The Shattered Peaks

See: Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks, Giants INDEX

The Shattered Peaks are a mountain range in the southern reaches of Eoperax, south of the Onyx Mountains and north and west of the Sapphire Weald. They take their name from the apparent state of their summits, which look, to anyone approaching along their sunward flank, as if the mountaintops had been broken. Cleaved by axes the size of valleys. Hollowed by chisels the size of rivers. Carved into shapes that no natural process of erosion or tectonic uplift could plausibly explain.

The shattering is not damage. It is architecture.

The Shattered Peaks were carved into homes by the giants who lived there during the Age of Wonders, the long pre-extinction era when the Stars of Power burned at full strength and the aetheric currents flowed thick enough to support beings whose mode of existence depended on them. The giants in question were Stone Giants (see Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks for their full treatment) and the architecture they left behind is the largest single body of giant-scale construction known to mortal scholarship.

The peaks are presently believed to be abandoned. The reasoning is straightforward: a being the size of a Stone Giant would be visible from a great distance, and no one has reported seeing one in any era a living mortal can remember. The reasoning is also, in the view of the small school of Ineffable scholars, probably wrong. A giant who has slowed to the pace of a mountain is a mountain, from the outside. The visible peaks may not be entirely empty.

Geography #

The range runs north to south, forming the southern end of the Westwall, the greater chain that also comprises the Ebon Mountains and the Onyx Mountains further north. Its northern extent rises into the Onyx Mountains without a clear boundary, and where one range ends and the next begins is a convention of mortal cartography rather than a fact of the ground. To the west the land falls away into the Vast Desert. To the east it descends into the southern frontiers of the Tatharian Empire and, beyond them, the Sapphire Weald. The southern extent is poorly surveyed.

The rock is granite, pale to mid grey and veined in places with quartz, which sets the Shattered Peaks apart from the dark basalt of the chain northward and accounts for how well the carved surfaces have held their edges. The giants were working stone that takes a cut and keeps it. The geology beneath the range is old and complicated enough that other formations occur in pockets, but granite is the working material.

There is no natural rock left in the Shattered Peaks. This is the fact that most reliably catches out visitors, who arrive expecting carved slopes standing against unworked ones and find instead that the distinction does not survive examination. The giants carved for an era, and they also moved stone, in volumes and over distances that no mortal survey has managed to account for, so that the spoil of one peak’s carving became the substrate of the next. A slope presenting as ordinary weathered granite may be original rock, or may be recontoured tailings older than most mortal nations. Telling the two apart is work that mortal geology is not currently equipped to do.

What can be said is that the deliberate work, the architecture plainly meant to be inhabited and looked at, faces north. Eoperax lies in Rolara’s southern hemisphere, where the sun tracks across the northern sky, and a north-facing slope is the slope that holds the light. The Stone Giants put their galleries, their doorways, and their inscriptions where the sun would fall on them. Because the range trends north to south, this produces no single continuous carved wall. It produces carved aspects scattered across the range peak by peak, each turned to catch the same light, with the reworked and ambiguous ground of the eastern and western flanks lying between them.

A further consequence is that much of the range cannot be perceived from inside it. Certain works are laid out at a scale with no mortal precedent: elements of writing, or of architecture, set so far apart that anyone standing among them registers nothing but unremarkable ground, and the arrangement resolves into something evidently intentional only from miles away, from the shoulder of some other peak. Expeditions have more than once established that the feature they spent a season surveying was one stroke of something much larger. There is no way to determine, from any given position in the Shattered Peaks, whether one is standing in the middle of a composition.

The carved slopes contain, by partial survey, at least the following features:

• Doorways the size of canyons. Vertical cleaves in the rock, hundreds of feet tall, spaced at intervals along the slope. Each one is clearly a doorway (the proportions are too deliberate to be natural), but the proportions are giant proportions, and a mortal standing at the threshold of one cannot see the top of it without leaning back.
• Stairs whose risers are the height of houses. A switchback path climbs the western shoulder of the highest peak, cut into the stone with mathematical regularity. Each step is roughly twelve feet tall. The path is not for mortals. It is what a Stone Giant uses to reach the upper galleries.
• Galleries the size of valleys. Hollows carved deep into the body of certain peaks, opening to the north, large enough to contain entire forests within their interiors. The largest known gallery, called the Hollow Crown by mortal cartographers, is wide enough at its mouth to admit weather. Storms have been observed forming inside it and exiting on the other side of the mountain.
• Inscriptions, possibly. The northern slopes of every major peak bear markings: channels cut into the stone, intersecting at angles that suggest a writing system. No mortal has read them. The markings are too large to perceive as text from up close (a single “letter,” if that is what it is, can span a hundred feet). They are best read from miles away, and even then they are read more as patterns than as language. Whether they are writing, ornament, or the residual record of some now-defunct mythek operation is unknown.

