The Cursed Rurateg Mountains (Roo-ruh-tegs)

"Why Do the Architects Hate These Mountains So Much?"

There is no more impenetrable landscape than the Rurateg mountains: it is a sub-range of the Adira Mountains that is also incredibly irradiated by Ederstone and infested with monstrosities. That is to say, the tallest and most difficult to navigate mountains combined with a level of ambient hostility second only to the Deverkel Wastes (to add insult to injury, Deverkel's Boiling Sea is right next to the Rurategs, and that waste constantly overflows into the Rurategs). No person has ever mapped the Rurategs while alive, not even the people who live there. 
There are communities in this place, even two lonesome mountain kingdoms: Uladahl and Kebbern, the isolated sanctuaries of the upper river. Granted, these kingdoms might be classified as sedentary mountain federations, but they are still bastions of permanency in an otherwise temporary and indecipherable land.

Geography

The Rurateg mountains are 550 miles across West-East, and 620 miles across North-South. There are six massive Ederstone deposits that serve as nightmarish nexuses of unreality, scattered across this vast mileage. Each nexus exerts slight influence over the surrounding territory, though the boundaries are fluid and any unreliable at best.

The Southern Rurategs

The most iconic and infamous of these zones are The Warrens, the Rurategs of the Southwest. The Warrens have a relatively small Ederstone deposit, and the massive climatic mutations are modest, but this doesn't mean that they are safe. On the contrary, the Warrens seem to have some strange relationship with the Boiling Sea of the Deverkel Wastes, which draws creatures and effects from the greatest of all Ederstone nexuses into the Warrens to incubate and multiply. The Warrens are filled with burrows and caverns that teem with alien life, and it almost seems like a zoo or monster museum at times - only the collected creatures are free, alive, and absolutely ready to eat intruders. The Warrens serve as a border zone for the Kingdom of Hain and the Empire of Eketen, but luckily don't seem to be actively pouring as many monsters as possible into the nearby settled states (only the occasional monster). 
Hell's Cradle to the West of the Warrens, is a nasty place for environmental reasons rather than its fauna. The Ederstone nexus here had the misfortune of landing in an area with volcanic activity, and the entire region has been transformed into a land of living fire, dancing poison mists, obsidian forests, and magma valleys. Most peoples don't mess with the Hell's Cradle, and Hell's Cradle is happy to leave them alone in return. 
The Marble Hive to the Southeast is a curious and strange place that is unusually "stable" one could say. The living ice and snow spirits can be perilous, but they rarely seek to claim new territory. The Hive itself is more ominous than dangerous... well, so far at least. It is a massive complex of living white stone and metal that encircles the Ederstone nexus and grows across the mountains for miles and miles. The Hive has perfectly preserved the ancient prism cities it has devoured and has even replicated them for some reason, generating new marble cities that are rarely actually livable. The prisms of those cities have also been stopped from dying, as their revenants and copies are kept re-enacting scenes of their lives in garbled orders throughout the wastes devoid of context and purpose. The Marble Hive has an unusual affinity for intelligent creations, though many of them are better at imitating people than being people - some of them seem to be solely devoted to luring people into the nexus to join them in eternal repetition. Frighteningly, many of the intelligent creatures seem to have learned magic somehow to enhance their existing magical potential. This is bad news for treasure hunters, who are often drawn to the Marble Hive's preserved cities and pointlessly generated treasure hoards. However, the relative stability is good news for neighboring settled kingdoms, who have to deal with fewer nightmare beasts.

The Northern Rurategs

Giant's Home is the Northern counterpart to the Marble Hive, though it is a little less stable. Mapping Giant's Home at all is a little tough, since the Nexus there actually travels in a massive creature; the geography actually shifts around it to make room for the traveling unreality. It seems that the most massive and biologically unsustainable creatures are drawn to nest in Giant's Home, from the Tarrasque to Titanic monsters. You'd think the shifting mountains and giant monsters would be bad enough, but you've also got the standard Ederstone wastleland nonsense. 
Silentridge is West of Giant's Home and is one of those "death traps everyone is happy isn't expanding". The last vestiges of the ancient Cursed Storm lies here as a perpetual fog swirling over the mountains and valleys. Frigid ghostly masses hunt from the sky, while great winds and periodically scour the landscape. Balls of lightning crawl across the mountaintops, screaming. The valleys closest to the Ederstone nexus get strangely more lush and inhabited, but not for good reasons: the nexus doesn't seem to want things to die, and animates any deceased life it has influence over. This can come with an illusion of flourishing abundance, or it can be nakedly undeath; it often poisons travelers with its influence. It is not known what the nexus itself actually looks like. 
Shininghell is the furthest Northwest part of the Rurategs, and it is an abundant land of rainbows and light. Glittery, dangerous, and full of movement; that must be the motto of Shininghell. The nexus itself is a swirling storm of glittery waterfalls and falling gems that defy gravity. 
The Fringe Nests, in the far Northeast, are cut off from the rest of the Rurategs by the settled kingdoms of Strovenka. They are still somewhat monster infested, but by less magic-dependent monsters and more "mundane" sorts of mutated beasts.

Type

Mountain Range

Location under

Stildane

Included Locations

• Hell's Cradle