The Frozen Wastes

In an area far to the north east, there is a land of ice and snow where one can see for miles across the flat desert frozen wastes.   The Frozen Wastes lay beyond the Diamond Mountains, named after their untouched beautiful icy peaks. Very few explorers have made it to the Diamond Mountains for it is well known to be a wasteland where nothing of interest lays.   There are old legends that have it that every century or so in the harshest of winters, an icy road links Autauga to some land unknown. It's a legend or folk tale that people in the northern country tell their children around a cozy fire on a cold dark night.  The tavern keep at Shades Mountain Tavern and Inn will tell you wild tales if you ask for them. He claims that the tavern and mountain beyond it were named for the Shadow Demons who came across the ice road from that foreign land, killing livestock and causing terror for miles around.    The village of Shades Town is small. And it's smaller than it used to be. It is mostly made up of farmers and a few doughty families who have lived there so long that they can't imagine living anywhere else though they make a hard scrabble living.   The funny thing about it is that there's an old feed store in the center of the village that was turned into a repository for books around 90 or 100 years ago. Testaments to events that happened during the period known as the Shade invasion fill the primitive shelves and the paper rots away from disuse. No one comes to Shades Town to visit the library these days. Some of the villagers think the place should be razed to the ground to build something new and different, something special that would attract tourists but the folk there can't quite agree on what should be put there in its place.   The small village is even smaller now but one only has to visit their strange library, converted from a feedstore, to find the crumbling records of sightings, oral records taken down by the monks and priests of the cleric Apostles as they called themselves. They were determined to stop the Shadow Demons from traveling further inland. They kept many records.   The Tavern Keep seems to be most enthusiastic about relating the stories from the last century about the Shade Invasion but he's never visited the library that is within sight of his business. He tells the stories to entertain the guests.   He shakes his head sadly about the dwindling number of travelers that stop by. North of the inn is the mountain itself. Travelers coming up the witch wood trail can see the mountain that frames the picturesque tavern and inn long before they can see the building. It is an imposing sight. The mountains are dark green, they appear black sometimes ahd there are often clouds that cover the mountain's peak lending a mysterious atmosphere to the whole area.