The Reach

That you have heard it before - the claim that no man has entered The Reach and returned to speak of its ineffable expanse - that its inextricable horrors and beauty are so indescribable as to be beyond our wondering experience. I have not lied, but I must be forthright. I did not enter The Reach. The Reach entered me. ~~~ Samuel Kerth, Essays on the Reach: The Land South of South and North of North - A Personal Account

Summary

The Reach is a colloquial name for the fractured and variegated expanses surrounding Vildrel's central continent. The lands are invariably ill-explored and worse-inhabited, inimical to even the most hardy breeds of chimera; the clay-sodden and inaptly plateaued islands poorly conceived for extended passage for all but the disconsolate Clayfolk.

To tarry surmisions of The Reach writ-large would be a foolhardy measure; its climes, raucous and uneven, flitter fecklessly from capricious to staid with little impugning rhyme or reason. Constructs within its domain merge deep with the loam beneath them, as though hewn directly into the very soil of the Reach itself, to cede back into waylaid pebbles and exposed lodestone but meters away. Clay stains deeply here, even along precipitous cliff-faces and callous cobblestone, there are shavings of the material in surfeit, which suffuse so deeply that even the inhabitants of these forsaken lands wear proud the marks of sculptors byzantine, shuffling about the most illumined and illustrated creatures of the realm.

Type

Expanse