Suns Divide Desert
The center of the continent of Vandarel is dominated by a massive desert. The desert is known for its harsh and deadly landscape and equally harsh and deadly sandstorms that blow across the land charged with magical energy.
Geography
The Desert Center
The center of the desert is a land of glass. During the height of the Drac-Nu ritual, the center of Vandarel was reduced to ash, dust, and then sand. And yet the Suns continued to fall and burn, and soon that remnant was further reduced to glass. Despite this jagged and alien landscape, it is one of the safest locales of the Divide. As for some unknown reason, the magical storms of the desert do not pass over the center lands. As such, a nation has grown here with the City of Eternal Glass at its center and a variety of outlying communities ringing the center of the desert.Desert Dunes
The majority of the desert are seemingly endless expansive and empty sand dunes. Beneath the dunes are countless ruins and remains of the former First Empire, the centuries having buried these ruins and relics in endless sand.Oasis
Despite the destructive history of the desert, life has taken hold in some places. With the Penumbra being the thinnest over these lands, true light can shine down upon the minute remnants of plants that remain, and some have thrived. Although rare, life filled and life sustaining oasis dot the land of the Divide. And despite the constant sand storms that threaten the rest of the desert, that magical essence of life seems to provide some shroud and shield against the destructive magic of sand and sun. These oasis are often guarded by territorial tribes who see the oasis either as a heritage or resource to be coveted.The Northern and Southern Shores
To the north and south the waters of Vandarel's ocean provided respite from the devastation of the desert's creation. Here the remnants of the First Empire fled, if they could not flee further east or could not dare flee to the unknown west. City-states dot the northern and southern shores, filled with an eclectic diaspora of the former First Empire, each of them slowly developing their own cultures and histories throughout the centuries. Despite this remnant of survival, for every city-state that provides a pocket of civilization in the harsh desert, there are an equal number of ruins that did not survive the fall of the First Empire or the following chaotic years.Localized Phenomena
The greatest danger of the Suns' Divide Desert is its most known phenomena, the massive sandstorms that billow across the sands. These sandstorms are charged with magical energy gathered from the energies of Vandarel's twin Suns. Although the desert is shrouded similar to the rest of the world, by the protective clouds of the Ritual of Occultation, known as the Penumbra, these clouds are the thinnest and weakest over the desert sands. As such the storms are fueled both by the suns above and the magically charged sands below, to the extent those have been 'baking' and gathering the energies of the suns before the storms begin to gather and pull the sand into the air.
The most intense storms combine both natural forces and intense magic as air blown sand turns into shards of glass in the air. Both variety of storms, sand and glass, are often fatal to the ill prepared.
History
The Suns' Divide Desert marks the world of Vandarel's greatest wound.
In the center of the then fracturing First Empire, where the Suns’ Divide Desert now burns and roils with its eternal sand, the Drac-Nu fought and won a climactic battle during their war of annihilation against the other races of Vandarel. At the conclusion of the battle, while the routed forces of their enemies fled the field, the Drac-Nu completed a powerful terrible ritual. High above Vandarel the twin suns that provided light and life to the world began to fall. Lowering in the sky and bringing their heat upon the world. Forests began to burn. Farmlands dried to dust. Lakes and rivers began to boil.
“A grand ritual must be answered with a grand ritual,” is an old saying that most experienced arcanists will simply nod their head to in complete agreement. Where armies and martial might failed, the greatest magical minds and practitioners of Vandarel came together to counter the Drac-Nu. Across the world a shadow war was fought in the background of the true war, as magical masters raced against time to work a multitude of spells, inscribe countless runes, and rewrite the threads of magic to save Vandarel. Two years after the suns began to fall and burn the world their ritual was complete, shielding Vandarel from the Drac-Nu’s grand intent, but forever shrouding the world in oppressive clouds.
Although the ritual was stopped and the world was saved, one third of the world and continent was reduced to ash, dust, and sand, as a desert of magical creation and energy enveloped the center of the world. Forests had burned to cinder. Plains had blown away to dust. And mountains had crumbled. The most fertile and prosperous lands of the former First Empire were now nothing but desert. A desert that was filled with intense magical energy, residue from the ritual performed from the Drac-Nu and the intense power delivered upon Vandarel by its twin suns.
Within those magically charged sands are the remnants of the First Empire and the many nations and peoples that comprised the Empire at its height of power, right before the disappearance of the First Emperor. Despite the devastation of this land, peoples survived and eventually adapted. Coastal cities of various sizes dot the northern and southern shores. Large tribes of nomadic wanderers make their lives across the sand dunes. And within the center of the desert, inheritors of the First Empire rule a land of glass. All the while deadly magically charged sand storms constantly move and shift the land, further erasing and shrouding ancient history.
The desert splits the world. To the west, the cold of endless ice and tundra of the unknown. To the east, the remnants of civilized Vandarel, having barely survived dark times of chaos, cataclysm, and apocalypse.
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