Location The Dendrik Ravine

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The Dendrik Ravine A scar upon the land that falls almost exactly in the center of the testing grounds. It has largely been ignored by Wizards and Wardens alike due to its irrelevance to the overall infrastructure of the island. Until recently it has been unique only in that it was the sole entrance into the heartlands through which a mortal can possibly pass. In the deepest depths the walls of the ravine give way to cave entrances that are seemingly littered randomly throughout the passage. The environment has had its own quasi-natural sentinels for decades in the hyper-intelligent breed of spiders, the Anakara. An experiment from just after the Valterian, Parsiminy Karte working in tandem with the Alahean Wizard Jarvek, which fused spiders with humans. The traits that were focused upon most heavily were intelligence and skeletal forms. Largely the spiders appear as arachnid, but they are enormous in size to facilitate the secondary bone structure, some growing as large as pit ponies. After their size their second most distinctive ability is that of speech, even the smallest can mimic and mutter language back at mortal passersby. The eldest can hold full conversations the downside is they rarely wish to talk about human affairs. These spiders have recently begun causing tunnel collapses and circumventing the old paths with new ones. The Wardens understand that this is a severe weakening of one of the holds on the Heartlands. The series of tunnels are in fact a giant glyph made by the first heartland’s warden that stabilize a shield holding the intellect that fuels the heartlands in stasis. The spiders are led by a singular creature called only by the moniker, ‘Mother’. She is by far the largest of the Anakara spiders and can only traverse specific chambers due to her bulk. She is thought to be from the original generation of spiders breed by Karte and Jarvek. Karte has never confirmed the suspicions regarding the orgins and Mother ate Jarvek. Kierra Doma has long been the de-facto curator of the ravine. Within the last few seasons events have begun to transpire not only within the Heartlands but within the Ravine that had stretched the one Warden too far. Kierra began to turn more inwards and focus on the needs of the Heartlands, this allowed a phase of neglect and in the intermediary the land seemed to have begun warping itself. Malfeasance seems to have taken an intrinsic hold on the ravine and several people have reported extreme feelings of distress or paranoia during their passage.