A vertical shaft forty miles across, punched clean through the Myjornis Mountains into the earth below. The walls are smooth as glass—no ledges, no handholds, no erosion despite millennia of rain. Standing at the rim, the far side is lost in haze. The bottom has never been seen, though estimates based on dropped objects (and their failure to produce audible impact) suggest a depth of at least fifteen miles.
The Walls
The shaft walls aren't natural stone. They're a dark, glassy substance that resists all attempts at sampling—chisels skate off, picks shatter, and magic slides away like water off oil. The material is warm to the touch regardless of weather. At night, faint luminescent veins pulse deep within the glass, following patterns that repeat on a 23-day cycle matching Nyxara's orbit.
The Rim
A permanent updraft rises from Yegnoth, carrying warm air and an acrid mineral smell. The wind is strong enough to make approaching the edge dangerous—several expeditions have lost members to unexpected gusts. The rim itself is barren for a quarter-mile back; nothing grows in the thin soil, and animals avoid the area entirely.
Three watchtowers ring the pit at cardinal points, maintained by Gorath's military. The garrison rotates every thirty days. Soldiers who serve longer begin reporting shared nightmares—always the same dream of descending, of being welcomed, of finally understanding. The military doesn't discuss this publicly.
The Descent
At least a dozen expeditions have attempted to descend Yegnoth using magical flight, levitation, or elaborate rope-and-pulley systems. None have returned. Scrying spells fail below the rim. Sending spells reach their targets but receive no response. One expedition maintained a speaking stone connection for eleven hours of descent before transmission cut off mid-sentence. The last words recorded were "there are lights down here, thousands of—"
The Arcane Consortium of Nashua has placed a 50,000 gold bounty on verifiable information about Yegnoth's depths. It has gone unclaimed for two centuries.
Origin Theories
The Gorathi believe Yegnoth is a wound left by a god's spear thrust into the world during the God War. Academic circles in Nashua theorize it's a collapsed planar boundary—a place where reality wore thin and simply gave way. The Vyko elves of nearby Vykus have older stories: that Yegnoth was here before the mountains, that the Myjornis range grew around it like scar tissue around a splinter, that whatever made it is still down there, waiting with infinite patience.
The Vyko don't go near the rim. They've lived in these mountains for three thousand years. They know something.