Absenia

The Southern Pole

  A very dormant and strange place.

  But one of the most studied and revered landmasses on the planet, it holds secrets lost and trapped in time, leaving mysteries more abundant than a horde of gold to be uncovered by those who dare venture to this strange and almost unworldly wasteland.

  It's not easy to call it cold.

  Absenia, a word derived from the term "Absent" which is defined as "Not present in a place, at an occasion, or as a part of something.", was the name given to this land due in major part to the lack of animal life that had been found there when the continent was first discovered in the early seventeen-hundreds or so by Histian explorers looking for new lands to possibly inhabit as a new expansion to their steadily-growing empire at the time. What they found instead was something that was hard to describe. It was a land covered in snow and ice and expanding for hundreds of miles, seemingly devoid of any natural life whatsoever. Upon further investigation however, they found extremely large swaths of land that were marked by large holes in the ground that dropped into seemingly nothing but an empty, cavernous void. Initially passing them off as deepened sinkholes or ancient meteor impact craters from the world's early history when rogue meteor showers and other phenomenon were much more common, the explorers mapped the strange formations and soon thereafter returned to the Empire with their findings. They, along with many others from such continents as Rethium and even Ethlemthos, would soon be returning to the continent to make more discoveries and strange findings.

  When they returned a few years later, they stumbled upon something unimaginable.

  When the expedition arrived back on Absenia a few years after their first trip, they landed in a region that they called the Lost Wilds. Upon their spreading out in search of more of these strange holes in the ice found on the first trip, they were instead met by the appearance of a collection of long and winding tunnels of permafrost and deep ice that almost unnaturally blue in color and smooth as glass to the touch. As they ventured further in, the group found it quite strange that rather than becoming colder and more dangerous, the air became in actuality warmer and more comfortable, and they were able to breath as well as they could on the surface. Until modern history, no caverns of this type had ever been discovered before, and there is a belief that none have been discovered since anywhere else on the globe.

  But even deeper in, they began to find signs of life.

  Strange plants that had never been seen before, and even the possibility of microscopic organisms that fed off of the water frozen inside the ice and other forms of biological life that had never been seen before. Small shrubs that simply grew out of the ice in clusters and small microbiomes, seemingly living off of the endless frozen water supply. And still they ventured further in. After a few hours of travelling or so it felt, the expedition finally stumbled upon a large open-face cave that looked into what the party believed should have been a barren icy wasteland of sculptures, stalactites and stalagmites, but in fact it was something far, far greater. They could see, for miles in all directions it seemed, a vast landscape of perfectly preserved specimens of flora and fauna not seen on the surface for many millions of years. Birds and other fowl that should have been burned out of the sky in the last great extinction event; dinosaurs and countless other types of reptiles both large and small that had supposedly been wiped clean in the last ages of the dinosaurs; even plants that had been killed by the poison gases and air brought on by those same extinction events. Everything and more of it all was located within this seemingly endless cavern network. The scientists were quickly able to determine that the holes in the ice may have indeed been caused by meteors and meteorites crashing into the surface, but these same objects could be traced to the origins of the plants they found which gave nutrients to the species who had fled so far underground. The holes acted as natural skylights, providing sufficient sunlight and moonlight to the subterranean landscape to preserve those plants and animals for several millions of years even when the rest of the world had believed every part of them to have gone extinct. How exactly all the specimens found were able to weather the passage of time is not fully understood even in modern times, and many still believe that the world under the ice is in fact an entirely separate dimension reversed through time to the ancient kingdoms of dinosaurs, but the fact is that no-one can truly explain how the dinosaurs, fowl and fauna have managed to cope with the passage of time without evolving or simply disappearing altogether somewhere along the way.

  One of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered in this ancient kingdom was one they called Dracocephalus, which translates to 'Dragon Head'. This beast towered over eighty feet tall and true to it's name had a head with an extremely powerful jaw as well as rows of sharp teeth. They possessed four eyes, giving them an extreme sense of sight. With webbed front limbs that are thought to have evolved into the wings of the modern dragons of the time and a long, spiked tail similar to many common dragons, the Dracocephalus is believed to be the closest living link to modern evolved dinosaurs. The Dracocephalus was extremely carnivorous and territorial, which drove the members of the party to avoid them when they stumbled upon what appeared to be a territorial dispute between two angered Dracocephalus. Thankfully during the encounter none of the team was hurt, but the smaller of the two dragons did end up suffering a fatal blow as recorded by one of the team members, after which said Dracocephalus quickly became a very delicious and long-lasting meal for the victor and his mate.

  The known recorded ground space of the underground caverns was measured out to be as large as one hundred square miles of space during the first few years of exploration into the caverns, but the number has since vastly increased to match a more modern standard of well over two-hundred-seventy square miles with more and more being added with every expedition brought to the distant lands of Absenia. It is thought that the caverns may extend as far as the borders of the continent itself and maybe even further to include large underground oceans that connect to the surface via tunnels and caverns of submerged ice, but no instances of this sort of formation have been found as an expedition has yet to venture far enough into the caverns to discover them. Since then, hundreds of species have been found to live in the underground caverns, sharing symbiotic relationships with other species as well as the existence of proper and sustainable food chains for the many species to live off of, which may be an explanation to their prolonged existence even this far underground. This cavern system, called The Lost Kingdom is the tenth World Wonder, of which of course there are many more, but many who have seen it believe that it belongs at the top of this expansive list not only for it's beauty and size, but for it's incredible age as well, not to mention the sustained populations of hundreds of species and their countless numbers.