Blightbend Isle

Trailing along the southwestern edge of Ashenhold Isle, like a bleached ribbon of land half-forgotten by the world, lies Blightbend Isle. Shaped by centuries of wind and ash, this long, low-lying island stretches some 600 kilometers east to west, with barely 150 kilometers separating its northern and southern shores. Its gentle curve seems to echo the southern edge of Ashenhold, as if drawn in by the other island’s slow-burning gravity.   Blightbend is a land of quiet desolation. Its terrain is flat and featureless, made up almost entirely of compacted ash, windblown sand, and the occasional low dune hardened into brittle crust. What trees may once have existed are long gone, and no green thing now grows. Instead, the island is covered in a strange, pallid grass—sickly yellow and dry to the touch. It grows everywhere and yet nourishes nothing. Druids and scholars alike have puzzled over this anomaly, for the island’s ash-laden soil should, by all logic, be fertile. But Blightbend seems to follow its own quiet rules.   There are no settlements, no freshwater sources, and no wildlife to speak of. Most who land here return empty-handed and uneasy, speaking of the silence and the strange way the wind seems to carry whispers across the dunes. Many maps mark the island with little more than a cautionary symbol—or leave it off entirely.   And yet, despite its lifelessness, Blightbend is known to a rare few as a place of value: beneath its shallows, along its eastern reefs, lies one of the finest pearl diving sites in all of Endórëmar. The waters are unusually clear, and the oysters that grow there produce pearls of remarkable color and size. Harvesting them is dangerous work—storms rise quickly, and anchoring near the island is unreliable—but for those skilled enough to brave the currents, the rewards can be immense.   Few linger on Blightbend. Fewer still speak fondly of it. It is a place of soft-footed silence, of colorless sunrises and skies perpetually tinged with grey. And perhaps that’s why the pearls shine so brightly: they are the only things the island does not swallow in dullness.