the Black Fountain

This is one of the new things I've been looking forward to showing off - commissioned art! Thanks to all my patrons I can now start to commission art depicting key locations, moments and personalities in Elyden. I have many more such pieces planned so keep an eye out!

This piece is by the talented artist Bruce Brenneise, who some of you may recognise as one of the artists responsible for the epic artwork of the Numenera campaign world, by Monte Cook.  You can follow him over on his own patron. I already have other work planned with him in the future and am really pleased by this piece. I hope you like it too.
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Both mutable and inflexible, the materia omna is the font from which all else is created. All that exists owes its origin, no matter how distant, to the Materia Omna.

    Elyden is a world governed by two dichotomous forces - the Atramenta and the Firmament, more commonly known as the Shadow and the Helix. Like water and oil in a glass, they exist both together and apart, each affecting the other whilst remaining separate. In them are the blueprints to the creation of the universe and, at its centre, the world of Elyden. 

    The Atramenta and the Firmament were employed by powerful Demiurges aeons past in the shaping of the world of Elyden. Its continents, oceans, forests and mountains, all were shaped from these two materials. As were the mortal races: Two-and-Twenty, one for each Demiurge, bearing its most distinctive traits and features. 

    The mortal races would later learn to manipulate the Atramenta and the Firmament, becoming accomplished shapers – warlocks and sorcerers with the power of the elements at their beck and call. 

* * *

Unbeknownst to them, those who called upon the Atramenta to fuel their acts of shaping drew their powers from the Black Fountain. One of two antipodes (the other being the True Meniscus, and font of the Firmament), this is the font of all Atramental activity in Elyden. Located at 8O 57’ 33” S, 27O 56’ 20” W, in the region of Daekyn in the Kharkharadontid Desert, it is one of the most dangerous natural areas in all of Elyden, and is inimical to most life, save for certain creatures that have adapted to life there. 

    The epicentre of the Black Fountain is a featureless black expanse that has been described by the few who have observed it as ‘an absence of space’. This region is known as the Abysmal Marrow and covers an area of around 300-square miles, with an assumed radius of around 10-miles, though the truth is that we do not know – the natural laws at the epicentre of the Black Fountain may warp space in ways we do not fully understand.       

    Farther out from the Abysmal Marrow is a far larger region, called the Penumbra, that nonetheless remains truly inhospitable to unadapted life. With an area of around 31,000- square-miles, this region is characterised by a mirage-like shimmer that pervades the air, and skies thick with clouds and raging with violet lightning storms that have fused the surface of the land into grotesque glass formations. The air is thick with the Atramenta and what flora and fauna survives here does so through thousands of years of hard adaptation.

     Lands where the rock lays as writhing meat are relatively common here, as are trees that pluse with a fleshy corpulence. Such blasphemous regions have become synonymous with Kharkharadontis, though they are far from the norm. There are areas where time passes at an oscillating rate, others where feculent canyons carry rivers of sludge for miles, and others still where flora and fauna have become one and the entire landscape is thought of as being a single organism, and many many more besides.

     Dreamlands (regions where the thoughts and dreams of dead Demiurges are made manifest in the material realm) that happen to fall within the Penumbra are bereft of any sense or order and natural restriction and are restricted only by the twisted bitter ruminations of the Demiurge dreaming them. 

    Further afield the direct influence of the Black Fountain becomes less obvious, though this serves to shine a light on the various unique regions that exist, including different living lands, dreamscapes and tainted vistas, that can be explored by those of  brave and adventerous dispositions.