The Broken Midlands
A millennium ago, the Midlands was simply the middle of the continent, with a thick coastal jungle abutting the southern tip of The Great Plateau. It was a lush land, living on the warm ocean moisture trapped against the mountains, being lightly harvested by humans on its northern edge and fading to nothingness as the land grew too warm for the trees to the south.
During the height of the Dragonscourge, however, a massive expenditure of magical energy was used to call a rock from the sky. Nobody today knows for sure if it was the Mages or the Dragons that called it, but the target was the capital of the Empire. The meteor crashed through the mountains, gouging a new canyon into the earth, and blowing a huge gap into the mountain range before leaving an impact crater in the eastern sea. The terrain shattered, debris from the crater rained over the land to the east and north, and waves flooded the land - creating the Thousand Shards.
After the dust settled (some hundred years later) the effects would begin to become evident to the few people remaining in the region. A creek trickled its way from the northeast (eventually growing into a proper river), but instead of clear water the river glowed a gentle purple color. The land of the new canyon became the color of a fresh bruise: purples, blues, reds, and yellows appearing in streaks and blotches across the earth. A haze of various colors hung in the sky with streaks of lightning appearing from out of the clouds, and none that entered could breathe the air. Magical inquiries showed that the land was almost completely polluted: the arcane residues of the meteor’s strike had created a region of entirely uncontrollable magical energy.
This residual magic seeped into the jungle on both sides of the canyon, animating the trees and other plants, bringing them to mobile life, creating a new host of dangers to any that lived near it. To this day, humans still harvest trees at the edge of the jungle, but they do so with a wary eye and with fire handy: they never know when one of the angry, bestial “tree demons” will storm out of the darkness of the jungle and end their harvest.
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