History #

The Shattered Peaks have a layered history, with three distinct cultural strata documented and at least one more suspected. All three documented strata predate the sealing of the Stars of Power by some considerable margin. Nothing of consequence has happened in the range since.

Layer One: The Soulweaver Conclave #

Before the giants, before the carving, the Shattered Peaks were home to a conclave of necromancer dragons who practiced an art they called soulweaving. The dragons were old when they arrived and older when they left. Their tenure in the range is dated only loosely; the surviving fragments of their work suggest they were present for several thousand years and that they departed (or transformed, or were displaced) thousands of years before the Stone Giants began their carving. There is no overlap. The two cultures did not coexist.

What the Soulweavers left behind is harder to read than the giant architecture. Their workings were inscribed not into the stone but into the air of certain high-altitude valleys, in patterns that the Wild Magic Pilgrims later described as “the smell of an idea before it has finished thinking itself.” Some Soulweaver sites are still active in a residual sense: a traveler who walks through one may briefly remember a life that is not their own, or hear a voice that has been waiting several millennia for someone to listen.

For the full treatment, see Soulweaver Conclave.

Layer Two: The Stone Giants #

The Stone Giants arrived sometime after the Soulweavers had gone, found the range empty, and began the work that gave the peaks their name. The carving took an era. The Ineffable scholars estimate that a single major peak required between eight hundred and twelve hundred years of continuous Stone Giant labor, though “continuous” in giant terms means the giants did not move on to anything else, not that they were actively chipping at the stone every day. The pace of the work was geological. The result is the only piece of pre-Wonders architecture in Rolara that is still visible from low orbit, if low orbit is something one is in a position to confirm.

The giants lived in their carved peaks for the remainder of the Age of Wonders. They were not isolationist; the Wild Magic Pilgrims who came to study with them were welcomed, fed, and (when they died of old age, as visitors to giant homes tended to) buried in alcoves carved into the gallery walls. But the giants were not interested in expansion either. Their territory was their range, and their range was their territory, and the borders of both were the limits of what they had personally carved.

For the full treatment, see Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks.

Layer Three: The Wild Magic Pilgrims #

During the latter half of the Age of Wonders, sorcerers adept in wild magic began traveling to the Shattered Peaks in significant numbers. The journey was difficult and the destination was strange, but the draw was undeniable: in the vicinity of the carved peaks, wild magic behaved differently. The chaos that wild sorcerers normally fought to channel was, in the Shattered Peaks, already partially ordered by the ambient mythek of the giant architecture. A wild sorcerer who would have produced a chaotic and unpredictable result in any other location would, in the Peaks, produce a result that was still chaotic but intelligible. Comprehensible. Aimed.

The pilgrims came to learn from the giants, and the giants, characteristically, neither encouraged nor discouraged them, but allowed them to stay. Some of the pilgrims left after a season. Some stayed for a lifetime. A small number entered the deeper galleries and were never seen again, though their belongings were occasionally found, neatly arranged, much later.

The pilgrimage never fully stopped. Wild magic sorcerers in the present day still describe an inexplicable pull toward the range, and a trickle of them continue to arrive, drawn by the same ordering effect that first brought the Pilgrims here in the Age of Wonders.

For the full treatment, see Wild Magic Pilgrims.

Layer Four: Whatever Came Before the Soulweavers #

Mentioned for completeness. The Soulweaver dragons themselves left fragmentary records suggesting that they were not the first inhabitants of the range, that something older had been there before them and had departed by means the dragons did not understand. No physical evidence of this earlier presence has been recovered. The Soulweaver records are the only source. The records are difficult to interpret, and the few mortal scholars who have studied them have produced no two consistent translations.

This layer is not currently a research priority, for the obvious reason that the research priority before it (the Soulweavers themselves) has not been completed.

The Present #

Nothing happens in the Shattered Peaks in the present age. No mortal nation claims them. No trade route crosses them. The few expeditions that have ventured onto the carved slopes have returned with sketches, fragmentary maps, and the consistent observation that the range feels watched. The feeling is not unpleasant. It is described, by those who have experienced it, as something like the feeling of walking through a sleeping person’s bedroom: a sense that the space belongs to someone who is not currently using it, but who could wake up at any moment and be entirely within their rights to ask what you are doing here.

Whether the someone is the giants, the residual Soulweaver workings, or something the giants and the Soulweavers were both trying to keep contained, is not known.

The “abandoned” reading is, at minimum, incomplete. At least one giant clan and a functioning monastery are active within the range today, training and turning away newcomers entirely outside the awareness of the mortal nations that consider the Peaks empty. What looks uninhabited from the lowlands is inhabited; it simply keeps to itself.