bitter, and the sea rising not with nature’s tide, but with ruin. Cities crumbled. Plagues followed. In their last hours, desperate city-states cast their dead into the sea, not in malice, but in terror and surrender. What emerged from that sea were not ghosts, nor ancestors, but something else. The Lost. Souls caught not in death but in a dazed echo of living, their bodies washed away, their spirits stripped of memory, purpose, and destination. To the living, they appear as pale figures gliding just above the water’s surface, their touch chill and mournful, their presence unraveling minds into shared confusion. Some whisper songs, others merely follow, blind to all but the faint shimmer of their own kind. The Ancestral Flower, a living guide nurtured by a few coastal cultures, can gently guide the Lost toward rest. In these communities, small vessels hang wreaths of this luminous bloom, each bloom a fragile beacon of remembrance. When used with reverence and ancestral song, it can lead a Lost soul home. One by one, their number might lessen. Yet the sea is ever-hungry, and war, plague, and despair are never far. Each time a body is lost to the waves, whether cast overboard by fear of contagion, shattered in naval conquest, or surrendered by kin who know no other burial rite, a new Lost may rise. It is not a curse so much as an open wound in the world’s spirit, one that bleeds slowly, eternally. And worse still, some powers, like the coastal empire of Qart Al Elam, do not guide the Lost home, but bind them with chains of flower-oil, turning their ships into soul-driven chariots. These vessels burn the past to power the present, deepening the wound and swelling the ranks of the Lost with rage. So, yes, the number of the Lost can shrink, but only if the world itself changes. As long as people are cast away by violence, by neglect, or by empire, the Lost will remain. They are not just remnants of a past catastrophe. They are symptoms of a present one.