The Sunmaw

The great southern desert: dune seas, salt flats, red mesas and, through the middle of it, the green corridor of the Talodin. The Gray Cough of the 160s swept north out of it into the Heartlands, and in the Year Without Summer (623) the Sunmaw starved with the rest of the world. It has swallowed two Castavari armies, the First Crusade of 699–701, when the Zarvani poisoned the wells and let the desert do the work, and the grain-hungry invasion of the Hunger Wars; in the deep desert salt is used as money. Its animals are the oryx that lives without drinking, the dune gazelle, the addax, the sand cat, the big-eared Deep Sands fox and the pale mesa lion of the red mesas, which a Zarvani prince must kill before he can inherit anything, along with horned vipers, fog-drinking dune beetles and locust swarms that mean famine. Caravan children are told of the Qaflan captain who carried a king's army for gold and is still standing at a crossroads somewhere in the Sunmaw, and of the camel that walked three hundred miles to Mazbaaran alone with the water on its back.

See also: The Deep Sands, The Talodin Corridor, The Spice Way, The Deep Oases