History & Cultures · Regions

The Swirl

Location

Off the south-western shore, named for its shape

Elevation

No more than 1,000 feet above sea level at its highest

Approach

Dangerous rocks to the north; impenetrable dead water elsewhere

Settlement

Haelast Outpost, nominally part of Nashriam

East

Rocky, barren and uninhabitable where it meets the Blight

Centre

The abandoned remains of an enormous structure nobody can explain

A strange stretch of land off the south-western shore of the continent, curled into the shape that names it and rising at its highest only a thousand feet above the sea. The whole island series is ringed by dangerous rocks to the north and impenetrable dead water everywhere else.

Its five strands are barely alike. The east is rocky, barren and uninhabitable where it converges with the Blight. The western strands are tropical but thinly wooded. The southern strand holds a deep jungle no civilisation has touched. And the strand at the centre carries the enormous abandoned remains of a structure that the Blight and time have long since rendered inoperable.

Haelast Outpost

The only settlement is Haelast Outpost, an exploratory village and fort living off fishing and hard small-scale farming. Adventurers and scholars make up most of the population and take turns as farmers when they are not standing guard against the monsters that roam the strands. It is nominally part of Nashriam, but the difficulty of reaching it leaves it far more independent than that suggests.

What draws researchers

The water on the northern side enters in a way that produces tides found nowhere else. Wave-sized flows are driven to the centre of the islands, and the backflow usually leaves by the east — but once a day the northern strands see a high tide rise to twice its normal height before draining away again.

Several biomes sit side by side on the Swirl and appear entirely disconnected from one another. The blighted eastern strand has almost no tide at all.

Past the eastern shores runs an undercurrent strong enough to carry deep-ocean creatures into the inlet by the northern strands. Karanodrin, the sea between the Swirl and the mainland, is otherwise dead water, save for a very large vortex near its centre.

The monsters here are almost all unlike their mainland counterparts, and they yield cores to match. That rarity is what brings hunters, and what makes the islands worth the crossing to the ambitious.

The strands

Eastern. Blighted, purple and brown, sickly and ominous, with a tide that matches nothing else in the world. Claimed by neither monsters nor people; nothing ends up there but death, null daemons and the occasional wandering madman.

Northern. Sandy and lightly tropical, partly submerged, heavy with algae and sea life and strong coral. Its monsters are fish, amphibians and marine invertebrates rather than anything large and clawed — which does not make them safe, only quieter about it. They surface on the high tide and can be caught exposed on the low. Their cores share no shape, only brightly neon colours.

Southern. Dense jungle: sweltering, oppressive, green and umber and shot through with vibrance. Land and beasts have taken the strand over completely, and this is as far as even the bravest travellers are willing to go. Cores taken here carry intricate helix patterns across their surfaces.

Western. Sparse, open and flat. Most of the ordinary-seeming animals live here, alongside large lumbering herbivores of a size with a brown beast. Creatures from both the northern and southern strands use it as hunting ground, and the currents in the bay occasionally fling deep-sea things onto the shore or into the shallows. Essentially every kind of life on the Swirl can turn up here, which is what makes it dangerous.

Centre. Tunnels, ruins and emptiness around a submerged megastructure of enormous size. Researchers who have seen it suspect the whole Swirl was built for some purpose and are set on working out what.

The waters between the strands hold monsters enough to give the most foolhardy pause, so despite the far more direct crossing by water, nearly every expedition walks around the Swirl from the northern strand by land.