The Ashen Plains

The Ashen Plains is a region in Landorya. A vast expanse of basaltic plateaus blanketed in pale volcanic ash, the Ashen Plains are the quieter, more contemplative territory of the Dragon Empire of Aurixia. This region is… Geography: Flat to gently rolling basaltic plateaus stretching outward from the Drakon Range's western and southern flanks, their surfaces layered wit… Climate: Arid and dry, with fine ash carried on constant low winds. Temperatures are moderate compared to the Drakon Range, thou…

Flat to gently rolling basaltic plateaus stretching outward from the Drakon Range's western and southern flanks, their surfaces layered with centuries of compressed ash deposits. Occasional obsidian outcroppings jut from the plains like frozen waves, sculpted by Ash Wyrm breath over generations.

Arid and dry, with fine ash carried on constant low winds. Temperatures are moderate compared to the Drakon Range, though superheated ash storms can sweep across the plains without warning.

The Ashen Plains were settled by Ash Wyrms in the early centuries of the empire's expansion, drawn by the vast open skies and the meditative stillness of the ash-covered landscape. Over millennia, the plains became the cultural and philosophical heartland of Aurixia, producing the empire's greatest thinkers and artists. The Drakonian mortal administrative layer has its densest population centers here, making it the primary zone of dragon–mortal cooperation and the most accessible region for rare diplomatic contact with neighboring civilizations.

It is whispered among the mortal administrators of the Ashen Plains that the oldest obsidian formations are not natural outcroppings at all, but the petrified exhalations of the First Ash Wyrm, a philosopher-dragon so ancient she contemplated herself into stillness and became the land. Drakonian scholars call this event the Great Inhalation, the moment she breathed in all her own thoughts and never breathed out again. Ash Wyrms who meditate beside these formations claim to hear faint intellectual murmurings rising from the stone, unfinished arguments and half-composed odes frozen mid-syllable. To chip or deface an obsidian outcropping is considered the gravest cultural desecration in all of Aurixia, punishable by exile to the volcanic interior.

Daily existence on the Ashen Plains is governed by a slow, deliberate rhythm unlike anywhere else in the Dragon Empire, Ash Wyrms rise with the pale grey dawn to inscribe their nocturnal meditations into the compressed ash with claw-tip script, vast calligraphic passages that stretch for hundreds of metres before the wind erases them by midday. The mortal administrative layer, clerks, translators, archivists, and envoys, rises early to transcribe what can be saved before the ash reclaims it, treating this ephemeral draconic art as both sacred text and bureaucratic record. Markets in the mortal settlement clusters are subdued and deliberate affairs, trading in ash-pigments, obsidian instruments, and philosophical manuscripts rather than arms or ore. Diplomatic delegations from neighboring civilizations are received in open-air platforms of smoothed basalt, where silence is considered the highest form of respect and an Ash Wyrm's willingness to speak is itself the honour.