Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==The Dread Marches==

'''Icons''':  The Shadowfury

What is there to be said of the Dread Marches?  Even now, much of its interior remains a mystery beyond lurid tales of a bleak landscape where plants and trees grow in pained, twisted shapes and where savage terrors stalk the shadows.  One hundred years ago, it erupted into being in the hills north-west of the Basin, spilling fleshtwisted horrors and undead out in a wave of conquest; stopped by an alliance of nations, its rage has since quelled.  For so long it was a cursed place that no-one dared enter unless fired with a zealous desire to purge corruption and taint, but in recent years that has changed.  It has become evident that civilisation still exists in the Dread Marches, albeit in the form of the Shadowfury's authority.

Her true name is unknown, but it is said she looks not a day older than she did when she unleashed the Dread Marches.  Fearful whispers rumour that she is a master necromancer, a talented fleshtwister, the owner of terrible Elder technology, a demonologist or perhaps all these things together.  Once she fought for hatred and vengeance, but it would seem the years have cooled her madness.

The most reliable tales of those who have travelled into the Marches confirm that it is a bleak landscape, clearly direly affected by the fell magics unleashed upon it; nonetheless, it is not so inhospitable as it might first appear.  Several small townships exist amidst farms that are fertile enough to feed the population.  The monstrous inhabitants of the landscape, from the gibbering Dreadspawn to the immense ash leviathans, mostly leave the people well alone - indeed, a number of servitors guard and protect them at the Shadowfury's command.  The culture here is strange, mystical and reverential of their dark champion, but not half as strange as many of those who come to seek the Shadowfury's teachings in the arts of necromancy, fleshtwisting or the hate-fuelled mastery of the fury's style of martial arts.  Others come seeking knowledge of Elder technology, or to acquire actual artefacts of such.

Most stories of the Shadowfury confirm that there is a bastion at the Marches' heart, a likely Elder structure that probably contains the warp-vats and twystcrystal devices the Shadowfury used to create fleshtwisted minions.  A few reports by arcane-minded travellers and petitioners also hint that there are Umbral ruins in the Marches, several of surprisingly intact nature. A few surviving accounts from prior to the Dread Marches creation do seem to corroborate this, although the landscape has since changed and deformed so much that it's hard to be certain.