Floating Islands
Occasionally, those who wander will find covered in dirt and decay the remnants of the once-great empires of the Giants. Massive ruins of magnificent halls, statues taller and greater than any humanoid could make, and maybe the most baffling of them all: the lone, crooked mountains and floating stones, never touching the ground but locked to hover above the ground, swaying back forth or up and down against all the laws of reason. This seemingly mad phenomenon has urged the mages to study these rocks to uncover their secrets for generations.
Origin
According to legends, floating islands were first lifted to the ground by the ancients giants in the end of the Age of Dawn and the practice persisted during the Age of the Skylords. These floating constructions were made of stone, soil, and magical clouds to be homes and palaces for the most powerful and wealthiest of the giant kind.
It is debated how the rocks were originally made to float, but this contributed to magic and elemental qualities of giants that most likely aren't present in their modern descendants, explaining why there are no records of more islands constructed since the Fall of the Titans.
During the Fall of the Titans, constant warring between dragons and giants, competing of giant societies and the rise of the humanoids, caused most of the floating islands to collapse, causing great destruction as they faltered. These collapses caused earthquakes, broke the islands in smaller pieces, killed people unfortunate enough to be on the way of the falling stones and solidified the decay of the giant empires.
Only a few proper floating islands and island chains exist to this day, but several smaller islands, most no bigger than large rocks, can still be found across Melyria.
Manifestation
Floating island is usually a sizable piece of rock, floating mid-air showing no intention to fall like one would expect it to. Occasionally, instead of a stone, the island can appear as a stationary cloud, which rarely rains and doesn't seem ever to go smaller than a fixed size. Cloud can gather more mass, by typical clouds clinging to it for a short period. Sometimes the Island can be a combination of both clouds and rocks. Clouds generally will appear higher than the stones do.
Islands can move, usually, with a slight up and down or side to side motion, few of them are known to rotate and turn. During particularly strong storms islands might move to the direction of the wind, and they can react to powerful enough impacts to move from their position, however, their position in the sky is often quite fixed. As a thumb rule, moving the island requires at least the same level of force to move, if the island would be resting on the ground.
Localization
Typical, still floating islands can be found near crooked mountains, giant craters and over islands or open sea in seemingly random places. These locations often have giant ruins nearby, unless they have been completely eroded by time or destroyed by entities in times past.
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