Lost Desert of Sibayad: Its Supernatural Origins

This book gives a passing overview on the supernatural origin of the Lost Desert of Sibayad.

In Skull Crags in northeast Arelith, there exists under Mount Valtheran a planar rift of indeterminate age and origin, pouring blood and fragments of crushed bodies to this world. And as they fall, they drain back to the portal that is like a geysir of crushed flesh and bones, ever warm and connected to the nether world. And when you join your flesh with the outpour and let yourself be drained with it, you will soon find yourself in an abyssal realm, desertlike, lighted with the lights of impaled everburning bodies of other people therein trapped, and filled with their endless scream of agony.

That extraplanar place bears great resemblance in both geography and architecture, to an island that lies to the south of Arelith, the land of Sibayad. The resemblance is quite striking. In fact they are almost like mirror images of each other. After discussing this with a druid who assumed that the place was but a distorted fragment of plane Prime Material, I later almost by mere chance got an opportunity to ask about it from someone well versed in abyssal matters. I therefore asked the Harbinger if this was indeed the case, and if what was present on that plane was a mirror image of what exists in our world.

So replied Harbinger, that as explained in old fables, the Overlord of the 363rd layer of Abyss once sought to take the ancient kingdom of Zanshibon for himself. And in order to do so, he ripped with his hand that kingdom of Zanshibon from our world to take the whole kingdom with him to the Abyss, and through this act nothing but ruined waste now remains at its place. The old lingering magic of that hand scarred the world around it and left but barren desert behind it. And that is the place we now call the Lost Desert.

Who then are the ancient tomb-kings that now inhabit the graves of the old in the form of ever-lingering spectres? He assumed that they might either be the kings of old Zanshibon, but that they could as well be kings that came but later. It therefore remains shrouded in mystery for now, over what those kings ruled at the time they still had their bodies full of life and they walked the lands of the living.

~ Nella Fryar AR 172.