Southwest of Awobiso, visible from the highest terraces, the Hills of the Damned rise from the sea—a barren promontory where nothing grows and the soil itself seems wrong. The hills earned their name centuries ago, when a Marrovini patrón attempted to bind a powerful spirit as a guardian, similar to Yibiye's Gates. The binding failed catastrophically, and worse than the patrón knew: what he reached for was older than the hills and already bound, and his working cracked that older seal instead of laying a new one over it.
Now the hills are haunted—genuinely, undeniably haunted. Spirits move through the rocks, wailing sounds carry across the water on still nights, and anyone who stays too long begins to hear voices offering terrible bargains. The Marrovini maintain a cordon of guard posts around the hills, not to protect them, but to keep what's inside from getting out.
At the center of the hills stands Tower Yprazi, a crooked spire of blackened stone that predates the binding and, the Marrovini have come to believe, was its true cause. The tower is sealed; its single door has not opened in living memory. Whatever the patrón disturbed is still inside it, and the cordon the family keeps is built to contain that, not to guard the stone.
The Marrovini rule about the hills is the strictest order they give and the one they explain least: do not name the place, do not chart it, do not grant that it exists. Travelers take this for the superstition of a paranoid house. It is not. The thing in the tower endures by being remembered, and every account of the hills, every whispered warning, every bargain carried home from the rocks is one more thread keeping it from fading. The family understood this long ago. Their silence is a method, not a fear.