The Lin Crater

The second Elven war was ended with cosmic finality when the Moon Elves pulled a comet from orbit and crashed it directly into the homeland of their enemies, the Lin Elves, in an event that blasted through the crust and cracked the mantle of the world. It took some twenty thousand years for civilization to recover, and in some ways the land never has.
The impact point remains a seething hot bowl of semi-molten rock and poisonous gases from deep inside the planet, surrounded by impossible black glass mountains that can cut like a blade and ringed by perpetual storms fueled by the high heat hitting the moist cool air masses coming down from Kylma and the sea. The guts of the planet still bleed out here, bringing with them foul air and malaise that mutates life into misshapen and horrific monsters. Elemental forces of fire and earth clash for supremacy. And deep below - transformed by this cataclysm but still certainly there - the wealth and magical treasures of the great progenitor Elven race, the Lin Elves, the inventors of Arcane magic.

Geography

Roughly circular but on a massive scale, over 600 miles across (France would fit inside with only a little overlap). The crater itself is punched several miles deep, but the surface is an active lava pool reaching dozens of miles still further down. On impact it reached all the way into the planet's mantle, and would have destroyed the world were it not for the efforts of the Lin Elves to use their magic to hold the world in one piece against the moment of impact. Over the millennia this has begun to cool and reharden deep below the surface but it is a gradient from liquid magma down to thicker and thicker material until it's fully dense and solid dozens of miles below.
A ring of mountains made of fused sand glass and carbon from organic matter - the fields, forests and even bodies of the Lin Elves - rings the crater to a height of an additional three to nearly four miles above sea level, in an uneven distribution with few passes all the way through. These are cooler with altitude on the exterior face and heated on the interior, so that they are slowly being pulled back into the center and now slightly angle inward after twenty thousand years of drift. The overall effect is of a massive claw trying to close and keep whatever is inside, inside.

Fauna & Flora

The lands are more akin to the hellscape of the plane of fire than to a normal ecosystem; strange flowering vines called Mourganias that exude a superheated sap have filled the primary niche of plant life, but obviously these can only be eaten by other creatures whose natural state is magma hot; herds of stench kine normally found only on the lower planes roam the soft stone mountains, devouring the Mourganias and any small animals besides, including a species of hairless rat that coats itself in a layer of mucus nearly an inch thick that steams off constantly. What it lacks in concealment it makes up for in opportunism, working in packs to hunt down older or weaker stench cows.
Various elemental beings including Azers, Efreeti, Fire Drakes and Salamanders, and all sorts of fire mephits can be found in some numbers, though actual permanent settlements and residents are few; most of these brings travel freely from their home planes to this point of the Orbis as they desire, but their nature is still tied to their elemental plane.

Natural Resources

Though the material is virtually impossible to mine, the magma from deep within the planet brings up interesting mineral wealth and the igneous rock is laced with both rare earths and a significant amount of low-grade radioactive material. The sap of the Mourganias is also valued for alchemical purposes. The black obsidian is poor because the cooling speeds are slow and material has time to crystalize.

Alternative Name(s)

The Scar; The Black Valley;

Type

Crater / Crater Lake / Caldera