At the heart of Slumber Deep, where the stasis is absolute and nothing should be able to move, a fortress stands.
Aphoryis was assembled rather than built. Its walls are ships, stacked and fused into impossible configurations. Its towers are the masts of a hundred vessels, reinforced with bone and coral and materials that resist identification. Its foundations rest on the preserved bodies of leviathans, their flesh hardened by centuries of pressure into something stronger than stone.
The fortress exists because its master found a way to move within the stasis, or perhaps because he predates it, and the stasis formed around him. Mirsalyenar the Cruel has occupied Aphoryis for longer than any surface records indicate. He may have been here when the leylines first intersected. He may have caused that intersection.
Within Aphoryis, the stasis does not apply. Servants move through its corridors: drowned sailors raised as mindless workers, captured Kendor forced into service, creatures from the deep that Mirsalyenar has bound to his will. The fortress maintains itself, grows, reaches outward into the suspended graveyard to harvest new materials from the endless supply of the lost.
The lich's phylactery rests somewhere in the fortress's deepest chamber. It cannot be destroyed there. Nothing can be destroyed in the absolute stasis zone, not by fire, not by force, not by the most powerful magic ever devised. Mirsalyenar chose this location specifically because it renders him truly immortal. Even if his body is destroyed on the surface, his phylactery will regenerate him in a place no enemy can reach.