Island of Ghiz
The Island of Ghiz lies in the cold waters between the Dragon Empire and the Dwarven Kingdom—a bleak place sailors try not to name aloud. Its shoreline is rock and black sand, its interior a wasted sweep of frost-scoured ground where even hardy scrub struggles to live. Above it all rises Ghiz’s most infamous landmark: a towering spiral of ice, an impossible helix that claws up into the sky like a frozen curse made visible.
Ghiz was not always barren. Old maps and half-remembered hymns speak of villages, pilgrimage routes, and stone sanctuaries raised to Morena, goddess of winter and death. Those days ended with Bogdan Sokół—once a monk, later the architect of Ghiz’s doom. Whether through grief, ambition, or something darker that found purchase in him, Bogdan turned to necromancy. When he was finally brought down and buried on Ghiz, the island itself changed: the ice spiral erupted from the earth, and the dead began to rise in numbers that never truly dwindled.
Today, Ghiz is known as the Seat of the Lich King—Bogdan Sokół’s final and most terrible name. The island feels claimed: the air is sharp with funerary cold, the ground is tainted, and the boundary between grave and world has worn thin. Undead servitors roam where roads once ran, and the ruins of Morena’s temples stand like broken teeth—silent, watchful, and profaned by what now walks among them.
Places on Ghiz
The Ice Spiral
Visible from miles out at sea, the spiral dominates the island’s horizon and seems to draw weather toward it. Storms gather strangely around its height, and the cold near its base has a biting, unnatural edge. Many believe the spiral is not merely a monument to the curse, but its anchor.
Ruins of Morena’s Temples
Across the island, collapsed sanctuaries and scattered shrines mark the remnants of an older Ghiz. Carvings of winter rites and death-litanies remain under rime and ash. Some still hold a trace of sanctity—enough to shelter a traveler for an hour, or to turn an undead’s hunger into hesitation—while others feel inverted, like places where prayers were answered by the wrong power.
The Hallowed Cliff Monastery
A cliffbound stronghold on the southeast coast, also known as the Morena Monastery. It is both refuge and warning: a sanctuary above, and a place where old, hungry things still press close beneath.
Fort Prav
A stout dwarven outpost on the shore—Ghiz’s most reliable foothold for the living. Fort Prava is built to endure: iron-reinforced barricades, hard angles, and immense statues of Svarog set like guardians along its defenses. It exists for one purpose—to hold back what comes wandering out of the island’s interior—and it does so with grim patience.
The fort is commanded by Siv Mark'kiln, and serves as the primary staging point for expeditions, rescues, and desperate sorties into the cursed land. The dwarves here treat the undead like a weather-front: predictable if you respect it, lethal if you provoke it.
Dangers & Rumors
Ghiz is not only plagued by the common dead. Stranger predators are whispered of, as well as opportunistic cults who treat the island as a hunting ground for forbidden practices. Even when the shoreline seems quiet, the island is never truly still.