Howler Maze
The land juts from the sea, its spine of hills and jagged mountains riddled with black mouths of stone. Caves pierce the ground everywhere here, a thousand tunnels yawning into darkness, some no deeper than a cellar, others plunging beyond the reach of light. The air is damp, heavy with salt and the stink of mud. Locals speak of the Howler, a faceless man-thing that stalks the caverns. They say its screams can strip a person’s sanity, that its echoes twist the rock itself. Few return from the Maze, and those who do are pale, trembling, unable to speak of what they’ve heard in the dark. The coastline offers no comfort; the eastern bay is known as the Mudwater, a mire of sucking sand and brackish tide pools. Strange lights flicker there at night, and smoke sometimes rises where no hearth should be.
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