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Lolth and the Valsharess aren't one in the same, dude. :P
And have you ever driven the highways of Louisiana? There's kudzu all over the place, growing and proliferating like wildfire and killing off all the local flora despite the state's ongoing efforts to burn all the kudzu down to the roots, all because some idiot thought that it would be totally awesome to cultivate this Japanese weed in the United States. So you might not be too far off the mark with Moander there.
And don't forget: The seas and oceans are territory too. ;)
Istishia - The Challenger Deep, the deepest watery depth on Earth at 35,994 feet (10,971 meters).
Umberlee - The Bermuda Triangle, a frequent crossing zone for hurricanes, waterspouts and other sea storms. The island Bermuda (which marks one corner of the Triangle) has been laid to waste by hurricanes a whopping 35 times since 1871; the other two corners of the Triangle -- Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico -- are favorite targets for Caribbean hurricanes as well. The Triangle's sea storms are also notorious for manifesting very quickly and without warning, a phenomenon which is likely responsible for the Triangle's legendary number of mysteriously vanished naval vessels and aircraft.
Valkur - The Mediterranean Sea, the mother basin of sailships, warships, naval trade routes and fair sailing weather since ancient times.
Sekolah - The Caribbean Sea. The largest Great White Shark on Earth was caught off the shores of Cuba in 1945; it measured 21 feet (6.4 meters) in length and weighed roughly 7,328 pounds (3,324 kilograms). The Caribbean Sea has also been ill-reputed for unprovoked shark attacks against humans since the Age of Sail.
Ulutiu - The Northern Polar Ice Cap. Unfortunately, an estimated 20% to 40% of the ice cap has melted since 1979, so Ulutiu might not stay asleep for too much longer....
Gond - Lorraine, France, the birthplace of Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, the inventor of the world's actual first automobile in 1769.
Kelemvor and/or Jergal - The Sedlec Ossuary, Sedlec, the Czech Republic. In 1278, a monastic abbot returned from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land bearing a bottle of topsoil which he'd collected from Golgotha, the ancient hill where Jesus of Nazareth (the cornerstone of Christianity and the Christ of that faith) had been crucified. The abbot then sprinkled the Golgothan soil over the chapel's cemetery, making the cemetery so desirable as hallowed ground that people from all over Europe began transporting their dead to Sedlec for burial there. The cemetery was greatly expanded to meet the rising demand brought on by the Black Death of 1346 and the Hussite Wars, and so numerous were the dead that the cemetery became home to unmarked graves and mass graves, hastily dug, filled and covered. So when a new church was built on the cemetery in the 15th Century, the excavators unearthed a great surprise: scores of unidentifiable human skeletons. For many years after, the skeletons lay stacked all willy-nilly wherever the priests could find room inside the church, until House Schwarzenberg hired a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint to do something with all the bones. And as you can see from the article's photographs, he did so in the only way a professional woodcarver would. Thus, human bones as decoration have made the Sedlec Ossuary a world-famously popular tourist attraction -- both fantastic and fascinatingly macabre -- for those passing through Eastern Europe.
Leira - Tevfikiye, Turkey...formerly Troy, Asia Minor, the ancient city besieged by the Greeks who, upon realizing that their ten-year siege against the Trojans had proven ineffective, resorted to trickery in the form of Epeios' now-legendary Trojan Horse. As the Greeks knew, the horse was held in high esteem by the Trojans and was honored as the Trojan emblem, so under pretenses of giving the giant wooden horse to the Trojans as a peace offering in order to end the war without further bloodshed, the Trojans gladly accepted the gift and wheeled it into their city. And as we all know, Greek soldiers emerged from inside the Trojan Horse after nightfall, opened the gates for their buddies and slaughtered the sleeping Trojans in their beds, thus ending the war in a far different manner than the Trojans had anticipated.
Hilarity ensued. :D
Tyr - Babylon, Iraq, ancient birthplace of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, author and establisher of Hammurabi's Code, the first set of written laws in the history of human civilization (and with it, the world's first legal system). King Hammurabi lived from around 1810 BC to 1750 BC.
Tempus - Stamford Bridge, East Riding, England. The invading Vikings under King Harald Hardrada of Norway had landed from their latest naval attack against English shores and, once joined by Norse reinforcements in Orkney, had made considerable headway into England. They set up camp in Battle Flats and were resting before their final push into York when suddenly, the English army appeared beyond the far end of Stamford Bridge and charged to attack. As legend has it, one very large Viking, armed with a Danish greataxe, took a stand on the center of Stamford Bridge and held his ground, stalling the entire English army while his comrades hastily girded and armed themselves. After the giant Norseman had felled as many as 40 Englishmen singlehandedly, a lethally cunning English spearman set a barrel in the river, straddled it, paddled it under the bridge and thrust his spear upward between the bridge planks, stabbing the defending Norse giant from below and killing him. The Englishmen then crossed the bridge unimpeded and soundly routed the Norsemen in the ensuing battle, but the account of the lone, nameless Norseman who valiantly stood alone against an entire army has made the Battle of Stamford Bridge something of a legend in modern times.
