In order to prevent their city-states from being
destroyed, sorcerer-kings pay tribute to the Dragon
in the form of massive sacrifices. Slaves, dissidents,
rebels and other undesirables are rounded up and
offered to the Dragon in order to placate the terrible
beast and buy safety for the despots and those under
their control—at least for a while longer.
Most of the sorcerer-kings wisely seek to keep the
Dragon from coming close to their domains when
claiming their offering. Numerous sites throughout
the Tyr region serve as places where the Dragon
claims its victims. Most are far from civilization. One
of the most notorious sacrificial sites is the Dragon’s
Altar, a place rarely visited because of its long-time
association with the Dragon. The Dragon’s Altar is so
polluted by the Dragon’s powerful defiling magic that
the very stones of Athas have been twisted and blackened by repeated exposure to the Dragon’s presence.
The Dragon’s Altar is located well within the
mountains, in a canyon surrounded on all sides by
towering, red-stone peaks. The Dragon’s Altar is actually within the caldera of an extinct volcano which
erupted in a time so ancient that there is no record of
it, not even in the vast memories of the sorcerer-kings.
A narrow, winding path leads through a crevasse
in the side of the canyon, granting access from the
outside. At the bottom of the canyon is a single, massive block of chiseled obsidian—the Dragon’s Altar
itself. Though no one knows who carved this obsidian
slab, it has been fortified by some external means—
magic, psionics, or something else—to remain pristine
despite eons of use as a place of hideous sacrifice. The
walls surrounding the Dragon’s Altar, on the other
hand, have been carved repeatedly by the wretched
beings waiting to be claimed by the Dragon. They
have left behind a massive, despairing display of pictographs and even the occasional written word telling
a tale of centuries of sacrifices to the great beast.
Most sensible people of Athas stay far, far away
from the Dragon’s Altar, even when no sacrifices are
waiting to be claimed. Aside from the taint left on the
landscape by the Dragon’s presence over the years,
there is the (not unreasonable) fear that the Dragon
might reappear at any time.
The Dragon’s Altar is located in the mountains
to the southwest of Gulg and west of the Great Ivory
Plain, not far from Altaruk. At the base of those
mountains lies an archway of carved stone bearing
warnings (in the form of both pictographs and rarelyseen written languages of many of the races of Athas)
that the region beyond the arch belongs to the Dragon
of Tyr. The archway is not hidden but it is relatively
small, so only those who know where it lies (or have
a map leading to it) can find it readily. Without such
knowledge, one could spend days wandering the foothills of the mountains, expending precious food and
water while searching for the entrance.
Once one passes through the arch, a path winds
for several miles through the mountains before crossing the crevasse into the caldera where the Dragon’s
Altar lies. Along the way, dozens of caves lead into
darkness. Templars who speak of their journeys to
deliver sacrifices to the Dragon’s Altar claim that the
whispers of the sacrificed dead call out from those
caves to anyone who passes by. Those who were brave
enough to follow the whispers have never been seen
or heard from again—ferried directly to the land of
the dead, the templars claim.
The truth behind these whispers is less mystical. A
slave tribe, known to one another as the Altar Skulkers, makes its home in the system of ancient lava
tubes surrounding the Dragon’s Altar. The “whispers
of the dead” that people hear as they march toward
the Altar are members of the slave tribe trying to lure
potential sacrifices away from the Altar and into the
safety of the caves before the Dragon arrives. They
can save only a few at a time, both because they fear
drawing the attention of the templars and because the
tribe lacks the resources to absorb more than a few
new members at once.
Other than those being sacrificed, templars are the
only people of Athas who can openly claim to have
visited the Dragon’s Altar and survived. Even when
the Dragon is not there and no sacrifice is waiting,
templars (in well-guarded entourages) sometimes visit
the Dragon’s Altar on missions for the inscrutable
sorcerer-kings. Mercenaries hired to accompany these
templars tell stories of the visits, but all are different;
sometimes the templars claim to be looking for slaves
that escaped the Dragon’s wrath, while other times
they offer no explanation but spend hours or days performing frightening, arcane experiments on the stone
surrounding the Dragon’s Altar. Though explorers,
dune traders, and raiders have almost certainly journeyed or wandered up the winding path to the Altar,
they were either captured and killed by the Altar
Skulkers or are too afraid of the stigma attached with
standing so close to the shadow of the Dragon to tell
anyone about it.
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