The Scorched Crescent
Frontier of Ash and Ambition
Stretching like a broken blade between the Federated Suns to the south and the Draconis Combine to the north, the Scorched Crescent is a land forged by fire and blood. It is not merely a mountain range, but a vast region of volcanic ridges, desert valleys, and ash-choked badlands, scarred by both natural fury and generations of war.
Blackened peaks claw at the sky, their slopes laced with molten rivers and treacherous stone bridges. Cracked basins shimmer with heat between the mountains, and salt flats bake under a pitiless sun. Southward, the Crescent gives way to searing desert; northward, the land hardens into steppe and broken forest. The very bones of the land bear witness to a history of elemental magic and martial conflict.
Though magic can be rare across the Sphere, the Crescent clings to its remnants fiercely, with ruins of the League of Stars lying buried beneath ash and stone, surrounded by veins of strange minerals and crystallized formations, products of elemental upheaval, that are prized by Runewrights and alchemists across the Sphere, ghost stories warn of ancient forces slumbering beneath the mountains—forces better left undisturbed.
Despite its dangers, the Crescent’s wealth draws miners, salvagers, and fortune-seekers. Small camps and fortified towns mark the safer fringes, but every settlement lives in the shadow of danger: volcanic eruptions, raiders, or the rival ambitions of the Great Houses.
The Elemental Wars left deep scars here. For ten years, House Davion and House Kurita armies clashed along the Crescent’s cruel passes, summoning elemental magics and martial mysticism in a desperate struggle.
Entire valleys remain uninhabitable to this day, poisoned by unstable magics or scorched clean by arcane firestorms. The few who survived call them "the Ghost Valleys," where the stones themselves remember the screams of the fallen. Skirmishes still erupt along the old battle lines, and both Great Houses quietly maneuver to secure what they can and eye the Crescent’s riches warily, knowing that to cede control would be to invite weakness, and that to overreach could reignite the flames of war.
The Scorched Crescent endures—an unforgiving crucible where fortune and ruin walk hand in hand. It is a place where the earth itself rebels against ambition, and where only the ruthless find lasting triumph.
“The Crescent never forgets. If the fire does not take you, the stones will.” — Marshal Iraj Hensarling, veteran of the Elemental Wars
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