Postby TarlimanJoppos » Wed Oct 16, 2013 11:04 am
It's your game world, put things where you need to put them. The Crimson Spire survives the fall of Sereatha, which IIRC hasn't happened yet, but becomes known as the Crying Spire.
The following is non-canonical, and may or may not be included in the Elven Nations book.
The last part of the descent from the mountains having been thus accomplished, we set ourselves to the task of navigating a path through the foothills. Let the reader not be fooled by my use of that word. These were no gently rolling hills, with lowlands between easily navigable. Far from it – they were crags in their own right, smaller enough than the mountains and in the right locations to be called foothills, but bare, jagged outcroppings of rock thrusting up from valley floors made of ash and hardpan. Finding a way through them took us nearly two weeks, not only from the difficulty of the terrain, but also from the fact that they extended considerably further than we had expected. The view we had had of them from the mountainside had been deceptive, their further reaches obscured by haze and ash-cloud.
Within the hills, we encountered our first denizen of the Wastes, a molgrim. The great ugly beast lunged up from an ambush point behind a boulder and laid open the shoulder of one of our cart-oxes before we could react. A scant few seconds later, it went running off with three arrows in its hide, but a haunch of ox clenched in its beak. We had to put the poor ox down ourselves. We made quick work of cutting off the better portions that the molgrim hadn't despoiled, and traveled hard the rest of the day to put distance between ourselves and the remaining carcass, knowing full well that where there was a predator, there must be scavengers, and having no wish to meet such. While there was fresh meat for dinner that night, we were also short an ox, and having to hitch up one of the spare animals far too soon into the expedition.
The hills gave us our first evidence of the Burning. The eastern sides of the rocks were bare of earth, stripped down to stone, and eroded as if by harsh winds. The ash lay less thick on the western faces, making it easy for us to clear it away and see what lay beneath. The obvious conclusion was that the prevailing wind was from the west, and the ash piled up in the lee. A close inspection of the stone by Tar-baden, our lead scholar in matters of the earth, brought forth two facts: One, the rock had been stripped of its earth by a force going west to east, and two, it had been eroded by a force going east to west. This matched the phenomenon seen in the vicinity of a fireball or other large explosion, where the blast creates a wind that carries away anything loose, including soil, thus creating a vacuum that Air rushes to fill, carrying airborne dirt, leaves, and the like back toward the site of the explosion. Anything not carried away by the blast is scoured first one way, then the other. A similar situation is seen in great fires, an example being the loss of the Otrovartid Forest twenty-three years ago. The flames consumed so much air that they created a fierce wind blowing toward the conflagration. That had less force than the inrush after a fireball, but created the same general type of scouring. The Wastes are covered in cinders and fly-ash. Certainly the Burning would have dispersed a great deal of ash, and the anxiety of Air to refill the void wold have created the contrary wind.
We therefore pronounced ourselves satisfied that we had found sufficient evidence to back the idea of the Burning in a general sort of way. Further exploration still remained necessary, of course, to find the source of the blast that had so obviously consumed the Western Kingdoms. Our other scholars, Vendelarian the master of beast lore, Urgruk the expert in plants, and our historians Kylendel and Apsitar, were anxious to find subjects for their own study, giving us additional impetus to carry on.
Andrew Ragland
Line Developer, 1879
