The Patino Falls

The Patino Falls were the terminus waterfall of the Inix River, just prior to its emptying into the north Feryll Sea. A great natural wonder, these waterfalls were the tallest and widest such waterfalls known in the western Saibh continent, with water cascading in an eight hundred foot plunge across a nearly mile-wide cliff face, landing in a brackish plunge pool before flowing into the ocean. This was by all historical accounts an awe-inspiring sight; the roar of the falls could be heard for miles, and ship captains would often anchor offshore for days at a time simply to behold the cascades in their majesty. The cliff face itself runs for several miles along the shoreline, and evidence of rock weathering suggests that the Inix occasionally re-routed its flow to cause the falls to 'move' several times in history.   While many sources claim the Falls to have been the largest waterfalls in the world, that title belongs to the recently-surveyed area of The Cradle, on a previously uncharted island deep in the frontiers of East Saibh.

While the falls themselves served as a fairly strict barrier between the freshwater aquatic life in the Inix and the Feryll Sea, the cliff face attracted large numbers of seabirds. Then-contemporary depictions of the Patino Falls almost always portrayed flocks of gulls and oceanic birds of prey in large numbers in and around the falls.

The Inix river is particularly languid right before the Falls. Prior to the construction of Patino, fish falling off the side of the cliff was a relatively common sight, with unlucky airborne fish typically being snatched right out of the air by a skilled bird. In the modern era, those fish simply find themselves falling through a series of waterwheels and aqueducts, occasionally being deposited into a storage cistern built into the cliff-face - the origin of the Patino Cisternfish.

No other site in the Principality of Etoile generates as much motive Power as that of the Patino Falls. The relatively languid tidal wheels in the Grand Canal of the Etoile Capital City support roughly thirty manufactories; the ever-expanding Patino Waterworks, embedded in the Falls and run by Fyysinvi, support over two hundred, with the Academy estimating that more than double this number could be established before exhausting the motive power of the site.

Prior to the establishment of the Principality of Etoile, the Patino Falls were a well-known natural sight, but largely left to its own devices. The fact that ships could not travel the Inix river into the ocean meant that the site held little trade or political value, and the petty kingdom that controlled the farmlands just upriver of the Falls did not deign to declare control over the Falls themselves, leaving them as merely a tourist attraction for naturalists and arists.   After The War of Unification, the First Princeps sent Power-engineers to survey all of Saibh in order to identify the best site for a new Powered industrial center, to drive wealth for the new state. The subsequent founding of Patino, the Machine City required the damming of the Falls into the new Patino waterworks in 631, in order to provide hydromechanical motive Power to the manufactories of the industrial city. The former cliff face is now cut through with waterwheels, cisterns, and other flow control devices, in order to extract as much motive power out of the Inix riverflow as possible before depositing the water into the sea. The stated objective of The Falls Revivalists is to undam the flow of the Inix and restore the Falls to their prior majesty.

Prior to the founding of Patino, well-heeled travelers and artists would seek the Falls for what many considered an almost-religious experience; merely standing in front of the vast falls impressed upon most their relative insignificance to the world, with the beauty of nature in full display, surrounding and enveloping the viewer in an auditory and visual feast. Expeditions to the lower viewing points, along the shoreline towards the base of the falls, were a lengthy and multiday affair, due to the relative remoteness of the Falls from historical trade and travel routes.    Patino is a thriving and bustling industrial city in the modern era, and is easily accessible by Power-Wagons or by sail, but the Falls themselves are only now a memory, captured in murals, landscapes, and journal accounts.