Divine Spots of Interest

Subject: Places a Divinity is widely held to be associated with
Evidence: Local practice and local story. Almost nothing is confirmed
Common Thread: People who live nearby behave as though it were true, whatever they say
Caution: Several of these are lethal for reasons unrelated to any Divinity

Some places on Aropria are treated differently by the people who live near them.

That is the only claim this article makes. What follows is what travellers report seeing, what locals avoid, and the story each place has attached to it. In almost every case a Divinity is held to be involved, and in almost every case there is nothing to confirm it beyond the fact that everyone acts as though there were.

Whioma

An island of enormous natural beauty in Lake Kea, kept as close to untouched as its owners can manage, with a high-class resort at one end and a research institute at the other.

Guests come for the flowers. Researchers come for what the island does, which includes a great many unexplained happenings generally blamed on the pool of congruence deep within it. Some hold that a Divinity is in residence and that the pool is the sign of it. The institute is harder to enter than the resort, and the resort is not easy.

Atagata Isle

Off the coast of Alvania, and known to locals as Cannibal Isle. The Alvanian story is of a stranded son who killed and ate his father; the son was never heard from again, and everything on the island has been wrong since.

Alvanians steer clear of the shore and pay their respects at a distance. The plants and animals there are described by everyone who has seen them as horrors. Some hold that a Divinity is present and that the story is a warning rather than a legend. Others hold that the story is a cover for something else. A few adventurers sail there to settle it. None has come back in living memory.

Qala di Ciel

The city above the cloud line, which most of the continent knows only by rumour.

It is isolated in a way nothing else is, and not by any choice of the people said to live there. One persistent account puts a Divinity there, content to sit above the world and watch it — though whether the inhabitants would recognise them as such is another question entirely.

The Hanging Gardens

In Beteje Forest, north-west of Anock: a secluded place of unusual calm that almost nobody finds.

Those who have describe it as tended — every vine placed as though on purpose — while also being certain nobody lives there. It is one of the few places sprii gather in numbers. Something is held to keep it, and to be away from it for long stretches without it ever going to ruin.

The Blighted Lands

A land void of anything anyone would call life, and the one place on the continent where congruence cannot be reached at all.

It is the only entry here that inverts the pattern: what is held to be attending to the Blighted Lands is held to be attending to their spread. Whether that is a Divinity, a process, or a story told to explain an unbearable place, nobody can say.

The Anock hunting grounds

On the plains of Anock, where bands of Arak roam.

On nights when stars fall, one particular stretch of ground is said to glow with a strange teal light where a star comes down, and the Arak nearby begin a hunt to bring something back to it. Those who succeed are said to be rewarded. What with varies considerably depending on who is telling it.

The Sea Spine

The strangely straight run of peaks rising from the sea between Zingare and the mainland, most of it just below the surface.

Sailors avoid it, and not for superstitious reasons: it drags water down alongside itself and has wrecked a great many ships. Some call it a mountain range. Nobody knows what it actually is, and the stories about how it got there involve a fight nobody witnessed.

The Temple of Row

Wherever Row is currently held to reside. See The Faith — the laudites of the Southern Post are considerably more confident on this point than those of the Northern Climb.