The Olympus Crater

Most of the Netzach province consists of the land known as the Olympus Crater. It’s a place imbued with energy where life thrives, and things have the unfortunate tendency of exploding unprompted.

The crater was once a colossal mountain that pierced the sky, literally and figuratively: climbing to the top would mean reaching Heaven, passing seamlessly from the Material World to another plane of existence. This unique propriety made Olympus Mons a crucial location during the Cosmic War. It was a strategic passage fought over in many fights, and one in particular, the Battle of the Immolation.

This battle saw the Utmost General of the Infernal Armies, Eosphorus, face the Great Celestial General Mahzitho-el, with a big part of their respective army and many divinities by their side. The battle ended with Eosphorus “becoming a star” or, in other words, making himself explode in a detonation of pure energy: this was the Immolation.

The Immolation vaporized the Olympus Mons, wiped out most of both armies and accelerated the Collapse of dimensions into the material world, putting the Cosmic War in the final phase that led to the Accord.

What remains of this cataclysmic event is a ring of high hills surrounding a depression: the Crater of the Immolation, measuring about 50 miles in radius. Further, There is another, less defined, circle of short hills with the same center and double the width, the Outer Ring.

The area enclosed in these two concentric circles has a peculiar mana field: the mana threads are always in a state of “over-excitement” contorted in dense entanglements and saturated with life energies.

There, everything is more dynamic and more energetic: the fires burn brighter, the wind blows more powerful, and the rain falls more intensely. Plants grow quickly and lushly, animals thrive, and people feel active and industrious.

The situation may be not as idyllic as one could think: this constant hyper-stimulation causes also many problems. Life doesn’t always adapt and mutations, tumoral growths, and metabolic disorders are relatively common among all living beings. Not only pleasant things are enhanced: extreme weather events, from hail storms to tornadoes, can occasionally ravage the countryside.

This is the only place in the world where someone can accidentally cast a spell: the mana knots are ready to spring into reality and an accidental hand gesture, coupled with a fleeting thought, can unleash them. It’s not something frequent but there are some cases of spontaneous combustion as well as spontaneous pieterification and liquidification.

Despite these incidents, uncommon but far from unheard of, and the general weirdness, many people live near the Outer Ring: the soil is the most fertile one can imagine, the livestock grows quickly and healthily, and melancholy never lasts long.

Last but not least, it is a beautiful place, especially at night.

The mana field moves like the weather, especially here, and when invisible and untouchable winds of magic blow things light up. Sometimes the field shines as a carpet of sun rays, sometimes mice run around looking like rolling shooting stars, and sometimes people glow softly for a moment, just for a breath, making them feel all the wonder of the world.

It’s forbidden to enter the center of the Olympus Crater, but many try nonetheless, defying the risks and punishments.

The crater’s heart is brimming with energy and is, theoretically, where you can cast the most grandiose spells and achieve magical feats rivaling those of the Divinities. But all that power is untamable: “accidental spells” and weird spell-like phenomena are common, as well as diseases and hallucinations caused by the overcharged mana field.

Once you pass the inner rim, you can encounter winds that make things invisible, make a companion turn into dust just uttering a random word, have the bones grow uncontrollably, and have your perception accelerated so much that a second feels like an eternity.

The Sisters of the Sheltering Silence are a monastic order tasked to help the few who dare (previous authorization of the Church, of course) enter the inner crater. The Silent Sisters (as commonly known) are specialists in abjuration magic and master in the creation of “antimagic fields”. The four Great Abbesses, each presiding a quarter of the inner rim from their respective abbeys, rival in authority the Archbishop of Netzach being the de facto rulers of the Olympian region.

The Silent Sisters not only aid the daring (and thoroughly vetted) explorers but keep off any interloper. The Olympus crater was the theater of one of the pivotal moments in the Cosmic War, where many divinities met their fate: people of all religions, but Diabolists in particular, give great importance to the site and try to enter the inner region aiming for the holy center point. The Sisters usually don’t have to do anything to stop the unwelcomed pilgrims, the environment will take care of them, but they follow them to see what they devised to face the uncontrollable energies.

The nuns are always eager to know (and acquire) new magical tools able to deflect the effects of the Olympian Mana Field: gnomish insulating glass, multilayered magic circles, constructs that act like lighting rods, and so on.

The Sisters of the Sheltering Silence, while being the warden of the crater for centuries, have not been able to see the central point, like everybody else, this gives a lot of them a fierce resentment to anyone who can go just a step further than them.

The Olympus Crater has many villages and some big towns, all resting on the Golden Loop, the road that follows the external hillside of the Outer Rim.

