Iron Desert

The Iron Desert is a vast, desolate landscape that dominates the eastern half of the continent where the majority of Amauvala's civilisations dwell. It reaches to the border of Syan in the west, Yehar in the south and all the way to the eastern ocean. The absolute majority of the Iron Desert is a near-endless rocky wasteland, the surface of the bedrock covered in a hard, burnt shale that prevents all but the most hardy wildlife from living there. Thus, the Iron Desert has no sand dunes and next to no oases. It is very characteristic in that the soil and most of the wildlife there follows a reddish colour pattern. Along with the Chaos terrain and the odd rocky formations that are frequently seen there, the Iron Desert would seem an alien and eerie place in comparison to most locations in Amauvala.
Most of the Iron Desert is too desolate to sustain much life, but it has two native humanoid groups; the Mentvjéh and the Scorched. The former are an aboriginal species with characteristic short, stocky bodies, dark skin and aversion to sunlight. They are of limited intelligence and have failed to develop any semblance of civilisation. The Scorched are the sole civilised inhabitants of the Iron Desert, a mysterious people who mostly live harsh, nomadic lives in the valleys of cracked shale where water can be found. However, there are also larger cities hidden beneath the red soil.
==Nomenclature==
The Iron Desert is known by various names in different nations. The Scorched themselves do not use a single term for it but literally have hundreds of names for their homeland, each with different connotations. Commonly used terms are Thtsvkja ("The Endless"), Ikhsvjerjeshtvsén ("The Red below the sky"), Vtsvashtenjír ("The World-spirit's corpse)", Vtsvá ("That which once was the world"),  and many others. 
It is called the Gholosza in the Syannic language meaning literally "The Sunlands."
In Yehar it is referred to as Rudjegannael or "The Land of Red Stones."
==The Mír Valley Region==
The Mír region lies in the extreme west of the Iron Desert. It is dominated by the mighty river Mír that has eroded the hard shale of the desert throughout thousands of years and created an enormous chasm several miles deep. The valley created by the flow of the Mír river is unusual as its banks are sandy, the hard rock ground into powder by millennia of flowing water. Most of the plant species here are quite unusual as they've developed in a very isolated environment. The area around the river are notoriously haunted by huge swarms of insects that prowl the region from dusk until dawn, the swarms being large and aggressive enough to swallow entire caravans, making travel along the banks of the Mír incredibly dangerous.
The Mír region is by far the most densely populated area of the Iron Desert, with several nomadic tribes and city-states located in the Mír valley and the surrounding plateau. The Mír river maintains a few trade routes between different Scorched city-states, though camel caravans are by far more commonplace. There is also some non-Scorched maritime activity along most of the Mír river, primarily Syannic sailors as the Mír river eventually flows out into the inland sea south of Syan known as the Parelsa or Khvjenkhstvmír. Syannic sources refer to the river as the Gholsȳ, or Sun River.
==The Red Heartland==
The Red Heartland is the central region of the Iron Desert, an immensely widespread region that is completely dominated by the hard, red shell covering the entire desert. The Red Heartland covers an area of thousands of square miles, most of it next to being completely uninhabited. The few Scorched settlements in the area are built around large crevises breaking the hard shale.
The civilisations of the Red Heartland are so isolated that they are considered mysterious even by other Scorched, although in the Bronze Age there are a few irregular caravans that brave the forbidding landscape between the Mír region and an inhabited region referred to as the "Star of Ashkyrenjé" as it is centered around a huge, star-shaped crater. Almost all settlements lie underground and are small and isolated.
==Mt. Strakhsirjtasír==
Somewhere out in the Red Heartland there is a massive monolith of a mountain, known as Strakhsirjtasír. It is not so much a monolith as it is a gigantic cluster of mountains packed together. The mountain is an inexplicable oddity, rising to enormous heights in the middle of an almost flat plateau, and the Scorched revere it as a sacred place. Its peaks are perpetually covered in snow, the highest single peak reaching more than 8200m above the sea level. Its location is very remote, but some caravaneers do brave the harsh desert for a pilgrimage to the holy mountain. It is said that travelers can see the mountain rising from the horizon six weeks before reaching its foot. 
The Scorched living at Strakhsirjtasír are divided into two tribes; one living under the sun and another living under the moon, with each of them doing different trades that complement one another. They are famous as excellent musicians, stargazers and leatherworkers, a deepy spiritual people even by Scorched standards and quite peaceful unlike their western brethren.
Category:Geographical features
Category:Deserts