[center][h1]A Stone Amongst Bones[/h1][/center]
On a world as ancient with civilization as Ecetopia, few are the lands untamed and unfrequented by mortals. Fewer still are reaches pregnant with secrets untold and rumors maligned equally by time and twisted tellings; few, yet present. Such places exist, known to mad mendicants and enlightened gurus. Such a one is named Rzail. Within that accursed subcontinent’s boundaries a blight preternaturally strips the land of vegetation, darkness, and light; twilight holds eternal tyranny over petrified forests, sand flats, and noxious bogs; and madness ensnares all but the hardiest of fools who dwell long within its borders. 

Yet fools there are.

Amongst that tight coterie of misanthropes and pariahs are aboriginals, rustic ranchers wild as the befouled soil they subsist on, adventurers yearning to discover themselves by losing themselves, and scientists attempting to discern the future by understanding the past—but in a manner well outside the mainstream. Of the latter, a team of crypto-archaelogists, from the University of Eceterum Alacis, recently descended on Rzail’s Doch Mol ruins, an historical site mostly buried beneath dunes the color and texture of dead flesh that undulate as far as an eye can see.

The name Doch Mol they ascribed to an ancient fortress, although the only evidence for such are the ostensibly innumerable layers of bodies, a thousand generations dense. These hint yet at what may have been a vast city. Added to that is another oddity, a pillar unearthed and decoded from its ancient tongue that reads:

[i][quote]“Karnorouri, Seer of Seers, 
Whose gaze doth scry the edge of time,
Sees not the end of old Doch Mol,
Where eternal reigns dare rise
Beneath the Mountains of Ez-Lye
Where, by His word, death undies.”[/quote][/i]
They called it, not to anyone’s astonishment, the Karnorouri’s Pillar. Based on the little evidence at their disposal, they assumed the place where it was found must be the name of the place of which it so ominously spoke. Yet of mountains naught remains. All about is plain and dune where buried life and lifeless brume conspire to blot the past from view. That and the legends of the aboriginal elders who recall an era of a powerful dwarven lich and even now ward their humble villages against the threat of undeath. Even the esteemed colleges of Eceterm Alacis, busily perturbing the final resting site of so many, occasionally shiver at the thought of bones rustling from more than just the twilight wind.