Shelter

Shelter is home to the people known as Desert Runners and is one of the oldest known hauflin settlements on the western edge of the Lost Sea.
The histories of the city, kept in their hall of records, hold ancient stories of how the hauflin people had once been a sea-faring race, sailing the sea until a disaster occured.
According to the ancient legends there was a terrible upheaval of the world to the north of Shelter, and it caused the ships that had been exploring the area to be dashed against the shore as smoke and fiery rocks obliterated the sky. The hauflin explorers took shelter on the shore, in the shelter of a system of caves, and when they emerged mere days after the sea was gone, leaving behind a great muddy basin coated with ash that continued to fall for days after the disaster.
Some scholars say that this is supported by a dwarven myth about the sleeping lady mountain, where the dwarves claim the mountain is their goddess, sleeping after having cut the Great Rift to save their race after the orcnea caused the great flood that banished the dwarves from their homeland. According to their Myth, the goddess then laid down to block the plains from ever flooding again and to wait for her children, the dwarves, to reclaim the heart of fire mountains from the orcnea.
The hauflin had no way back across what was now to be called The Lost Sea, so they settled into their new shelter and began to slowly build a settlement there.
As the days faded to months and then to years the ancient records say the mud dried under the heat of the sun, and from out of the north came a species that had never been seen before. Tall deer-like creatures with long ears and soft paws rather than hooves. These tall jackalopes became a favored sled-puller for the hauflin as they began to set out across the desert in expeditions. Slowly going further and further into the wastes.
Eventually the hauflin was able to set up a route back to their homeland, opening a trade route between the hauflin and orcnea that is still strong.