Estuary of the Forked Tongue

To the untrained eye, the silt is an endless plain of desolation, lifeless and deadly. Yet this is only an illusion, a distortion of the truth. The silt possesses its characteristic formations and moods, just as landforms anywhere do. The experienced silt traveler faces an everchanging terrain as diverse as that of the Tablelands or the Ringing Mountains. Silt is not found in the boundaries of the Sea alone. Many inland dust sinks and silt basins, as well as the great silt estuaries, are found near the borders of the sea or within a few days' march. The dust that fills them is carried across the intervening lands in the course of great storms out on the Sea, and it fills the lower-lying areas. The dust basins surrounding Bodach and the Mud Palace were created in this fashion. Conversely, the Sea of Silt is not composed exclusively of silt. Rocky islands rise from the dust, dotting the surface of the sea with firm land. Bare patches of stone can be found here and there, places where the earth is scoured flat by the endless winds-places where the silt never accumulates. In other areas, sharp crags pierce the blanket of dust like spears buried in sand. Lastly, of course, there are countless mud flats scattered across the pearly silt.

What is the Sea of Silt? Where did it come from? One need only see the ruins of the ancients that litter its shores to realize that Athas was not always the arid waste it is today. Some people believe the Sea was once filled with water, so much water that one could stand on the shore and not see the other side. The silt itself is a grayish powder, like very fine and dry dust. It runs through the fingers like water, leaving not a trace on one's hands. The slightest trace of moisture causes it to stick and clump; it can cake the eyes, nose, and throat in seconds. Breathing the airborne silt slowly lines the lungs with powder and chokes the life from even a giant.

Like water, silt has a devilish ability to find its way into everything. A traveler walking along the borders of the Sea of Silt on a windy day finds boots, packs, and even pockets filling with gray dust. Most of the time it is merely annoying-but contamination of a canteen or food supplies is a sore blow to the wayfarer on short rations. Silt is denser than air, but far less than water. Stories tell of inventors who tried to copy the hulled, wheelless vehicles the ancients used to travel through water. The silt is so light, and of so little substance, that even the most carefully built boat sank through the dust to rest on the bottom. Others tried to strap great baskets to their feet, hoping that these could support their weight over the silt. They were no more successful.

Water sinks rapidly through the silt. A gallon of water thrown into shallow silt leaves a foot-wide muddy shaft through the dust down to the rock below. This rapidly fills over and collapses, but some sages observing this effect have speculated that a sufficient amount of water, such as one good rain, could pound the entire Sea into a single mud flat. Of course, the terrible heat of the sun would soon dry the mud back into silt. 

Silt travelers must be forewarned of the Gray Death: suffocation from windborne dust while wading or flying above the silt (or even traveling near its borders) on windy days. The lungs and the throat slowly clog with dust, and unprotected characters traveling in these conditions suffer as if they were Drowning. Breathing through a thin, fine cloth is adequate protection for most humans and humanlike creatures. The cloth must be kept damp and clean, which consumes ½ gallon of water per day.

The endless flat expanse of the Sea of Silt allows terrifying winds to develop across its empty scope. It is a rare day when the Sea is still. Most of the time, it is whipped into a blinding, pearly haze by the fierce winds that sweep across the dust. On very windy days, the top layer of the silt is actually carried away and borne into the atmosphere. Dust can hang in the air for many hours, and sometimes even days, after a major storm. Depending on the depth of the silt and the power of the wind, this stripped layer can be anywhere from a few inches to dozens of feet thick. In many places a large storm can strip shallow silt right down to the bedrock and carry a blanket of silt over lands that are not normally covered. The borders of the sea are thus fluid and shift with the wind. Eventually, the wind always replaces what it has taken away, and the Sea returns to its normal limits. Beneath this top layer lies the wave silt. This behaves like any body of water, forming waves when agitated. Running snakewise before the wind, the endless rise and fall of the gray dust can become hypnotic. Unlike water, the dust is too light to ever break or fall, and if the wind should suddenly die, the silt is left frozen in endless rippling dunes. They are deceptively solid to the eye, but are no more dense than other silt.

Underneath the wave silt is the deep silt. This layer lies so far down (40-50' deep) that it is almost never disturbed by the surface weather. Even the most knowledgeable sages can only guess at conditions in the deep silt. Presumably it is lightless and airless, and some amount of silt compression most likely takes place. What creatures make their homes here, or what secrets the deep silt hides, no one knows.