Here, you can feel the effects of the inner crater energies, but only to a point. Once a week or so, you may see a fleeting spark coming out of nowhere, maybe of an unusual green hue. A handful of times a season, you may witness stranger phenomena, yet still fleeting and innocuous: a dropped coin may roll for minutes, avoiding obstacles like it was animated; you may see a songbird doing a duet with its mirage; an unknown memory may intrude your thoughts like a stranger’s dream get stuck in your mind.

But once a year, sometimes more, sometimes less, something big will happen: a full-blow magic effect, like a wild spell, can erupt out of the blue, causing real damage. Fires are the most common accident, but sometimes magic “sets water” to an area that becomes more and more drenched. Things can also change shapes, and when it happens to a wall or a column it can mean the collapse of the whole building.

There is no real way to prevent these dangerous happenstances but people have nonetheless tried. The Sisters of the Sheltering Silence have tried to identify “triggers”, but with questionable results. For example: the Silent Nuns say it’s better to avoid wearing blue clothes with black dots, and yet when that combination became fashionable for a while, the accidents had the same frequency. Similarly, the Sisters recommend silver necklaces to avoid impromptu teleportations, but there are records of some poor boys and girls who disappeared into thin air while wearing just that.

The bits of advice of the Sisters, deformed by word of mouth and mixed up with popular wisdom have given rise to a series of superstitious gestures and habits. Some are weird prohibitions, not enforced by law but observed as such. Along the Golden Loop, children are forbidden from scribbling with colored crayons; minor scales can’t be played on string instruments; parsley, basil, and sage can’t be cut and must be shredded; you should never walk a full circle clockwise uninterrupted. There are also “apotropaic gestures” that should avert a surge of magic like touching your nose if iron falls over wood, blinking if you hear a whistle, or greeting with the least hand if you meet someone with a dress of the same color.

These “quirks” are some of the most baffling aspects of the region for travelers. A merchant can be screamed at for browsing a book under a birch or be harshly reprimanded for stirring a pot under a straw roof.

The Silent Sisters look with distaste and condescension to these superstitions but, in a way, they participate in it as well. The nuns, in exchange for some offers, give out amulets with warding glyphs and bless houses with sigils of abjuration magic but the “arcane science” supporting that is tenuous at best. The efficacy of the nun methods is unquantifiable due to the unpredictable nature of magic, exacerbated in this area. They will swear their methods are the only true one but, if a fork fall on a table, all the sisters present will touch their nose nonetheless.

Villages are rarer in the inner side of the Outer Rim hills. From there on, the effects of the “mana environment” become too strong: it’s not an unlivable situation, but the issues outweigh the benefits. The toll on physical and mental health becomes tangible with cases of cancerous growth, accelerated aging, birth anomalies, waves of hallucinations and sensory overloads, and many other conditions that dissuade permanent settlements.

There are still “seasonal villages” used as bases by hunters, foragers, lumberjacks, and other workers who go there for a month or two. The people keeping that grounds have a high turnover as well and rarely stay more than a year before going back to the other side of the hills. This area, even if left almost wild and subject to the growth-inducing mana field, is not too wild: animals and insects (and the occasional extreme weather event) keep them in check.

The last settlements, almost midway between the inner and outer rims, are some Abbey of the Silent Sisters that work as borders between the allowed and forbidden parts of the Crater. The Abbeys are architectural magic circles, shielding the interiors from the influences of the “overloaded” Mana Field. The nuns have complex and clockwork routines to keep the circle’s magic active, with precise patterns they have to walk every day inside the cloisters and specific hymns they have to sing as incantations at exact times.

The abbeys are almost self-sufficient, with only a few supplies needed. The vegetable gardens and orchards give anything the Sisters need, and they breed chicken and goat to complement their diet. One curious animal they keep is the Capibangels.

These big rodents are relatives of the Manticorats, the flying critters that “eat” magic. The Manticorat predilection for entangled mana seems more a matter of taste than nutrients: mana knots ready to materialize are rare, and if they would count on them as a staple food, they would starve.

For the Capibangels it’s the reverse: in the Olypian area, active mana knots are everywhere and they can just chew air and suck out the lingering energies. These Capibaras still eat grass and other plants, but it’s more to complement their diet and for “fun”.

They are a common presence in the interim area, they spend their time near bodies of water and streams and often stay still for hours and hours on end. Their wings are small and of no use, just vestigial remnants. The Glowing Linx is their only predator but they don’t seem to fear them. Some see them as the epitome of self-sacrifice and stoicism, with a member of the herd giving itself to the predator to spare the rest. Others (usually from other regions) see them as the pinnacle of laziness, as if even running for their lives is too much of a bother to them.

