Ghostlands
"A sombre mark upon even this grey landscape, the sagging walls of a once-great, tiered city set with its back to the mountains is visible from a great distance. Most famous outside of Kandar itself, the Ghostlands are an old story of woe and horror. Though the locals exhibit a healthy fear of the place and refused to get closer than in sight of it, they told tales of the crumbling remnants of buildings that rise out of the constant low-lying fog and the undead entities that roam within..."The Ghostlands is the name now used for a large settlement ruined in the Sunderings whose name has been lost to time. It's one of the only signs of permanent settlement in Kandar, and there has been much debate over whether it was the capital of whatever land existed before Kandar, or whether it was a large city of one of the precursors to the current countries in the Candala Union. Whatever the case, the expanse of crumbling stone and rotting timber is now only host to the largest concentration of restless dead in the known world - mostly mindless, mostly dangerous to anyone living that captures their attention, but sometimes indifferent or rarely even friendly to living beings that cross their path. The Kandar, for obvious reasons, give the area a wide berth, but claim that the best healer in all of Kandar lives on its outskirts and trains whoever goes to them, unafraid of the nearby undead and seemingly not affected by them.
- An Excerpt from ‘An Exploration of the Scorched Wastelands by The Valadrin Research Department’
Points of interest
The Ghostlands holds many points of interest for historians, as one of the largest known and structurally most preserved ruins from pre-sunderings. However, the sheer danger means that only archaeological expeditions that delve very shallowly into the borders of the city have been attempted thus far, and so much remains unknown and yearned for. Of particular interest is the numerous ziggurats towering above even the highest level of the city, and only theories and supposition exists as to their purpose.
In more recent times historians have begun looking to record the oral histories of the various Kandar Wanderer Tribes in the hope of gleaming some insight into what once existed there and what exactly happened during the First Sundering that left so much of the infrastructure intact but wiped out the people only to raise them again.
Architecture
The architecture that remains in the Ghostlands has the most similarity to that seen in Antarak and somewhat in what few remnants remain of the land that existed before Aggea, but some historians that have seen the Ghostlands from afar also claim to see the precursors to modern architecture in nearby Candala countries.
Whatever the case, the city that was once there seemed to have many familiar features, including domed buildings, arches, and ziggurats. Evidence also suggests that colourful facades were once common, though they have fallen or faded in the course of time and disaster, leaving nothing but the eternal grey endemic to the wastelands.
