Dirhand

Summary
What is gold, compared to water in the deserts of Dirhand? Nothing. Less than that, perhaps - it is dead weight. Without water, the heat and aridity of the Hoon-Bayek - the great desert - will kill even the hardiest of travelers. If the heat doesn’t kill you, the enormous sandstorms, rising like great walls of the desert, blow across its shimmering face, sweeping it clean, and ensuring all caught out in the desert are buried alive. For millennia, Dirhand was considered an uninhabitable hellscape of sloping deserts etching their way across the horizon into eternity. The deep red and gold sands paint beautiful swirls across the rolling curves of the desert - but even if one were to stand at the desert’s edge and squint, straining one’s eyes to their limits - one wouldn’t see the jewel of the desert. Ruins from ancient civilizations lie scattered throughout the desert, and if one is lucky, one might find a rocky oasis in which they can survive the night - but little else is offered as means of any real shelter from the heat or the enormous storms of Dirhand.

In recent years, many travelers of the desert’s edge have remarked upon what seems a strange red star, barely seen through the barrage of dust, glinting angrily in the high winds of the distant sands… What awaits within the hurricane walls of sand can only be imagined…