The Sleeping Beast
Twisting for miles along Lamordia’s southern horizon, The Sleeping Beast is a brooding, jagged mountain range whose peaks resemble the vertebrae and ribs of some colossus long dead. The name is more than poetic: from a distance, the range looks eerily like a curled-up giant—head nestled in mist, limbs hidden beneath moss-slicked rock and tangled forest. But what earns the range its name in hushed Lamordian whispers is not its shape, but the terrible suspicion that something within it still moves.
The Sleeping Beast is a place where the rules of nature fray—a geological wound layered with failed experiments, lost explorers, and something more ancient and nameless buried deep within. In Lamordia, where the pursuit of science eclipses morality, this mountainous border serves as both wall and warning—a grim reminder that some boundaries were never meant to be crossed.
“The Beast sleeps now. Best pray it doesn’t dream of you.”
Geography
The slopes of the Sleeping Beast are choked with warped and stunted trees, their trunks twisted into unnatural shapes and their bark riddled with veined, tumor-like growths. No consistent explanation exists for this deformation, but scholars speak of resonant geological disturbances, subliminal vibrations, or even tainting from ancient blood spilled upon the mountain’s stone.
Paths through the Beast shift over time. Trails mapped and marked one season are buried or redirected the next. Some believe the mountains themselves breathe, and that the land slowly rearranges itself, coiling and flexing beneath the weight of Lamordia’s sins.
Places of Dread Within the Sleeping Beast
- The Maw: A gaping chasm shaped like a mouth rimmed with stalagmite “teeth.” Locals say it moans before avalanches.
- Strickwald Grove: A patch of forest where time passes unevenly and shadows crawl in directions that make no sense.
- The Pulse Stones: Veined rocks that tremble faintly, warm to the touch despite the alpine chill.
Fauna & Flora
Within the forested crags and dark canyons, twisted wildlife thrives. Albino mountain lions with eyeless faces, birds with mirrored plumage and broken melodies, and packs of predatory beasts with too many limbs or mouths are whispered of by trappers and refugees alike. Lamordia’s outcasts—fleshwarped experiments, fugitive constructs, and hermits of hideous intellect—vanish into the Sleeping Beast to escape persecution or continue their obsessions in secret.
History
Some believe the range is not a mountain at all, but the petrified corpse of a god, a primordial being whose dreams poisoned the land. Others claim the range is the cocoon of some titanic horror, not yet awake, and that each tremor in the stone is the twitch of a dreaming limb.
Lamordian rationalists scoff at such tales, but even they avoid deep expeditions into the southern heights. Every decade, some brilliant expedition sets out to chart the interior… and is never seen again.
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