The Dragon's Eye
"There it is, sis. The Blinding Isle, right in the center of the Dragon's Eye."
They perched high in the branches of an oak, taking it in. The inland sea stretched out before them to the horizon, waves gently lapping at the fine sand of the shore. The island was far out in the water, but so large it was hard to tell exactly how far. It blazed with light, difficult to look at with her eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was as though every inch of it was aflame, or coated with gas lamps from Wroklinn.
"I can see how it got it's name."
"The isle, yes. Have you heard about the Eye?" She shook her head. "It's said that back when the world was made, an immense dragon lived and ruled with an iron fist. A mighty hero, his name long lost to history, slayed the beast. Bits of it's body can be found all over the world. Reportedly it's skull lies beneath our feet. His horns formed the hills around here, and the cavity of it's eye became the lake."
"What about that immense island?"
"The hero's weapon, embedded so deep into the earth he could not lift it out again."
Geography
The inland sea is surrounded by rolling hills carpeted by dense deciduous forest. To the south, the beginnings of the Ursine Mountains can be seen (though Drimotea itself is below the horizon). Those traveling to the North will find themselves in the flat grassy plains of the Catlands after a few days' walk.
At it's deepest the water is 150 feet deep and a dull blue. The mud along it's bottom is almost loamy-black and sticky with dissolved clays. The massive island rising out of the center rises almost 50 feet above the lake surface (built up by the human population as the first of many public works). The walls of the Shining City rise above that, concealing the majority of the City itself from view at shore level.
Ecosystem
The sea lies squarely in a temperate zone. The summers are warm, but mildly so, and the winters are bitterly cold, but short. Winter freezes the shallows near the shoreline as well as around the island, but rarely reaches across the deepest areas of the water. It rains here with some frequency- no less than once a week even in the hottest month of summer- and snows almost constantly during the depths of winter.
A couple different kinds of water weed grow along the shore at at the bottom of the lake. These are consumed by fish as well as the multitudinous species of water birds that migrate through the region. Birds have learned to avoid the island almost entirely, as any which come near are taken out by either hunting drones or the automated defense cannons. Instead they fly in wide arcs around it and nest (as applicable) in thick cover nearby.
Only about a dozen species of fish live in the sea. This is partly because most of these species once relied on swimming upstream to spawn at source-waters that no longer exist. Those in the Shining City have seen to their preservation (and further, their proliferation) by creating ideal spawning zones within the Dragon's Eye for each species, tended to by automated robots. This makes it easy to harvest fish from the waters without wiping out the populations. A similar farming technique is used for the one crustacean which lives here- the dragon shrimp. These monstrous arthropods are an important food source for Citizens and a delicacy fresh for the upper echelons of their society.
History
The Dragon's Eye formed on the Garden long before humans came. Once many great rivers converged here, carving out silt and stone til only the hardest rock- the island- remained. Over time the land shifted. Many of the rivers diverted or disappeared, and the outflow became blocked. The plain that the rivers had made flooded and became the inland sea seen today.
When The Endeavor entered orbit, the Dragon's Eye was striking- so large as to be visible from space and shaped in such a recognizable way. The island was all but deserted as well, a wonderfully defensible spot on a new, hostile world. And so they set down to colonize here- this was where it all began.
After the mutants left to spread out across the world, the City was built on the island, becoming a true fortress the like of which the original colonizers could only have dreamed of.
Alternative Name(s)
The Blinding Isle
Type
Inland Sea
Included Organizations
Owning Organization
Related Ethnicities
Comments