Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==Myrmec==

Myrmec is the name of the increasingly arid landscape north of the Great Eastern Plain; the southern, hilly reaches are now provinces under the control of Huron, but the Lord Commander's authority only reaches as far as the slow-moving expanse of the Usma river and the green belt of arable soil around it.  Beyond that, the habitability of Myrmec rapidly reduces further; barren hills, rocky badlands and, ultimately, the unforgiving Myrmec desert itself.

Signs of the beings that once ruled the Myrmec are clear - eerie, crumbling old structures obviously not made for human habitation, worryingly insectoid images carved into rocky cliffs, clay tablets covered in alien glyphs that literally set a human's eyes itching just to look upon them.  Here and there, old Elder relics slowly turn to rust amidst the arid badlands; immense black-metal girders just up, long since stripped of whatever structure they held aloft.  Whoever once dwelt here, they are long gone; the Myrmecians of today are humans, albeit with an unusually high number of earth and fire genasi amongst them.  These Myrmecians traditionally live in small groups of several families, bound together by a particular piece of their culture's philosophies or poetry - that is to say, the word-clan is genuinely the guardian of a given scrap of thought or text.  Now, the southern Myrmecians are vassals to the Huronese, but they are grudging and often rebellious.  As well as human inhabitants, so too are there a handful of wiry, lean desert gnoll marauder-clans; they have no love for the Myrmecians and helped the Huronese conquerers significantly as scouts and pathfinders, but now that Huronese conquest has slowed to a standstill, they are seen in a more ambivalent light by the new rulers of the region.

The desert proper is a strange, eerie place with a mournful air to it; ash and bone are plentiful amidst the sands and rocks, and it is scattered with the hollow, discarded, eroding remnants of past eras.  Vast strange devices, immense twisted bones and incomprehensible towers break the desolation, relics of a past age that now lie forgotten.  The beasts of the desert are also strange indeed, including immense, lumbering behemoths that look, from a distance, like great hills themselves.  It is here that the terrible Longfang herself is said to hunt from time to time; so too are there stories of the karkadaan, the lords of the desert, mighty creatures with a myriad of pearlescent horns that are said to be the children of behemoths and elementals and which consider themselves wardens of the old, rusting Elder artefacts of their domain.

The northern Myrmecians still live free from the Huronese yoke, and their society has transformed to resist any further aggression from the south.  New word-clans have formed, piecing together bits of philosophy and poetry into new, militant interpretations that are carried through by the clansmen and -women in the way they live their lives.  A number of priest-leaders have risen up over the world-clans, each the guardian of a number of different pieces of text that they have combined into radical new concepts and from which they in turn take their own names and titles.  It's no secret to the Huronese commanders of Usma that the Myrmecians have now fortified several ancient Dawn-era bastions and pre-human ruins in the desert, turning such ancient discarded husks into defensive positions; some claim they've seen desert behemoths turned into walking buildings, their backs holding great howdahs aloft.

Even stranger tales sometimes come from the depths of the desert - rumours of the Shining One, a sinuous, curling serpentine beast of glorious mien but sinister nature that is caught in some sort of eternal battle against demonic beings that stalk the far reaches, in a region where a Dawn War weapon turned sand to glass.  So too are there stories of pre-human ruins filled with rows of sealed ceramic pots that mutter and shake, and of a great tower guarded by beings of liquid metal.