RIZING
POWERBETA V7.5.16 · RIZE OF POWER

Zyraxis is the ninth world of twenty-seven, and the only one where the gems came alive.

It is one continent, divided into ten districts, and each of them grew up around a single enormous gem buried in its ground. Beastlands in the west where the grass hides things with teeth. A silver oasis in the south. Forests that rearrange themselves. A machine-district that measures everything. Each one has its own weather, its own species, its own way of deciding what counts as normal.

You can walk from any one of them to any other. Nobody stops you. Plenty of things will try.

Every district has a Gemlord — the living will of the gem underneath it. They are not bosses standing in a room waiting for you. They are the reason the district is the way it is.

The crimson one in the west is dominance and predatory instinct, and the Beastlands behave accordingly. The pearl in the south keeps balance, and the south is orderly in a way that feels almost enforced. The amethyst at the centre is a sanctuary. The sapphire thinks in systems. The onyx receives and holds. Each district is a clue to the being beneath it.

Select a Gemlord's name to open their public record.

RakoronMalezor · Ruby IviriumZarvane · Pearl MutarynAndrannor · Citrine EmeralixVeridan · Emerald EurakeonNetharion · Amethyst AzurelVorashil · Sapphire ObsidiusXilnar · Onyx AmbrevonBaelgor · Amber OathaneThardin · IX OatheusKorathen · X

Ten seats. Ten gems. Ten presences older than every road built above them.

Select a gem to explore its natural power — in the land, in Zyrex, and in Rizers.

For most of recorded history, eight Gem Types were believed to define the natural limits of gem formation. Zyraxis also recognises two exceptional composite formations whose structure and origin remain closely guarded. From these ten expressions come the Ten Gemlords — but the final two do not share the same origin as the first eight.

Colour on Zyraxis works the way colour works everywhere — as a lean. The light is one thing before it enters anything; what comes back out tells you what it passed through. A gem’s hue alludes to the astralite inside it, and to the older colour language the whole saga is built on, where red is body and blue is mind and nothing is inherently good or bad.

So Ruby says instinct. Emerald says growth. Sapphire says intelligence. Amber says perfected form, which sounds like a compliment until you meet something that believes it.

Gems turn up everywhere once you start looking — in the ground, in what your Zyrex are made of, in the weapons people carry and the walls they build. Learning to read the colours is most of learning to read Zyraxis.

The last two are not single hues at all. Hold one to the light and several colours answer at once — which is the first true thing anyone can tell you about them, and the last thing this book will.

A Zyrex is a living thing with astralite in its blood, which means it can do something the rest of the world cannot. There are hundreds of species — grass-dwelling things the size of your boot, machine-things that rebuild themselves, drakes that were old when the districts were young.

They are tiered, one to nine, and the tier is not a difficulty rating. It is how much world a creature is made of. A tier-one is a complete animal. A tier-nine is closer to a force with a face.

Most evolve. Some do not, and the ones that refuse are usually refusing for a reason.

A Rizer is not a trainer. Nobody on Zyraxis uses that word.

Rizers channel astralite through their own body — the same substance their Zyrex are made of — which is why the good ones fight beside their partners instead of behind them. It is also why it is dangerous. Push too much through a human frame and the frame is what gives.

You start as a kid in the westernmost district with a backpack and no idea what you are doing. Getting registered is a morning's work. Becoming a Rizer anyone would trust takes the rest of the game.

You will climb, and the climbing is the point.

The Seers are a cult with a headquarters in every district and a very organised way of moving through the world. They wear the same grey. They are polite. They have a stated purpose and a real one.

What is not in dispute is the disappearances. People go into a Seer building and the district quietly stops mentioning them.

Everything that matters on Zyraxis is made of astralite, and astralite comes in sixty-three distinct signatures — arranged nine by seven, one full matrix, with a sixty-fourth that sits outside the grid and is not discussed in polite company.

Every Zyrex carries a signature. So does every relic, every gem, every weapon worth the name. Two things with the same signature recognise each other across a continent.

Sixteen of the sixty-three condensed into something else entirely a very long time ago. Those sixteen are the oldest objects in existence, they cannot be made, and the world has spent its whole history trying to get hold of one.

Every Zyrex has one or two types, and type decides how a creature meets the world — what it shrugs off, what goes straight through it, what it is quietly terrified of.

Twenty. They form a closed ring — every type is strong against exactly three others and vulnerable to three, so there is no perfect team, only a team that is wrong in ways you have planned for.

Long before the districts had their current names, a Rizer named Novarius did something nobody has managed since, and left behind a standing challenge for anyone who thought they could match it.

It has never been closed. It has also never been completed.

Most people treat it as a story you tell children. A few treat it as a career. And at least one organisation on Zyraxis considers it dangerous enough that they would rather it stopped existing — which tells you more about the Challenge than any of the legends do.

It is waiting for you. Not early.

It starts domestically. Your mother in the kitchen. Your sister needs walking to school. Your father is at work and has been promising you something for weeks.

By the end of that first day you are registered, you have a Zyrex, and an old Warden at the hall has agreed to teach you what the registration did not — which is everything.

The first district is small on purpose. Every system in the game is taught to you there by a person who lives there, and each of them will remember you for it. Then a road opens south, and the second district is not small, and it is already in trouble when you arrive.

Ten districts. Ten Gemlords. Sixty-three signatures and a cult with a plan.
Go and find out.