Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

=The Eastern Drakkath Plains=

Although quite varied terrain, the bulk of the eastern end of the Drakkath is lowlands and plains; sometimes the land is broken by karst, and the occasional mountain rears up, but the expanse is mostly grassland and wooded hills.  A myriad of rivers break up the landscape, feeding into mightier waterways like the iril-Khun and the Djantao that feed into the White Bay.  The hinterlands of the city-states are usually fairly well-ordered regions of agriculture, minor settlements and military outposts, but travel far enough into the wilds and one will find independent townships and smaller communities where the lands become more rugged and rough.  Old Imperial highways thread towards west towards the Central basin, and these are of very varying states of repair.

It would not be inaccurate to consider the Eastern Drakkath Plains the most civilised and tamed of the Drakkath due to the influence of the city-states, but it would also be a mistake to assume that these maritime powers fully control vast regions - they do not, and even those lands they do control are the subject of frequent squabbles and conflicts.  However, as the years pass, the ports are becoming more capable of expanding their reach over the hinterlands and the plains beyond, grasping once again for the power of a past era.

In the south of the plains, the lowlands are split by the brooding bulk of the Khayadan mountain range, a spine of peaks and highland that reaches as far south-east as the borders of Qyashun.  As well as playing host to several remote settlements and isolated religious settlements, the wild Khayadan highlands are known for both beasts and monstrosities - the former due to the fact that a swathe of the forests that abut onto the range were once the Imperial Hunting Preserve, and it was seeded with many rare and exotic animals for the pleasure of the Imperial Family.  Now, goblin clans and far stranger creatures besides dwell amidst the peaks and crags, and haunt the broken, steep valleys.  It is also rumoured that a pair of some sort of spined, winged creatures called 'manticores' that were once part of the now-deserted Imperial Zoo Gardens must have survived to escape and breed, for reports from nearby regions of carnivorous, spiked sky-hunters have been growing over the years.

The Khayadan does have one noted bastion amongst its folded mountains - a Grumandic temple sanctuary.  The place is reputedly near-impossible to reach if you do not know the correct path, and this is a secret only carefully given out to trusted Grumand priests.  A sect of elemental practitioners dwell in this sanctuary, apparently locked in an ongoing struggle with another faction in the high mountains - a cabal of magi and fleshtwisters.  Ascertaining how much of all this is true is a difficult endeavour, but some of the aberrations coming out of the mountain range are certainly stranger even than the cages of the Imperial Zoo ever held.

The deserted city of Ayuthai slumps in the northern region of the plains.  Once a powerful city, its population left during the Dawn War and never returned.  Now Ayuthai is a mournful place, just tumbled stones and empty collonades amongst which trees rise and creepers clamber.  It has a reputation for being haunted or cursed, and few tarry long near the empty city's boundaries for fear of angering ancestral ghosts.