Sunken City

An ancient city on the bottom of the Southern Sea, a few days to the north from the isle of Oriab. Its ruins are clearly visible from the surface when sailing above it on a ship. The Sunken City is first mentioned in Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath".
Nobody seems to know the name of the city, nor how old the city is or how it came to be beneath the waves. Two major theories exist on this last point. First is that the Sunken City was once a nation above the waves. A cataclysm, perhaps the hubris of the residents, or perhaps the ever-shifting landscape of the Dreamlands themselves, then took it beneath the waves like the mythical Earth city of Atlantis. In such an event, most of the residents must surely have drowned, which accounts for the dearth of information on its history today. The second theory is that the Sunken City was always underwater. Of course, this theory does not explain what happened to the now-deserted city's inhabitants or why no record of them seems to exist.
However, those who have visited the Sunken City personally can attest: it's not quite as empty as it seems from the surface. Randolph Carter on his way to Oriab saw strange lights emanating from the city's windows, and in the courtyard of one of the buildings there was a fresh corpse of a man tied to the monolith. This indicates that the city is probably inhabited by some violent beings such as the Deep Ones that worship Dagon. In the Tsuwamono roleplaying game, the Sunken City is inhabited by sunken cultists.
== Architecture ==
The Sunken City "rose on gentle hills which were covered with the stamp of ancient streets and the crumbling walls of small houses". At the northern end of the city there is a great temple with twin rows of statutes of strange sphinx-like creatures leading toward a huge public square. At the very southern edge of the city, there is another temple or monastery - a dark, low structure whose walls described a square with a tower at each of its corners.
Category:Places
Category:Cities
Category:South