Spires of Neharût

The Spires of Neharût, a name that means "the drowning night" in the tongue of Deshret, are a range of black and forbidding mountains in the deep southeast of Gallorea, rising beyond the monster-haunted Sands of Night. Together with the Hshron Mountains they wall off the hidden elven homeland of Elarean, though the desert folk who named them have no knowledge of the elves at all, and hold instead that the Spires mark the wall of the world and the threshold of the land of the dead.

Name

To the priests of Deshret, night is not merely the absence of the sun but a substance in its own right: a cold dark water that rises out of the ground when the light withdraws, and drains away again with the dawn. In their reckoning that dark does not drain evenly. It gathers, and where it gathers deepest it drowns the land. The Spires of Neharût are held to be the deepest such place in all the world, a range where the night pools and never fully lifts, and from which, the Deshreti say, all the darkness of the desert nights first flows. Hence Neharût, the drowning night: not mountains that stand in the dark, but mountains that make it.

Older charts, drawn before the desert cities learned their dread of the place, name the range only the Dreadspire Mountains. The Deshreti find that a child's name for it.

Geography

The Spires rise in a long black wall across the deep southeast of the continent, sheer and close-ranked, their passes few and their heights killing. At their feet lie the Sands of Night, a waterless waste that borders the settled lands of Deshret and that no caravan crosses willingly. The range runs on to meet the Hshron Mountains, and between the two of them they seal off the vale of Elarean so completely that the land beyond has passed out of the desert's knowledge altogether.

A curious thing is told of the country at the foot of the Spires: that dusk comes early and falsely there, a premature dark that slides down out of the peaks hours before the true sunset, so that a traveler may lose the day while the sky to the west is still bright. Whether this is a trick of the mountains' shadow or something stranger, the caravan-masters do not care to test. They keep to the desert's edge and turn back long before the false dusk can reach them.

The Sands of Night

The desert at the range's feet takes its name from the same belief, and it is among the most dangerous country in Gallorea. Monsters breed in the deep dark that is said to pool there: things that hunt by the false dusk and are never seen by day, and that grow bolder the nearer one comes to the Spires. The bones of the ambitious and the lost whiten the sand for leagues before the first slopes are ever reached.

What Lies Beyond

The Deshreti are certain that beyond the Spires of Neharût lies the country of the dead, and that the range is the wall the gods raised to keep the living from wandering into it. In this they are wrong, and instructively so. What lies beyond is Elarean, the guarded homeland of the elves, a people so withdrawn from the affairs of the world that the desert cities have never so much as heard of them and would not believe in them if they had.

The confusion is old and self-sustaining. Now and again a caravan will attempt the passes, or a grieving house will send its dead into the Sands to be nearer the threshold; and now and again none of them return. To the priests this is proof that the land of the dead lies close and jealous beyond the peaks. That the true cause may be the wards and watchers of a living people who suffer no trespass has never once occurred to them.

Legends

• That the false dusk at the Spires is the land of the dead breathing out, and that a soul caught in it is drawn through the peaks and does not come back.
• That the priest-cartographers of Deshret mark the range on no map, but only with a single warning-glyph, the sign they also set upon tombs, and that to draw the Spires in full is held to invite the drowning night into one's own house.
• That somewhere in the black passes stands a gate, and that the darkness of every desert night in the world pours out from beneath it.

See also:

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