The southernmost landmass of Venalthier—a windswept plateau extending toward the polar ice cap, where the boundary between land and permanent sea ice becomes impossible to determine. The Akratian Plateau represents the end of the world in the most literal sense: beyond it lies only the frozen ocean and the pole itself.
Geography
The Akratian Plateau rises south of the Selengreyb Plateau, separated by a broad glacial valley. It extends roughly 200 miles east to west and at least 150 miles north to south—"at least" because no one has mapped its southern extent. At some point, the land ice merges with the sea ice, and the distinction becomes meaningless.
Elevation averages 4,000-5,000 feet, lower than Selengreyb but still punishingly high. The surface is smoother than the northern plateau, with fewer undulations and less visible variation. The ice here is older, more compressed, bluer in color. In places, it's nearly transparent, revealing dark rock hundreds of feet below.
The plateau's edges are marked by ice cliffs where glaciers calve into the surrounding sea—extensions of the Whitewall system that wraps around Venalthier's coast. These southern cliffs are lower and less dramatic than the northern Whitewalls, but they extend for hundreds of miles in both directions.
The Polar Approach
The Akratian Plateau is the gateway to Alaria's southern pole—or would be, if reaching the pole were possible.
The plateau gradually merges with the polar ice sheet, a transition zone of perhaps 100 miles where land-based ice and sea-based ice become indistinguishable. Beyond that transition, the polar ice cap extends to the geographic pole itself, an additional 500+ miles of frozen ocean that no expedition has successfully crossed.
Several attempts have been made. All have failed. The furthest known penetration reached approximately 200 miles onto the sea ice before being forced to turn back by conditions that made continued travel impossible. What those conditions were, the survivors couldn't fully articulate—something about the ice itself becoming wrong, the compass spinning uselessly, time seeming to stretch and compress unpredictably.
The pole remains unconquered, its nature unknown. Some scholars theorize it's simply more ice extending to a mathematical point. Others believe something exists at the pole—something that doesn't want to be found.
The Ice Singers
One phenomenon is consistently reported by Akratian expeditions: the ice sings.
Not metaphorically. The ice produces sounds—tones that rise and fall, harmonics that shift and layer, something that resembles music but follows no recognizable pattern. The singing is loudest during the coldest periods and disappears entirely during warmer spells. It seems to emanate from deep within the glacier, from far to the south.
The singing is a voice. Specifically, it's the voice of Keth-Vorun, a primordial entity that was imprisoned at the southern pole before the current age began.
Keth-Vorun predates the God War, the titans, possibly the primordials themselves. The fragmentary records that mention it describe something that existed before the current arrangement of planes—a consciousness from an earlier attempt at creation that went wrong. The beings who became the primordials didn't destroy Keth-Vorun; they couldn't. Instead, they bound it at the axis of the world and froze it there, using the planet's rotation to power a containment that has held for epochs.
The ice cap isn't natural. It exists because Keth-Vorun is cold, profoundly cold, in ways that transcend temperature. Its prison leaks, and that leakage creates Venalthier's climate. The polar conditions that make this continent uninhabitable are a side effect of something far worse being kept contained.
The singing is Keth-Vorun attempting to communicate. It has been attempting to communicate for millions of years. The "music" is actually a language, but the concepts it encodes are so alien that mortal minds experience them as abstract sound rather than meaning. Those who listen too long begin to parse it—and that's when the madness starts. Understanding Keth-Vorun's language means thinking in patterns incompatible with sanity.
What The Nabuhe Know
The Nabuhe learned about Keth-Vorun from Velkoreth's memories—the titan whose corpse is The Face. Before dying, Velkoreth witnessed the binding, epochs ago, and that memory persists in the Frostfire. Nabuhe who consume unprocessed Frostfire during certain rituals can access fragments of the titan's knowledge, including its understanding of what lies at the pole.
The Nabuhe don't go to the Akratian Plateau because they know exactly what's there. They don't share this knowledge because understanding Keth-Vorun invites its attention. The entity can sense minds that comprehend it; those who learn what it truly is become audible to something that has been trying to communicate for millions of years.
The failed polar expeditions didn't turn back because of harsh conditions. They turned back because the singing started making sense.