The Codex of Alaria

The Misery River is the largest river system in the jungles between Shyona and the Krell Lands, draining a vast watershed before it empties into Belanorn Bay. Its water carries an ancient grief. The grief is not a poison and does the body no harm, but it settles into anyone who drinks it as a sorrow that is not their own, and it grows more specific the closer one comes to the headwaters. Everything along the banks has been shaped by it.

Course

The main channel comes down out of the mountains northwest of Locquine, fed by dozens of streams off the highlands, and runs down through thickening jungle toward the coast. It gathers tributaries as it goes, the Marmoroy from the north being the largest. The river passes near the pixie city-state of Locquine and widens as it nears Belanorn Bay. So many smaller streams feed it that the whole watershed becomes a web of waterways, and in the wet season the low ground floods into temporary lakes.

The water's grief

The Misery is not poisoned. It supports abundant life, and drinking it does no physical harm. What it does is grief. Those who drink from it feel a sudden sorrow that belongs to someone else: memories of losses they never suffered, mourning for people they never knew. A few mouthfuls pass within hours. Heavy exposure lingers for days.

Prolonged contact is worse. People who spend weeks on the Misery's tributaries describe a creeping despair, an inability to feel joy, and finally the urge to end it. More than one expedition has lost members to self-inflicted death with no cause anyone could point to. The effect answers to no detection spell and no antimagic field, because it is not an enchantment. It is older than structured magic, and it behaves less like a spell than like something bleeding into the water from far upstream.

The unreachable source

The grief grows specific as the river climbs. Near the headwaters it is no longer a vague sadness but the unmistakable mourning of a single consciousness, grieving something lost so long ago that time itself has forgotten what it was. The source has never been reached. Those who push too far upstream either turn back overwhelmed or do not come back at all. The last serious attempt, funded out of Shyona in 3,298 SD, lost six of its eight members. What waits at the source is left to the imagination of the few who have returned from the upper river, and they do not like to speak of it.

The pixies of Locquine know more than they will say. Asked about the source, they answer the same way every time.

She remembers. We remember with her. — the Locquine pixies, when asked what lies at the headwaters

Ecology

For all the danger it carries, the Misery teems with life. Fish found in no other water swim its channels, amphibians and reptiles crowd its banks, and the jungle along its course grows unusually lush, as though the grief feeds the green rather than poisoning it. The forest here feels watchful, not hostile but mournful. Travelers describe trees that seem to lean toward them and animal calls that come close to weeping.

Travel and trade

The Misery is the most direct water route from the interior to Belanorn Bay, and almost no one uses it. The toll on the mind is too high. Those who must go usually arm themselves against it: earplugs packed with particular herbs, masks soaked in alchemical compounds, or pixie guides hired out of Locquine who know how to read the river's moods. The mouth at Belanorn Bay is the gentlest stretch, where the grief thins as the water meets the sea. A few fishing communities work there, and even they report melancholic dreams and more sorrow in their houses than other towns carry.

The name

The first Shyonan parties to chart this country named the river for what it cost them. Their journals describe the change coming on once they entered the watershed: companions who had been laughing went silent, plans made in good cheer collapsed into bitter argument. By the time they reached Locquine, three of their number had walked off into the jungle and never come back. The survivors called the river the Misery and turned for home.