Lore24 Mar 10: The Inexorable March of the Deserts

It is one of the great and terrible truths of the world: the deserts are growing. Each year places that used to be farmland are abandoned as nothing grows there any longer. Some years it’s barely noticeable, and in some years huge caravans of people move towards the more central territories, as their crops failed and they face starvation. The desert marches ever onward, relentlessly.

The reason for this is much speculated upon. There are of course those who believe that it is the gods’ punishment, though no-one seems to agree on exactly what it is they are being punished for. Failing morals is a popular choice, as it is easy to not elaborate on, leaving the details up to the listeners’ imagination. A different theory is that this is simply the way the world was set up, whether intentionally on unintentionally by the gods (as the gods are not not believed to be omniscient, or omnipotent, many hold that this is due to a mistake in how the world was created). Of course the desertification is also popularly attributed to demons or other enemies of the gods. Then there are those who simply refuse to acknowledge it is happening at all.

This process is one of the many reasons why large empires are falling apart (other reasons include plagues, earthquakes, volcanoes, and foreign invasions).

 Image by Mostafa Meraji

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