The Crater

"A location on the Portal Network that we have discovered in our time in the forest, the Crater is the ruins of a very large Ancient Elven city. The sight of it is incredible, much, much larger than Ypakar when it was whole, but mostly vaporised in some kind of magical or technological disaster. Parts of the buildings are visible, but the majority is dust and shattered material, all held in the air mid-explosion by a powerful effect.
There are a number of speculations we can make -

1. That this could be the capital of The Empire of Coraar 'ath Revaar - due to the size this is very possible, but we have not explored all of the ruins fully.
2. That this disaster relates to the Elven/Infernal war mentioned by the strange and elusive Awarth. A war would certainly trigger destruction on this scale
3. That this catastrophe could be related to either The Loss or the Corruption Event. Or both.

With the data we currently hold, having barely visited, all we can ascertain for now is that it is a gigantic elven ruin that may be very hard to investigate without flight or other means of traversing through the air.
It is also difficult to take items from the area - I had tried to move one of the chunks of debris but it snapped back into place. It is unclear whether this effect would last a Portal trip.
This is location four on the Portal Network and so should be easy to revisit in time. If we should find any historical records in the ruins that explain the name of the fourth rune, that will also confirm or deny our speculation on the identity of the place.

— Notes from Dalitar's journal, taken in Bardh after recovering from a Portal trip.

Recently revealed to be named Indruist/Heartgem by Goldriver

Related NPCs

• "The Keeper" - seemed to travel back to his sanctum via the portal to here
• Awarth - speculated to have travelled here after the party encountered her in the Elven Fort ruin.
• Goldriver ????

Description taken from the recording:
You step through the portal heaving the suddenly very heavy and unhelpful form of Rah-Tah-Tum with you. There is that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you go very fast over a hump or a bridge as you are whisked away by the magic of the portal. The other side is a strange sight as your vision clears from flickers of orange and the blazing light of stepping into the portal, suddenly it clears to a strange, dull grey tone. Clouds of dust hang in the air all around you, completely unmoving and rubble and debris stretches through the air floating in space. Below you is an enormous crater-like shape, a hemisphere bored out of the earth by some power. The sun weakly glows through the clouds of dust that reaching out you can touch… and ever so slightly knock from its position before it swings gently back into place.
There's a lot of strange debris here that mostly looks as though it's shattered rock. Beyond that, you can't necessarily immediately tell what it is.
The area below you seems to be like a crater. You look out and it's very hard to see through this thick dust that clears the air. You can vaguely make out some shadowy shapes at the edges of the crater, if you want to call it that. That seems to look like tiny distant trees. This crater seems to be probably a mile or more across, and you appear to be near one of the outer edges on a largish piece of debris that has the portal on it that you have stepped through.
The sky above you. It's clear. It's interesting. If you were in the middle of the forest, obviously there would be canopy above you, but it's obvious the sky is definitely above you. It's just difficult to see again because this thick, choking cloud of dust is all around you. But when you breathe, you don't necessarily breathe the dust particles in. They shake a little in front of your face, but revert to where their original position was.
The dust is extremely difficult to see through. It's as though sand had just been thrown in the air and it had frozen in that moment of time.
You can reach out and grab some of these small particles in the air and pull them towards you. There's a resistance as though two magnets are being pulled apart. Not ridiculously strong, but you can definitely feel that tension. And as you attempt to put it in your bag, a vial or something, the particle of dust seems to elastically ping back into position. There's no overshooting. It flies straight back through the air and returns to its original position.
The arrangement of the debris seems to come from a central point, and that central point seems to hover directly above the central point of this bowl.
“So it's as if all of if there was a trajectory from which all of these objects originate and it was from the centre, like an explosion.”
Yes. Right. So secondly, having been focussed a little more on the debris, you start to be able to pick out features and realise that there's a part of the tower here, an archway there. The debris seems to be the exploded features of a large building with much the same architecture as you might have found in Bardh (elven)

Type

Crater / Crater Lake / Caldera

Location under

The Empire of Coraar 'ath Revaar