The Blades of the Master

Geography

A roughly triangular field, approximately 50 miles on a side, of hoodoos, fairy chimneys, and perched boulders rising from the surrounding flat expanse of salt pan in the Upper Marodeen Sea. The spires are vaguely conical, rising to points, but are wider in the east-west direction, giving them a blade-like appearance. The formations range in size from the size of short trees, to barely a dozen feet wide at the base and not much taller, to soaring towers a hundred feet wide and 300 feet tall. They tend to be arranged in clusters that resemble hills, with the tallest spires in the middle and the size decreasing towards the outside of each cluster. All of the hoodoos are made of layers of rock salt and soft stone; all but the smallest of them is topped with a sharp "cap" of darker stone. The westerly winds have been blasting the formations with fine salt crystals for thousands of years, leading the western-pointing "edges" of the "blades" to have an especially sharp, almost polished appearance.

Natural Resources

Salt.  That's pretty much it.  Clearly the Marodeen who dwell in and under the Blades must have access to fresh water and food, but its source is a well-guarded secret to everyone.

History

On the top of several of the tallest "blades", the weathered, bleached remains of ancient ships lie, impaled on the jagged stone.  Almost five thousand years ago, as the Marodeen Sea evaporated into nothingness, the greatest ships of the Marodeen Thalassocracy were grounded here, on what had previously been a series of rocky, undersea hills.

Many, many generations later, the now-nomadic
Marodeen rediscovered the site, which the relentless, dry wind had already begun shaping into the form it has today. Remembering the legendary Master of Blades whose betrayal had lost his people The Gem of the Perpetual Sea, they named the stone spires piercing the hulls of their ancestral homes the "Blades of the Master". Eventually, subsequent generations of Marodeen discovered that the bases of the "blades" could be easily carved out, and that the ground beneath was formed of much the same material. They built hidden storage bunkers and secret stops for their caravans, protected by hundreds of miles of flat, open expanse in every direction. Gradually, this grew into the closest thing the Marodeen have to settlements.

Type

Rock Formation

Location under

Upper Marodeen Sea

Related Tradition (Primary)

• Marodeen Rite of Passage