Giant's Harbor

The largest of the steam-hidden, eddying harbors that define the north coast of the deadly Strait of Gehenna, Giant’s Harbor is the only place along the Gehenna coastline that truly teems with life. Always as hot as a hotspring (with subtle variations, depending on season and nearby volcanic activity), Giant’s Harbor is home to a wide variety of unique, magical, and heat resistant sea life. Here can be found rare volcanic minerals, magical sea plants brimming with medicinal or dangerous properties, and some say the most beautiful population of starfish and sea anemones in the world.
Here is also the one place in the world where one can find the elusive ruby mussel. Ruby mussel shells are a dull, near-black red on the outside, barely distinguishable from typical blue-black mussels, albeit somewhat larger than average. Inside, their flesh is strangely metallic-tasting and can be toxic in large quantities, such that they are rarely eaten. However, the mother-of-pearl lining a ruby mussel’s inner shell blazes in the wild oranges, pinks, reds, and yellows of a glorious sunrise, and when ruby mussels form pearls, they are brilliantly variegated red or orange.
Ruby mussels rarely form pearls (especially in captivity), and when they do, they are never perfectly round. A smooth, oblong ruby mussel pearl (often called a ruby pearl, lava pearl, blood pearl, or hell pearl), the size of a grain of rice, would be worth a thousand similarly-sized perfect rubies. Even ruby-mussel shells are worth extravagant sums, which is the primary reason why attempts have been made to keep them in captivity in heated pools, albeit with little long-term success.
Of course, one reason the ruby pearls are so precious, even aside from their rarity, is the near-impossibility of obtaining one from Giant’s Harbor. To the south of the harbor lies the infamous Boiling Maelstrom and beyond it the deadly-swift waters of the Strait of Gehenna. To the east and west, the harbor is sheltered by unscalable volcanic cliffs. To the north, the harbor is guarded by the fire giant village of Kreglarran, which is populated by fiercely territorial warriors. Some say that even the waters of the harbor itself are guarded and the mussel beds tended by a race of intelligent octopods with whom the giants have a treaty. If so, only the Kreglarran fire giants have ever seen them.