Anauroch

This book explores all three regions of Anauroch, for those who want to go "Just Out There."   When we learned their aims, it was too late. We could not strike down what had been done without laying waste to all Tbril. Too high a price, we judged—and left them the harsh sands they had created. But for humans, memory is a failing thing, and today we see a savage desert that makes men as cruel and keen-sharp as sword blades or leaves their bones to bleach in the sun. Not even legends remember fair Netheril as it truly was; folk think of us as decadent, idle, wholly evil necromancers.

"I wonder how much else of the history we hold to be true is twisted thus?" —Rhaugilath "the Ageless," Lich-King of Orbedal

To folk in the Realms today, Anauroch (pronounced: "An-OAR-ock-hh") is a fierce, unconquerable desert, a vast, sundering shield between the Sword Coast North and the Moonsea North. It forces trade and travel into long, torturous overland routes between the westernmost ports on the Sea of Fallen Stars (chiefly Westgate, Suzail, and Teziir) to Amn, Baldur's Gate, and Waterdeep, mostly by way of Iriaebor and the River Chionthar. These strategic places are enriched by the endless stream of caravans, but merchants have always sought shorter, cheaper routes, often braving the "flat" but harsh Great Desert.

Always? Not so, say the sages: little more than five hundred years ago, Anauroch held little sand, and several verdant, wealthy human realms, with lakes and merchant ships of their own. At least one of these lands, Netheril, was then the height of human achievement in magic and the arts. What happened to so suddenly and thoroughly sweep all this away?

Most folk of Faerun see Anauroch as a scorching waste of sand, "The Wall That Near Divides The Heartlands," a good place never to go near. (What can be found in a barren desert, to be worth the dangers of the trip?)

Most folk, as is often the case, are wrong. The first thing Elminster said of Anauroch was that it is not a natural desert, and is not all hot sands. Anauroch today is three deserts: the hot, sandy place most imagine it all to be, called "the Sword" by sages because of the fierce human Bedine nomads who dwell there; a higher, wind-scoured land of bare rock, called "the Plain of Standing Stones," though very little of it is a flat plain; and in the north, a vast, rift scored ice sheet overlying bedrock, known as "the High Ice." These three areas were once very different. All held proud, rich cities of elves, men, dwarves, and others; cities that may still stand, buried or merely hidden by the vast desolation, their riches waiting. Elminster says Anauroch is "the largest, and probably wealthiest, treasure-house in all Ibril." Even those who agree can show few treasures recovered from it, but when this was pointed out, Elminster merely shrugged and held up an ornate, hand-sized carving of a spired castle. Strolling to the door of his ramshackle tower, he tossed it into the air, whispered a secret word—and in the meadow beyond his pool, a huge castle of black obsidian suddenly stood tall and splendid and very real.

"When too many guests come calling to sleep here," the Old Mage of Shadowdale said mildly, "I always have this; one of the least powerful magics of the Netherese, but the only one I've found in Anauroch. I haven't much time to go wandering about there, mind—this was just lying on a table, in an old house half-buried in sand. Where?" He smiled, and waved north- wards. "Oh—just out there."