Great Crater

Vesarca  is no stranger to craters. On a planet so wartorn, they are a common sight, whether fresh and jagged, or worn smooth and grown over with grass. But the Great Crater is an anomaly, an immense scar on the face of Vesarca, over thirty kilometers in diameter. Its cause is an utter mystery. The blasted rock tells no tales, and the Black Stone is silent on the subject.

Vesarca knows craters only from war and perhaps the occasional industrial catastrophe, but at an estimated ten thousand years old, the Great Crater predates any weapon or technology Vesarcans have developed capable of such destruction. The largest guns on the Royal capital ships could wreak such havoc on the surface, but they certainly did not exist ten thousand years ago.

From the ground, the Great Crater can be hard to discern. The jagged rim of the crater has been worn smooth by time and vegetation has grown over the once dead soil, and standing at one edge, the other disappears due to Vesarca’s curvature. Standing beside it, one might think the edge of the crater nothing more than ordinary hills or weathered cliffs, oblivious to its counterpart beyond the horizon. Indeed, whole villages had sprung up in the basin thousands of years before anyone realized the nature of the place.

From the air or space, the story is quite different. The depression in Vesarca’s surface is plain to see, testament to some ancient cataclysm at which humanity can only guess.

The crater is inhabited to this day, home to the same farming villages that arose thousands of years ago. Tungsten mining in the crater has also become a profitable venture over the last century or so, as rich deposits of the metal were discovered beneath the soil. Two observation towers stand in the area, one in the center of the crater and one at its southern edge, for sightseers to see the full breadth of the crater without need of air travel. The nobility generally still prefer to observe from the comfort of their personal aircraft, however.