Draukari

The surface approaches to this annex are cloaked in spectral forests, where leafless, ash-gray trees twist into natural stockades and false lanes. Their skeletal branches funnel intruders into dead ends or sudden drop-pits, and in Avalas’s hollow air the groves whisper like ghostly drill orders. Beneath them lies the Crawl, a claustrophobic maze where ceilings rarely rise above five feet. Anything larger than a kobold is forced to stoop, squeeze, or crawl through the cold mud, only to find punji stakes, wire snares, and oil-slicked traps waiting underfoot.   The shifting nature of Avalas itself compounds the danger. When two cubes “kiss”, shockwaves ripple through the stone, sliding whole corridors by a pace or two. Waymarks are etched with deliberate subtlety, readable only by locals, so that outsiders are misled deeper into danger. These passages extend into planar rat-runs, choke-points keyed to Kurtulmak’s deeper redoubts beyond Avalas, where saboteurs slip through chalk-marked arches and vanish a plane away.   Within the warren-holds themselves, life clusters in brutal necessity. Frekstavik, the gate-borough at the trailheads, lures invaders with visibly “weak” palisades that mask tiered murder-holes. Nibellin serves as both trap-smith quarter and council hive, where cube-collision ambushes are scheduled to the toll of the bell. Snjarll functions as the cold-store and mess of the tunnel-sappers, its ranks mustering for counter-raids into Clangor proper.   Travel through this domain is as perilous as any battlefront. Most passages force squeezing on Medium or larger creatures, and ranged lines are kinked into uselessness; shields snag against walls and polearms are worse than liabilities. The terrain itself is engineered, mud pits that suck at boots, oil skims that turn footing treacherous, and load-bearing props primed to drop a ceiling on the unwise. Navigation becomes disorienting, as subtle grade shifts and mirrored corridors impose penalties unless a traveler knows the local way-cuts, or trusts a native guide. Even timing is a weapon here: during scheduled cube collisions, ambush doors realign for only minutes at a time, sealing or opening planar exits in perfect rhythm with the war-machine of Avalas.