Arcane Heap
The Arcane Heap, located in the ever-deepening Forged Basin, is a rusted, oozing, tragic, detritus-filled monument to artificery and magical experimentation.
The landmark stands hundreds of feet tall and wide on an otherwise flat plain populated only by marshes and bogs. Every kind of abandoned golem, construct, rigging, platform, wand or scepter, arm or armament, tinkering, tool, rusted shell, rusted screw, scientific failure or spellcraft that the mind could ever conceive...has ended up in this colossal arcane landfill.
The Arcane Heap is a knot in The Web. A twisted tangle. Things there come to life no matter how much they were never intended to be, no matter how flawed their schematics or programming. They simply animate. They simply become.
Not only that, but in the last several decades, reports have come that magic is unreliable elsewhere in The Spicemarsh. Spells don't fire accurately, or fizzle, or flare in the wrong direction; overwhelmingly, they just don't work at all. Theories posit that the Arcane Heap is siphoning the magic from the surrounding areas, the tangled nest of the Web growing and pulling threads from the surrounding area. The Arcane Heap isn't just magical. It is the only magic in the area.
To the south of the Heap, the massive Jona's Wall stands as a barrier to keep the arcana from leeching into Mother's Gift and the continent's primary farmland. No one expected the Heap to keep growing like this. No one expected it to be so huge. No one expected it to start taking for its own, to steal magic and parts from elsewhere, to craft a facsimile of life, necromantic robotics in a dumpsite. And now? They didn't have to feed it, for it fed itself, making it nigh impossible to stop. It was unquenchable, ravenous.
It wasn't supposed to get this big.
Hazards & Traps
The water in the Arcane Heap is poison. The air is poison, thick with rust flakes and the tang of iron, seeping into pores.
But more than all of this, the Heap is dangerous because this much concentrated arcana doesn't lay still, doesn't simply die. The Heap is rife with robotic appendages dragging themselves along, abandoned helper constructs clamboring over each other muttering how may I help you in quiet warbles, guard dogs of electrum sinew prowling with screeched howls echoing into the night. Surveillance drones shaped like tiny jeweled insects swarm and sting and bite, ensorceled weaponry prototypes firing unenthusiastically with batteries constantly recharging on the surrounding mana fields.
History
The Arcane Heap started out (as far as anyone can tell) several hundred years ago (although generally agreed to be after The Breaking, when the need for artificing rose sharply as The Web became a limited commodity) as just that: a landfill, a deliberate dumping ground. Artificers and smiths had many a spellshell to discard after their experiments continued to fail, no magic taking hold, a graveyard for failed inventions and hopes of reclaimed glory.
Even after the Godcrafting restored the tether to The Web (for some), the practice of dumping rejected, broken, failed, or unwanted pieces in this area of The Spicemarsh continued, discarded arcana oozing from broken metal bodies and unwanted commissions. If you were any sort of tinkerer that dealt in magic, be it a swordsmith, an armorer, a botmaker, an architect, your scrap ended up in the Arcane Heap. Some places made it a point to collect all of their broken bits and bobs, unwanted doodads, screws and washers and bolts, into large wagons to haul the long (sometimes very long distances) to dump their scrap there, even if it meant trekking for weeks to do so.
Why? People just sort of shrugged, and muttered some sort of "that's where it goes" or "best place for it" excuse. They could have started a new Arcane Heap. Every city, every workshop could have one. But artificers know that even discarded, broken tech can be dangerous, imbued with intent and then left to rust with the magic still dripping like ichor from broken vials or cut fuel lines. No one wanted that in their backyard and anyway, the Heap was already there, right? Might as well use it, right? Out in the middle of those damned swamps, no one needed that land, no one cared, right?
And over time, folks realized they didn't even need to make the journey to that tetanus titan. Their scrap would be sitting, ready to go on its journey, and then...poof. Gone. They'd come out the next morning and it was gone. Of course, people at first thought it was theft of some kind. But when a few keen artificers put tracking spells on their own junk piles to sniff out the thieves (and it should have been their first hint that it was not normal, given the thieves struck every night, all over all of Ostelliach, unsighted)...the results were all the same: that their old metal had wound up where it belonged, in The Heap.
The Arcane Heap continues to grow every year, siphoning the detritus of Ostelliach's inventors, a magnet for their discarded dreams and Davincian mechanations. It weighs so much that the land around it has depressed into a lake, a pool: the Forged Basin, deepening each year, muddy marsh water mixing in, tinged with rainbow slicks of pearlescent arcane oil slicks. The lake forming there teems with self-animated robotic fish constructs, opaque liquid as much magical runoff and steel silt as it is water.
Tourism
At one point, it became a dangerous coming-of-age rite for the region's teens to spend a night in the Heap, go several hours surrounded by construct corpses. Since magic has become unreliable from the Heap's magnetic mana drain, this is less and less common. Few value dares or bragging rights more than their lives.
Founding Date
210 AB
Type
Graveyard