The Nysanna Range is one of the most inhospitable places on Alaria, and by some measures the most dramatic. These are the tallest mountains in the world, their peaks rising so high that the air becomes too thin to breathe. The entire range is plagued with constant blizzards, high winds, and freezing temperatures. It is rare for the temperature to climb above -20°F, and the high altitudes cause confusion, hallucination, and poor judgment in those who venture too high without magical protection.
Within the range lie a wide variety of wildlife, civilizations, and valuable resources, but claiming any of them requires surviving the mountains first.
The Glaciers
Massive glaciers fill the valleys and passes of the Nysanna Range, some of them miles thick and constantly grinding forward. These rivers of ice are not static; they calve enormous icebergs into the North Sea, reshape the landscape over centuries, and occasionally release ancient things frozen within them. The glaciers are also riddled with tunnels, some carved by meltwater, others by creatures that call the ice home.
The largest glaciers have names among those who know the range: the Breath of Nydus, the Thousand-Year Flow, the Grinding. Navigation through the range often means traveling through glaciers rather than around them, following tunnel networks that may or may not still exist from season to season.
Dragon Territories
Two white dragons claim the Nysanna Range as their hunting ground, dividing the mountains between them in a cold détente.
Shananae holds the western reaches, from the approaches to the Anderegnons to roughly the midpoint of the range. She is ancient and indifferent, not actively cruel but utterly unconcerned with the lives of smaller creatures. The Atowatowa have learned to read the wind patterns that signal her hunts and adjust their movements accordingly.
Niquous claims the central range, his territory beginning where Shananae's ends and stretching east toward Witvein. He is younger and far more actively malevolent, a hunter who takes pleasure in terror. His blue-white scales make him nearly invisible against glacial ice. The Wydlings of Witvein have lost enough hunting parties to him that they've developed elaborate warning systems for his approach.
The space between their territories is not safe; it is simply where both dragons hunt.
Western Peaks
The western arm of the Nysanna Range curves northward toward the Senaveer Mountains and the Anderegnons, approaching the border between the Material Plane and Celestia. Here the mountains grow taller and stranger, their peaks often wreathed in aurora-light even during the day.