whitescar [Lore] Spine of the World Serpent

[SteelEagle]

SPINE OF THE WORLD SERPENT - THE POISON THEY CHOOSE

 

The Spine of the World Serpent is a large mountain range in the northern region of the Whitescar. The name hearkens back to the deepest and oldest of Caribou legends and fables about the creation of Whitescar itself. The Great World Serpent was a villainous beast who ate everything in its path, leaving in its blazing trails monsters who terrorized the few that survived its travel across the land. All that remained were the race of Stone Golems who decided to end the evil that spread across the land. For six days and nights they battled across the nondescript land. Where they fell, mountains were born. The World Serpent was finally slain, its body turning to ash along the northern edge of the known world. The Spine quite literally refers to what the legends believe make up the Spine of the World Serpent and the many Stone Golems it ate during the final battle.

 

The first stop is the large wooded plains and forests that stretch southward, calling out as a challenge to the Caribou. It is an angry, terrible place. Fierce winds threaten to rip the heaviest of furs off of the sturdiest of bodies. Snowstorms can reduce visibility to mere inches and last weeks, burying unwary camps under tons of flash-frozen ice snow. Temperatures range from deadly in a matter of moments to mind numbing in a breath. What few wild animals traverse this wilderness have hides as thick as airship armor and eyes as finely tuned as a binocular. Nothing can grow here as the soil is dead, as dead as any in the known world, and the environment makes a mockery of any attempt at sustainable living.

 

The ground underneath is shockingly hollow, the very earth giving way and dropping hundreds of caribou down a hole hundreds of miles wide...and several miles deep. So harsh and heavy are the snow storms that one can never tell if they are stepping on solid ground or the compacted crashed ground of previous cave-ins. Despite the eons of this cycle it still happens. Whatever happens to the old ground, snow, caribou, caravans, and creatures that fall into this terrifying large cavern under the ground that allows this process to repeat? Some Caribou believe the World Serpent still slumbers and wakes every so often to feast on what has dropped below.

 

Once one pushes past the forests and into the mountains, conditions improve but the physical daily challenge of survival remains unimpeded. The winds and snow remain but the caribou are capable of pushing into the mountains. There they encounter organized bands of vicious Whitescar trolls and sapient spider clans who fight tenaciously over the scraps of food to be found. The deeper one goes into the mountains, the deeper the terror of the Spine's creatures become. No Caribou has ever found where all the deep caves go and it is doubtful one ever will, as even the bravest and greatest fighters are ground down by the incessant conditions and fighting to be found here. The few caribou who make this place a permanent home are among the most feared in existence, fighting daily for bare survival against each other, terrible odds, creatures, and elements. There are no permanent structures to be marked on a map aside from the Three Tombs. While some hard-won cave complexes exist, they are almost always death traps for future entrants. Seemingly any stay of significance by the caribou is met by overwhelming force by the Spine's creatures, and former defensive holdouts and encampments are claimed and turned definitively hostile to future clans. It is a cycle that only the caribou could ever know: They must push though to the mountains to get what little food can be found. By doing so they attract vicious and organized creatures defending their food sources. The Caribou push deeper to find more food, face even more resistance. Only the caribou could handle it.

 

And only the caribou could love it. The landscape is something out of a heroic fable in the tradition of the Caribou, which explains why the Three Tombs exist. The Tombs belong to a grandfather, his son, and his grandson, all of whom were High Kings, and all of whom dedicated their lives to the endless cycle of warfare in the Spine. Under their command, dozens of clans were bled out into near nothingness by the incessant fighting. When the grandfather fell, his tomb was placed at the furthest extent of his reach into the mountain. His son was more reckless and died quicker, even if he expanded the caribou reach thrice. The grandson was intelligent and ruthless and through the near obliteration of the clan-organized caribou, quadrupled the reach of the caribou of his father's age. When he finally fell as an old man himself, he was placed at the furthest extent of where the Caribou had gone. Shortly afterwards, the Caribou in and around the Spine were simply overwhelmed and crushed. What few dozen survivors made it back to the bare-bones populations of the safer reaches of the Whitescar were legendary in their own right, and each one formed his or her own clan. It is from these survivors that the first clans of the modern caribou were established and the new order as a result of the Tomb-Kings as they are now known has stretched for eons of its own.

 

Even now, if a clan leader believes his clan has become soft, he will take them to the Spine. There they will endure and fight and fight and endure until the weak have been weeded out. He will return to his homeland with a stronger, if smaller, clan. Great changes in history have been marked by particularly spectacular campaigns. The current High King maybe known as a progressive, but as a young Clan Chieftain, he led his clan into the Spine himself and refused to return until every single Caribou who remained passed his personal examination. When he reached the Tomb of the Grandfather, he abruptly declared the trip a success and a quarter of those who left returned. Just a few years later, he now rules the Caribou- and is the only Caribou to have seen any of the Tombs since they were made, even if he is mum on what he saw...

- A Journal Between Lovers: My Travels and Travails, by Flowing Stars