Winter Wastes

At the very northern edges of Aterica beyond the Karhold mountains and the northlands of Kaidos lies the desolate Winter Wastes. These wastelands are a land of permanent winter, covered in thick ice sheets, glaciers and frozen plains. Here the ice age that has gripped Calera over the last few million years is still in full effect and despite the warming temperatures elsewhere, the glaciers and ice sheets show no sign of retreating. In fact the entire region is incredibly stable and has barely changed in the last 500 thousand years.
Amongst the snow covered plains and ice sheets, pockets of warm geothermal and volcanic activity break through and give some of the smaller animals and creatures a chance to live in the wastes all year round. In the summer months swaths of tundra and and grassy permafrost surround these hotter pockets. Great beasts like the Manoc, Loras and the Razorclaw roam between these pockets in search of food, constantly battling the freezing temperatures and struggling to survive. In the winter months, these area of respite are once again covered by snow and ice and most of the larger animals are forced to migrate southwards.

Within the depths of the ice sheets some of the heat and geothermal energy from below creates a strange regional effect known as hollows. These hollows are carved out of the ice sheets to create interconnecting caverns of colossal size. These hollows often have bare earth and rock at their bottoms or even lakes of warm liquid water. While the insides are still cold and mostly frozen, plants and animals are able to survive more easily here than on the surface. At the tops of these hollows a thin layer of clear ice tends to form, kept frozen by surface conditions and kept thin enough by heat from below that natural light penetrates deep within. Even so this light from above is thin and fleeting, barely enough for plants to grow at all and during the winter months it disappears entirely. The formation and continued existence of the hollows is not an entirely natural phenomenon, for it is here that archaic people known as the Atins have thrived for thousands of years.
The Atins are not the only creatures to thrive within the hollows and many of the surface creatures that find it so hard to survive on the surface sometimes trek down the larger passages to relative safety. But this is only possible for a few of the larger hollows and any surface creature runs the risk of encountering the natural predators within. Apart from a few of the larger more accessible caverns, most of the shadowy underground is isolated and cut off from the outside world. This has led to many plants and animals evolving into distinct variations of their surface cousins and are perfectly adapted to the low light conditions. Fungi are among the most successful species, with large “forests” of huge mushrooms covering much of the ground in many of hollows.

Type

Region

Location under

Aterica