Pylae Adflatua -- The Blighted Canyon (Pie-lie Ad-fla-too-ah)

Do you have any idea why I obey the dragons? I have no love for them, nor they for me or my people. No, my friends. When I was a princeling, barely more than a boy, the halfling governor of the province took me far to the north, to the Pylae Adflatua. When I saw the jagged cliffs and ruined buildings through the poisonous mists, I asked what had happened, what this place was. "It is the remains of the people who dared to defy the Great Ones," he said to me. He didn't need to say anything else. The warning, or threat, was clear enough.

King Caeso of Iuxta Mare

North of the Spine of the World lies the Pylae Adflatua, a cursed and desolate canyon that formed during the Dragons' destruction of the ancient human city of Aquilo and the great lake called Lacus. The waters of the lake sit stagnant at the bottom of the canyon, and a festering swamp has grown up around it over the millennia, somehow managing to survive the acidic and poisonous air that surrounds the lair of the black dragon Xidnaf, the ultimate architect of Aquilo's destruction.

Geography

Unlike canyons formed over aeons by the slow erosion of water, the Pylae Adflatua formed violently and suddenly during the Destruction of Aquilo when the Black Dragon Xidnaf, now called The Destroyer, and the Copper Dragon Vorthurdis fought. She saw that he and his kind were spreading a terrible magical blight throughout the city, rather than merely using his breath weapon as all of the dragons had agreed before the attack. Though she was his elder by at least a millennium, she found herself no match for him, and he snatched her by the neck from the air and dove down into the depths of Lacus with her. The force of the crash was so great that the land was rent in two for nearly three hundred miles. Rainwater and snowmelt fill the southern base of the canyon as it once did the lake, but it sits stagnant with nowhere to go. It is only about 200ft deep at the waterline.

Ecosystem

Thanks to the presence of Xidnaf and his brood, much of the area is a fetid, festering swamp, especially in the southern part of the canyon where a waterfall descends from snowmelt off the Spine of the World. The dragons' acid breath and tainted nature cause even hearty plants to rot and fester, and all animals in the region look emaciated and sickly for their species, though the beasts of the swamp are more ferocious and fearsome than any such beasts elsewhere. Plus, the Black Blight that the dragons spread during the attack on Aquilo lingers, twisting animals into revolting monstrosities and causing plants to twist into poisonous, thorned things that can feed and house no beast. The dragons' servants-- the Kobolds, Dragonborn, and chosen Halflings-- must all be of Black Dragon stock or granted a Black Dragon's blessing or else the Black Blight will infect them. There are beings wandering the canyon that were once Kobolds, Dragonborn, and Halflings of other scales, but now are cursed, feral things. And if the Black Blight weren't bad enough, the undead remains of the poor souls who once lived in Aquilo still creep through the vile canyon, enacting their vengeance against any foolish enough to enter.

Localized Phenomena

The Black Blight is a terrible thing that lingers in the poisonous air surrounding the Pylae Adflatua. Halfling scholars have determined that the Black Blight is not any sort of infection like that of blood fever or plague. Rather, it is a kind of magical miasma that seems to have developed within the Black Dragons themselves and is expelled with their breath weapon. Magically, it acts more like a curse than any living infection, and has the essence of necrotic and transmutive energies, but nothing shaped by udalila can replicate the effect. Particularly devout worshippers of the Black Dragons insist that this a divine power greater than any of the other Great Ones' abilities, and some scholars fear that they may be correct.

Type

Canyon

Location under

Summa