Malar - Lycosura, Greece. Lycosura was the dominion of King Lycaon, who, according to Greek myth, dared to kill his own son, cook his son's flesh and serve the questionable roast to an esteemed visitor to his court. The visitor turned out to be Zeus himself, who then punished King Lycaon for his horrid deed by transforming him into a wolf. Though it's debatable whether or not King Lycaon ever actually lived, his myth painted King Lycaon as the world's first werewolf and thus founded the folklore of the lycanthropes forever after.
Talos - Mount Vesuvius, Italy, the site of what is quite likely the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in history, which completely eradicated the Roman city of Pompeii in 79 AD. Vesuvius heaped an estimated 13 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) of scorching volcanic ash onto the doomed city, and archaeologists are still digging skeletons out of the volcanic ash to this day.
And I have to disagree with you on Auril, my dear. :P
Auril - Pick one:
• Vostok Station, Antarctica, the Russian (and formerly Soviet) research station where the coldest recorded temperature on Earth took place: −128.6° Fahrenheit, or −89.2° Celsius, on July 23, 1983. The research station sits on roughly 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) of solid ice over Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica.
• Observation Hill, the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, where Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party, having failed to beat Roald Amundsen in their race to the South Pole, marched back to the sea but succumbed to hypothermia in the November of 1912, dying to the last man well before they could reach the Antarctic shores for extraction. The Scott Party's final camp became their tomb as later explorers built a cairn of snow over the entire campsite and topped it with a simple Christian memorial cross, and a century's worth of ice and snow have sculpted the cairn into the face of Observation Hill as we know it today.
• Mount Everest, Nepal, site of the Mount Everest Disaster of 1996, in which an unexpected snowstorm swiftly closed in and trapped four parties of climbers on the mountain overnight, resulting in twelve deaths from hypothermia and many more injuries from frostbite. As most of these deaths occurred in the extreme altitudes of Everest's Death Zone (26,000 feet/8,000 meters and upward), mountaineers have thus far proven too weak from oxygen starvation to remove the corpses from Everest's slopes, and so climbers have simply been using the cold-preserved human corpses as grim landmarks on their routes to the summit ever since. Many other climbers and sherpas have perished to Everest's extreme cold and frequent avalanches since the British Mount Everest Expedition of 1922.
Back to you. :)
And have you ever driven the highways of Louisiana? There's kudzu all over the place, growing and proliferating like wildfire and killing off all the local flora despite the state's ongoing efforts to burn all the kudzu down to the roots, all because some idiot thought that it would be totally awesome to cultivate this Japanese weed in the United States. So you might not be too far off the mark with Moander there.
And don't forget: The seas and oceans are territory too. ;)
Istishia - The Challenger Deep, the deepest watery depth on Earth at 35,994 feet (10,971 meters).
Umberlee - The Bermuda Triangle, a frequent crossing zone for hurricanes, waterspouts and other sea storms. The island Bermuda (which marks one corner of the Triangle) has been laid to waste by hurricanes a whopping 35 times since 1871; the other two corners of the Triangle -- Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico -- are favorite targets for Caribbean hurricanes as well. The Triangle's sea storms are also notorious for manifesting very quickly and without warning, a phenomenon which is likely responsible for the Triangle's legendary number of mysteriously vanished naval vessels and aircraft.
Valkur - The Mediterranean Sea, the mother basin of sailships, warships, naval trade routes and fair sailing weather since ancient times.
Sekolah - The Caribbean Sea. The largest Great White Shark on Earth was caught off the shores of Cuba in 1945; it measured 21 feet (6.4 meters) in length and weighed roughly 7,328 pounds (3,324 kilograms). The Caribbean Sea has also been ill-reputed for unprovoked shark attacks against humans since the Age of Sail.
Ulutiu - The Northern Polar Ice Cap. Unfortunately, an estimated 20% to 40% of the ice cap has melted since 1979, so Ulutiu might not stay asleep for too much longer....
Gond - Lorraine, France, the birthplace of Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, the inventor of the world's actual first automobile in 1769.
Kelemvor and/or Jergal - The Sedlec Ossuary, Sedlec, the Czech Republic. In 1278, a monastic abbot returned from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land bearing a bottle of topsoil which he'd collected from Golgotha, the ancient hill where Jesus of Nazareth (the cornerstone of Christianity and the Christ of that faith) had been crucified. The abbot then sprinkled the Golgothan soil over the chapel's cemetery, making the cemetery so desirable as hallowed ground that people from all over Europe began transporting their dead to Sedlec for burial there. The cemetery was greatly expanded to meet the rising demand brought on by the Black Death of 1346 and the Hussite Wars, and so numerous were the dead that the cemetery became home to unmarked graves and mass graves, hastily dug, filled and covered. So when a new church was built on the cemetery in the 15th Century, the excavators unearthed a great surprise: scores of unidentifiable human skeletons. For many years after, the skeletons lay stacked all willy-nilly wherever the priests could find room inside the church, until House Schwarzenberg hired a woodcarver named Frantisek Rint to do something with all the bones. And as you can see from the article's photographs, he did so in the only way a professional woodcarver would. Thus, human bones as decoration have made the Sedlec Ossuary a world-famously popular tourist attraction -- both fantastic and fascinatingly macabre -- for those passing through Eastern Europe.
