Ayen al-Tinnin

Ayen al-Tinnin, the Dragon's Eye, is a great pristine lake set high among the Peaks of the Wyrm in the extreme southeast of Gallorea, in one of the last places on Baltheron where dragons still rule the open sky. It is among the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, yet so remote and so deadly is the country that holds it that few mortals have ever laid eyes upon it, and fewer still are believed. To the dragons who wheel above its shores it has another and older name: Vaeloth Zar, "the high water."

Name

The desert folk of the southeast, who know of the lake only through rumor and the raving of the lost, name it Ayen al-Tinnin, the "Dragon's Eye". In their telling it is no mere lake but a watching thing: a single vast, unblinking eye set in the roof of the world, through which the wyrms observe all that passes in the lands below. To speak of it plainly is thought unlucky, and to seek it is held a form of suicide.

The dragons make no such poetry of it. In the wyrm-tongue it is Vaeloth Zar, simply "the high water," a name as flat and ancient as the peaks themselves. That the greatest wonder of the mortal imagination is, to its true masters, a plain fact of geography, is perhaps the most that any scholar has ever truly learned about dragonkind.

Geography

Ayen al-Tinnin lies cradled among the highest of the Peaks of the Wyrm, walled on every side by cliffs and by the thin, killing air of great altitude. It is enormous, its far shore lost below the horizon of its own curvature, and its water is famously clear and cold, undisturbed by mill, net, or oar. No river of note is known to feed or drain it; it simply lies there, held in the stone, older to all appearance than the ranges that guard it.

The approach is the true barrier. The lake sits at the heart of a country ruled from the air, where anything that moves across the open slopes is seen, and what is seen by a dragon is seldom left alive. Between the desert realms and the peaks lie leagues of trackless waste and then the killing heights themselves. No road leads there. No caravan has ever reached it. The maps of the Ashran cities mark its place only with a warning.

The Dragons

The Peaks of the Wyrm are among the few regions where dragons still hold uncontested dominion, and Ayen al-Tinnin is reckoned the heart of that dominion. The eldest and greatest of the region's wyrms are said to keep its shores, and mortal lore holds the lake sacred to dragonkind above all other places: a thing they will suffer no lesser creature to approach, and will cross a continent to defend.

Why the dragons prize it, none can say. Some of the desert priests hold that a dragon drinks from Vaeloth Zar but once in its long life, and that the water confers something no mortal should covet. Others say the lake is where the wyrms go at the very end, to sink into its cold and vanish, and that its floor is paved with the bones of ages of dragons. Both tales agree on one point: whatever the water is to them, it is not for men.

Rumors and Legends

• That Ayen al-Tinnin never freezes, however bitter the height, as though warmed by some vast slow fire slumbering beneath it.
• That its surface is so perfectly still that a dragon may descend to gaze upon its own reflection, and that this, and not any thirst, is why the eldest come.
• That a single mortal has returned from its shore: a cartographer of Deshret who is said to have crossed the wastes in disguise and looked upon the lake for the space of one breath before fleeing. He came home with white hair, a map he would let no one see, and a madness that never left him, insisting to the end that the water had looked back.

See also:

• Peaks of the Wyrm

 

This article is part of the Player's Guide to Gallorea

Introduction ·  Economics and Trade ·  Legends and History ·  Religion ·  Regions and Realms

Regions and Realms on Gallorea

Geographic Regions · Nations and Realms