Dłnan Dłthchasach

a Tenebrous Realm of the Far Dreaming

Past the homesteads and glens of Rowan-Oak's Near Dreaming, beyond the Vale of Mists, the land rises steeply and the woodlands grow more tangled, becoming an outlying arm of the Forest of Lies. Trods are few here, and fewer are touched by the Silver Path. Only one leads through this forest and out again, and it is a Twilight Road, unprotected by the enchantments of the Tuatha de Danaan. Those who wind through the shifting forest and its perils find themselves upon a stony height overlooking a broad, bowl-shaped plateau, misty and indistinct below them.

This is the realm of Dłnan Dłthchasach, whose stony moors rise amidst tangled groves and treacherous bogs under a lowering sky. The Twilight Road drops down the steep bank and coils into the heart of the land, where smoke rises from humble cottages clustered below a half-ruined fortress of unmortared, cyclopean stone, stronghold of Melor, who rules the fir-bholg people called the Corca-Cabrach, feuding endlessly with the untame fuath who have their own fastnesses hidden in the forests on his borders, and leading raids against incautious Fielding Folk and marauding redcaps of Middlemarch.

Dłnan Dłthchasach is still largely a wild land, and many chimerical beasts lair here. The eastern badlands are perilous with mantichorae, and a frost-fanged, venomous wyrm haunts the Caillteach Glacier in the North Pass. Melor keeps his people close, spurning outside alliances and propitiating the Dreaming with condemned criminals and captives of war burned alive in great wicker cages at the quarter-day feasts. Other matters of religion he delegates to his druids and the one-eyed moirae seeress who dwells in a caven beneath Tairbheartach Henge.

Visitors are received with suspicion in Dłnan Dłthchasach, and must pay a toll for passage of the Twilight Road through Melor's domain. Not a few lost travellers have elected to offer their fealty to the Corca-Cabrach's lord, preferring serfdom and servitude to the horrors that lurk abroad. A handful of kithain serve here as bondsmen to the fir bholg, and it is rumored that others, made captive in raids upon the nearward marches, labor in Dłnan Dłthchasach's salt-pits and quarries. Such are the fortunes of war in the Far Dreaming, however, and wanderers should not expect the protections of the Escheat here.

Even so, one occasionally meets travellers from deeper in the Tenebrous Realms. Beyond the borders of Melor's land, the Twilight Road leads on through forest and fen to its desolate end. Those native to the realm will not speak of the trod's destination but instead look away and make the sign that averts evil should Caer Poenedigath be mentioned.

Enter Dłnan Dłthchasach, travel onward to Caer Poenedigaeth
or return to Iron Mountain