Leira - Tevfikiye, Turkey...formerly Troy, Asia Minor, the ancient city besieged by the Greeks who, upon realizing that their ten-year siege against the Trojans had proven ineffective, resorted to trickery in the form of Epeios' now-legendary Trojan Horse. As the Greeks knew, the horse was held in high esteem by the Trojans and was honored as the Trojan emblem, so under pretenses of giving the giant wooden horse to the Trojans as a peace offering in order to end the war without further bloodshed, the Trojans gladly accepted the gift and wheeled it into their city. And as we all know, Greek soldiers emerged from inside the Trojan Horse after nightfall, opened the gates for their buddies and slaughtered the sleeping Trojans in their beds, thus ending the war in a far different manner than the Trojans had anticipated.
Hilarity ensued. :D
Tyr - Babylon, Iraq, ancient birthplace of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, author and establisher of Hammurabi's Code, the first set of written laws in the history of human civilization (and with it, the world's first legal system). King Hammurabi lived from around 1810 BC to 1750 BC.
Tempus - Stamford Bridge, East Riding, England. The invading Vikings under King Harald Hardrada of Norway had landed from their latest naval attack against English shores and, once joined by Norse reinforcements in Orkney, had made considerable headway into England. They set up camp in Battle Flats and were resting before their final push into York when suddenly, the English army appeared beyond the far end of Stamford Bridge and charged to attack. As legend has it, one very large Viking, armed with a Danish greataxe, took a stand on the center of Stamford Bridge and held his ground, stalling the entire English army while his comrades hastily girded and armed themselves. After the giant Norseman had felled as many as 40 Englishmen singlehandedly, a lethally cunning English spearman set a barrel in the river, straddled it, paddled it under the bridge and thrust his spear upward between the bridge planks, stabbing the defending Norse giant from below and killing him. The Englishmen then crossed the bridge unimpeded and soundly routed the Norsemen in the ensuing battle, but the account of the lone, nameless Norseman who valiantly stood alone against an entire army has made the Battle of Stamford Bridge something of a legend in modern times.
Malar - Lycosura, Greece. Lycosura was the dominion of King Lycaon, who, according to Greek myth, dared to kill his own son, cook his son's flesh and serve the questionable roast to an esteemed visitor to his court. The visitor turned out to be Zeus himself, who then punished King Lycaon for his horrid deed by transforming him into a wolf. Though it's debatable whether or not King Lycaon ever actually lived, his myth painted King Lycaon as the world's first werewolf and thus founded the folklore of the lycanthropes forever after.
Talos - Mount Vesuvius, Italy, the site of what is quite likely the deadliest and most destructive volcanic eruption in history, which completely eradicated the Roman city of Pompeii in 79 AD. Vesuvius heaped an estimated 13 to 20 feet (4 to 6 meters) of scorching volcanic ash onto the doomed city, and archaeologists are still digging skeletons out of the volcanic ash to this day.
And I have to disagree with you on Auril, my dear. :P
Auril - Pick one:
• Vostok Station, Antarctica, the Russian (and formerly Soviet) research station where the coldest recorded temperature on Earth took place: −128.6° Fahrenheit, or −89.2° Celsius, on July 23, 1983. The research station sits on roughly 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) of solid ice over Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica.
• Observation Hill, the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, where Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party, having failed to beat Roald Amundsen in their race to the South Pole, marched back to the sea but succumbed to hypothermia in the November of 1912, dying to the last man well before they could reach the Antarctic shores for extraction. The Scott Party's final camp became their tomb as later explorers built a cairn of snow over the entire campsite and topped it with a simple Christian memorial cross, and a century's worth of ice and snow have sculpted the cairn into the face of Observation Hill as we know it today.
• Mount Everest, Nepal, site of the Mount Everest Disaster of 1996, in which an unexpected snowstorm swiftly closed in and trapped four parties of climbers on the mountain overnight, resulting in twelve deaths from hypothermia and many more injuries from frostbite. As most of these deaths occurred in the extreme altitudes of Everest's Death Zone (26,000 feet/8,000 meters and upward), mountaineers have thus far proven too weak from oxygen starvation to remove the corpses from Everest's slopes, and so climbers have simply been using the cold-preserved human corpses as grim landmarks on their routes to the summit ever since. Many other climbers and sherpas have perished to Everest's extreme cold and frequent avalanches since the British Mount Everest Expedition of 1922.
Back to you. :)
Corella d'Margo, arch-liar
Wyren Caul-of-Amber, alchemist
Tirah Het-Nanu, courtesan
Wyren Caul-of-Amber, alchemist
Tirah Het-Nanu, courtesan