The Red Wastes

The Red Wastes suffered sudden destruction and sickness about fifteen years before 1034. Paths run beneath the ocean between there and the Mines of The Free, and the party's notes place it in the Rubble Belt.

The pirates of The Broken Bones turned the Red Wastes into a bubble in which time passes differently, sealed under a red sky and powered by imps. Inside lay the city of Mahovana (Mahavana), with a conservatory holding a teleportation portal; Clef Neverthirst guarded it. The party entered in 1034, destroyed the imps and burned Clef in the light. The bubble's contract, "the Red Bubble", was among those Olaf tore up in Dis. A later Sending found only a massive crater, and no sign of the sphere of annihilation the party had left there.

The camps

Six camps of survivors live in the Red Wastes outside the dome: Camp Paradise, Camp Blessing, Camp Jubilee, Camp Harmony (led by Glyndan), Camp Fortune and Camp Ambition. Each holds perhaps a thousand people, hardy but gaunt and poor. Nothing grows, fishing yields little, and the camps raid one another almost weekly. Many people show slight mutations, mostly hidden under clothing: webbed fingers, gills behind the ears, skin flaps from arm to back under their capes, sharpened claws, stony scaled skin on some of the elders, and scars around the mouth on a few. The party arrived at Camp Jubilee, where the elder Tanari guided them. Vashana, great-granddaughter of the dead scholar Thelhan, keeps some of his knowledge, and the echo knight Salud also lives in the Wastes. Camp Ambition (Am S'shon), near Mahovana, had been ravaged by jackal-headed beasts; a few women and children hid beneath a secret floor among the gored dead.

The Shell

The Shell is a great shimmering dome of red energy on the horizon, slowly expanding. Inside it time runs about three thousand times faster than outside: years pass within while only minutes pass without, and leaves falling outside seem to hang in the air. Under the changed light the plants have grown very dark grey and impossibly thick, and trees straddling the edge are strangely mutated, their inner halves far older than their outer ones. Beasts have retaken the forest, The Axebane, except for a small clearing by a shack, and the wood woads of The First roam it. A family of three rats lives at the edge of the bubble.

At the centre, a few corrugated-iron shacks surround a manhole and a hand-cranked lift that drops about half a mile into a bunker, where imps work the machines that generate the bubble. The machine draws its power from a sphere of annihilation. The bubble is the product of Meradana's wish through The King In Yellow.