Towering above the marshes, rainforests, tundra forests, glaciers, and snow-clad cliffs of Tasmania lies a land of fire and death—the Tasmanian Highlands, more commonly known across Oceanyka as the Hellscape. This tortured expanse is among the most hostile environments on Earth, an unrelenting battleground where ice and fire wage eternal war. The Hellscape is a realm of extreme volcanic activity, where daily eruptions churn rivers of molten rock through the jagged valleys. The relentless geothermal heat prevents any lasting snow or ice, turning what should be a frozen wasteland into a land of scorching rock and blistering winds. Temperatures in the valleys can rival the hottest places on Earth, yet just beyond their reach, glaciers loom over the toxic plains, feeding streams laced with volcanic acids and heavy metals. These poisoned waters flow downward, where the resilient vegetation of the lowlands filters them into something barely suitable for life.
And yet, life persists. Twisted, unnatural, and nightmarishly lethal, the creatures of the Hellscape defy logic itself. They are deformed in ways that seem almost intentional, their mutations eerily precise, their resilience bordering on the supernatural. Many believe the land’s unnatural evolution is linked to its exceptionally high concentrations of Warpstone, a substance notorious for causing radical mutations in both flora and fauna. Nowhere else in Oceanyka is the Cryptid 🐲 population denser—many of the continent’s most feared and elusive creatures are known to descend from the Hellscape, their violent hunts leaving only blood and silence in their wake.
Whether these anomalies have always plagued Tasmania or emerged in recent centuries is a question no scholar has answered. If they are historical in nature, it raises a chilling possibility: that the Ferozen Invasion was not merely a conquest, but an exodus—a desperate flight from something far worse than war.
Rising above this land of madness is Mount Ossa, standing at an unfathomable 6,531 metres above sea level, the highest peak in all of Oceanyka. It is a monument to Tasmania’s cruel majesty, a beacon to those who dare trespass into the Hellscape. But those who do rarely return unchanged—if they return at all.