Xak Khalan

Before the Cataclysm, Xak Khalan was a medium-sized free city known for its academic and religious scholarship. Sister to the powerful mercantile city of Xak Tsaroth to the south, Xak Khalan was a place of peace and learning. Tree-lined streets spread in a spoked-wheel pattern from a central plaza surrounded by impressive government buildings. Various city sectors were occupied by universities, libraries, temples, museums, cathedrals, shrines, and institutes studying magic and technology. A bustling theater district dominated the city's northern region, and shops throughout the city traded in books, scrolls, and ancient knowledge. Xak Khalan's scholars and experts were without peer throughout Ergoth and Solamnia, and even in Istar they were greeted with respect. For a thousand years, Xak Khalan stood as a shining monument to the power of learning and advanced thought, until the Cataclysm wiped it from the face of Krynn.
Like its sister city, Xak Khalan slid slowly into decadence and rot in the last few centuries of its existence. Where the people of Xak Tsaroth became greedy, hedonistic, and cruel, the scholars and sages of Xak Khalan became obsessed with hoarding knowledge. The city government cracked down on heterodox speech and thought, true teaching gave way to pedantry and simple rhetoric, and much of Krynn's knowledge was hidden, locked away in massive library vaults accessible only to the privileged few. Knowledge and education were pursued for their own sake, as trophies and marks of status rather than to be used for the greater good of society. In the end, just weeks before the Cataclysm, the city's head librarian destroyed millions of books, scrolls, and ancient tablets rather than let a restive public seize them from the library.
When the fiery mountain struck Istar, the entirety of Ansalon shuddered in pain. While Xak Tsaroth was consumed by the deluge of water rushing in to fill the basin of Newsea, Xak Khalan was destroyed by a raging fire and hundreds of devastating earthquakes. Survivors fled into the Sentinel Peaks and Solace Vale with only the clothes on their backs and whatever they could carry. Within a decade, most of Xak Khalan had returned to nature, consumed by fast-spreading marshlands and aggressive ironclaw trees.
Today, little is left of Xak Khalan. Much of the street grid survived, but it's buried under feet of bog and mossy, saturated ground. Few intact buildings remain, and they have been thoroughly looted over the past four centuries. Like Xak Tsaroth, Xak Khalan is said to be haunted and is currently inhabited by various dangerous creatures. Rumors persist of vast underground vaults full of treasure and the accumulated knowledge of all the people of Ansalon up to the point of the Cataclysm. If these vaults do exist, their contents have surely been looted or destroyed by encroaching water by this point.

Type

Ruins