Faerie Fen

The Faerie Fen surrounds the city of Ars on all sides, protecting it as well as enabling its access to both water and ambient magic.

Localized Phenomena

The Faerie Fen is notable for having multiple natural hot springs interspersed with the fen's cooler waters. This points to an ancient volcano underlying the region but has also made it extremely well-adapted for Abaddonic demons to create spas in their quarter of the city.

Fauna & Flora

The fen is a place of dangerous beauty. Much of its local creatures are aggressive and dangerous to mortals--even the plants. Especially the plants.
Sundew Sundews are naturally carnivorous plants who mostly feed on insects. They have pale lime green stalks culminating in an open "mouth" surrounded by red tendrils. These tendrils are typically topped by glittering beads of moisture, which presumably led to their name. The moisture is a sugary substance excreted by the plant that attracts the insects as well, particularly for the larger plants, as unwary children's fingers.
Sundew Spiders Sundew spiders are what happens when you really make an Abaddonic angry. They are hybrid creatures bred from an unholy cross between the sundew and the spider. Scholars debate whether to classify them as plant or insect. Or fungus, as a single Sundew Spider consists of numerous stalks. The stalks boast numerous exceedingly long tendrils, which weave together and drip their sugary liquid onto each other in gelatinous ropes, producing spider-like "webs." These webs can easily stretch to dozens of paces long and are generally considered impassable except with very vigorous machete work. Some swear that Sundew Spiders' webs contain arcane seal patterns that draw you in if you look at them too long. Such claims are not easily substantiated, as researchers keep going missing.
Grasping Sedge  The less said about Grasping Sedge, the better. The less seen, the best.
Beavers Beavers love the fen, as it provides them with ample waterways to travel through as well as mud, scrub plants, and rocks to utilize in building their lodges. Unlike many fen species, they are herbivorous. However, their teeth are sharp and their jaws extremely strong, as visitors disrupting their habitats or getting close to their young have discovered to their sorrow.

Natural Resources

Hot Springs Unusually, the fen boasts a large number of natural hot springs. These springs were originally relatively unimpressive and often entirely covered with algae mats, but through the terraforming process (see History) a number of unique pools with different kinds of dissolved minerals were created in what would become the Abaddonic quarter of Ars. Notably, there is the "blood pool" with iron and magnesium oxides in the mud at the bottom of the pool, the "night pool" with dissolved magnesium, the "sky pool" with microbial mats that cover the colors of the rainbow, and a number of clear springs with dissolved bicarbonites. Some of these pools are too hot for most mortals to enter (though the demonic spirits appear to particularly enjoy them) but others are renowned for (debated) therapeutic benefits to mortals.
Ambient Magic Perhaps due to the long faerie habitation--or perhaps one reason for that habitation in the first place--the fen's waters are unusually saturated with natural magical energy. Spirits can imbibe this energy along with the water or by bathing in it. The faeries living in the fen before Ars almost certainly used the magic to entrap or kill unwary humans. Such traps are no doubt even more threatening now that Ars has been built as a demonic refuge. Certainly, as documented in a few truly grisly instances of people attempting to reach the city without using the demons' barges, unenchanted boats are no longer able to navigate its waters.
Fertile Soil Of course, not all of the fen is water. Where the ground is firm enough for plants to grow, they are notably lively. Ars' farms are quite small in relation to the population they support, even if spirits only eat plants out of desire rather than necessity. Ars has so far declined to sell their unique soil to neighboring territories, despite numerous proposals for mutually advantageous trade, leading some to fringe conspiracy theories about insidious magics in the dirt that seep into their plants and, thus, the Belphagorian restaurants.

History

The Faerie Fen is so named because a number of Demonic spirits from different clans but equally modeling themselves on Fairy chose to live there. Favored mortals were led through the fen's safe, solid paths by dancing lights (the spirits were known to particularly like dogs and horses but despised goats, for some reason) while the disrespectful or unwise who chased after faerie spirits found themselves falling through apparently solid ground into dark waters or stumbling into boiling hot springs.
The fen was of mostly local interest until the group who would become the first Ars Council set out to look for a defensible location for their city. It needed to have enough natural magic that the spirits would not starve even if the city was put under siege as well as terrain that would make assaulting the city undesirable in the first place. They also wanted somewhere politically radioactive for the liquor industry, with its strong ties to the Albion Empire; the fen's location in the no man's land between Erlang Shen, Futen, and Do'urmok delivered this.
Eventually, the two sides came to an accord. The Leviathan known at the time as Blackness led a terraforming project to create an island large enough for the city in the middle of the fen as well as to create waterways deep enough for boats (albeit flat-bottom barges) to ferry tourists in.

Type

Wetland / Swamp

Owning Organization

Ars Council

Inhabiting Species

• Grasping Sedge