The transitional highlands between the forests and the lakes—a band of rolling terrain separating Eberri Ygonzi from the northern reaches of Kama Sa'malina. The Endari Hills are neither as deadly as the forest nor as treacherous as the lake country, but they're hardly safe. This is buffer zone, and everything that survives here has learned to avoid the worse things on either side.
Geography
The Endari Hills stretch roughly sixty miles east to west and thirty miles north to south, rising gradually from the forest floor and dropping into the marshy lowlands around the lakes. The terrain is open compared to Eberri Ygonzi: scrub forest, rock outcrops, grassy slopes with occasional stands of wind-bent conifers.
The hills offer the best overland travel route in the region. Moving east-west through Wycendeula's southern reaches, travelers can either cross Eberri Ygonzi (coilwights), Kama Sa'malina (gilthrain), or the Endari Hills (relatively nothing). Most choose the hills.
This makes the Endari the closest thing the region has to a trade route, though "trade route" implies more traffic than actually exists. A handful of trappers, hunters, and desperate travelers cross the hills each year. It's enough to maintain rough paths but not enough to support permanent way-stations.
What's Here
Wildlife
The hills support the kind of fauna you'd expect—deer, rabbits, ground-nesting birds, the predators that hunt them. Wolves and foxes range across the Endari, as do occasional bears. Nothing dramatically dangerous by the standards of wilderness elsewhere.
The notable absence: nothing from Eberri Ygonzi or Kama Sa'malina. Coilwights don't leave the forest cover. Gilthrain can't survive far from water. The Pallid stick to the Pale Death and its immediate approaches. The Endari Hills exist in a gap between territories, too exposed for forest hunters and too dry for lake predators.
Bristle-wolf packs sometimes range into the hills from Eberri Ygonzi, hunting in the open terrain. They're the main non-environmental threat travelers face—smart enough to avoid large groups, patient enough to follow smaller ones for days.
The Burned Stones
A circle of blackite monoliths on the highest hill in the range, clearly artificial, origin unknown. The stones stand twelve to fifteen feet tall, arranged in a ring roughly a hundred feet across. Their surfaces are smooth, almost glassy, as if subjected to intense heat.
No one knows who built the Burned Stones or why. The arrangement doesn't match any known culture's practices. The stones predate the Riin, predate human presence in Wycendeula, possibly predate the Third Eon. Scholars have examined them without learning anything useful—the stones are just stones, apparently, carrying no magical signature or planar resonance.
Local trappers avoid the circle anyway. The stones feel wrong, they say. Not dangerous, just... observed. Standing in the ring produces the sensation of being watched by something very far away.
Travel Advice
The Endari Hills are the safest route through the region, but "safest" is relative.
- Stick to the ridgelines: The high ground offers visibility and keeps you away from the forest edge (where coilwights hunt) and the lake approaches (where gilthrain territory begins).
- Travel in daylight: The hills don't have nocturnal super-predators, but bristle-wolves prefer to attack at night.
- Avoid the Burned Stones at night: Probably superstition. But the trappers who use these hills regularly all say the same thing, and they've survived longer than the people who dismissed their advice.
- Watch for weather: The hills are exposed. Storms that would be merely unpleasant in the forest become dangerous in open terrain.
Hooks
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Something's changed at the Burned Stones. A trapper reports that the monoliths have moved—not much, maybe a few feet each, but they're now facing inward when they used to face outward. No one has seen them move. No one can explain how stones weighing tons could shift without leaving marks. But someone's paying to investigate.
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Bristle-wolves are massing. Multiple packs have been seen traveling together through the Endari Hills—unprecedented behavior for a territorial species. Something is either driving them from Eberri Ygonzi or drawing them toward Kama Sa'malina. Either way, the hills are becoming more dangerous, and the reason matters.
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The safe route isn't. Travelers have gone missing in the Endari Hills—not in the forest, not in the lakes, but in the theoretically safe buffer zone. No bodies have been found. No signs of predator attack. People are simply vanishing, and the survivors are too few to provide useful information.