The Silent Sisters shepherd the Capibangels for their meat, a little gamey and quite complex to butcher, but very nutrient. Fur has its use too, but the more important by-product is the fat. The Capibangels have a specific fat tissue that insulates them from many effects of the Olympian energies. This fat, after proper curing, is used in the tanning process to add a level of magic resistance to clothes.

Also, it’s believed that the presence of Capibangels reduces the “pressure” from the mana field since they eat away excess energy. But this could be just one of the many superstitions of these lands.

Past the Abbeys that act as a border, there is the area near and beyond the inner rim, the Forbidden Lands, where the effects of the altered Mana Field are massive and pervasive.

After only some hours of walking from the last bastions of the Sisters of the Sheltering Silence, you can feel the “pressure” of the high-energy environment: muscular spasms, psychological time dilation, hysterical laughter, overgrowing of hair and nails, and so on. Also, the discharge of “accidental spells” is not just a possibility but a certainty: everything you do could trigger a magic effect, be it illusions, bursts of energy, or flesh warping. The weather changes in the blink of an eye, shifting from clear sky to snowy clouds to tornados to fog in a day.

To avoid these effects, people have devised insulating clothing and armor, collectively called Olymponautic Suits. There are different approaches to the construction of these suits that all revolve around the use of exotic materials and magic sigils to ward off the excess energy: Gnomish Glass and Maladominian Porcelain are among the most popular choices, used in big pieces like armor plates or as minuscule beads embedded in the fabric, or even spun in threads. The texture of the fabric is also crucial, with specific glyphic patterns interwoven like a tapestry. Sometimes, unique and invaluable objects are used, like tiny cubes from the Hades Badlands, Ember Roses from the Ash Kahante, and curated bones of Vampire Cardinals.

The techniques used in the construction of the Olymponauts suits can be divided into four categories:

• inhibiting the formation of knots (and therefore spells) fixing in place the mana threads, avoiding further entanglements;
• actively unentangling the mana field, “straightening” the mana threads:
• creating “exhaustion valves” through magic circles and other tools that will continuously cast harmless spells, depleting the extra energies;
• using a “lighting rod” tool that is more prone to become the target of the accidental spells, sparing the explorer.

Protecting the head is crucial since it can be harmed both physically and, most importantly, psychologically. The Silent Sisters are experts in dealing with wounds and illness but minds are another matter and even the ones brought back from delirium have their memories shattered and long-lasting traumas.

Sometimes the Olymponauts bring back objects they say are exceptional, never seen before, miraculous, but most of the time they turn out to be mundane and unremarkable, like a rock, a leaf, a stick. It’s unclear if those things were wonders that lost their proprieties or if the explorers were delusional all along.

Despite the many dangers present in the inner part of the Olympus Crater, many people attempt to reach its center.

There are many reasons to venture into such a difficult journey. Some go there for pure intellectual curiosity and scholarly interest. Others try to exploit the area’s proprieties, attempting (and mostly failing) to collect the excess energies. Occasionally, ruthless individuals try to loot the expensive suits from the unlucky Olymponauts.

Most explorers are motivated by religious reasons: the Olympus Crater was the theatre of a crucial moment of the Cosmic War. In this place, many divinities died as martyrs (who were the good guys and the bad guys vary drastically for each religion). People from every part of the globe pilgrimage to the inner crater, even the Matras of southern Uxali. Some pious citizens of the Holy Infernal Empire have attempted the journey in times of war.

Many believe that the dead divinities are still there, transfigured into Eidolons. The Eidolons are the “ghosts of gods” and this is a theological concept that first emerged to explain the possibility of miracles: the divinities that died in the mortal world left an imprint into the mana field that can, occasionally, act on the world to help the devouts. Theoretically, this process happened concretely in the Olympian area: the divinities could have become pure mana shapes, fueled by their divine spark.

Many, not liking the association of the divine with the undead, prefer to avoid the “ghosts of gods” lens and look at the Eidolon as “living spells”, since, as spells, they could be “powered up” mana knots.

Anything about the Eidolon is pure conjecture. The Olymponauts that came back alive from an exploration were all, in one way or another, insane. The luckiest one affected only marginally and capable of recovery, had nonetheless multiple blackouts and memories mixed with fantasies.

But the general understanding is that, despite the delirious reports, there must be something, or someone, in the center of Olympus: survivors mention human figures made of lights, often warping their surroundings and infusing the environment with energy.