The Kella Desert
| Type | Desert |
|---|---|
| Notable sites | Varaar, The Avonbourn, the drovig tunnels |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
The Kella Desert is the great sand waste of Eslura, drovig country, and the ground the road from Varaar to Zybersia crosses.[1] The canyon city of Varaar is sunk into it and the Avonbourn stands at its outermost edge.[2][3] The desert and its canyon city are the setting of The Heart of the Kella.[3]
The desert
Rolling dunes stretch as far as a rider can see, broken by the occasional cactus or tumbleweed, hardened craters, low scrub and clusters of cacti both short and tall. The wind runs hot and dry, grit settles on the tongue and in the seams of clothes, and cicadas sound along the paths. Cacti grow tall enough that one on the road to Zybersia stood twice Aero Ellisvat's height.[4][5][6][3]
Covering the face is a necessary measure for any Eslurian venturing out into the Kella, and travel after dark is worse than travel by day. Tabitha Glowdish would not untie a prisoner at night on the grounds that chasing her across the sand would be too dangerous.[3][5]
Paths across the sand are old and worth keeping to. Straying off them risks whatever creatures are waiting and, north of Varaar, risks the hexaflares.[1]
The drovig tunnels
Drovigs, the giant blind and deaf sandworms of the Kella, tunnel under the desert through all hours of the evening and lie dormant by day.[7] One way down into their tunnels is a jagged mouth half swallowed by shifting dunes at the base of a red sandstone outcrop, not a crafted entrance but a hole gouged out of the desert floor by something enormous. It leads downward, wide enough for five to enter side by side, and slopes into a dark deep enough to swallow torchlight after the first curve. A strange hum comes up out of it.[4]
Below, hard sandstone gives way to claw scarred gouges, and the walls are ribbed with long grooves where something has dragged itself through again and again. The passages narrow and open into chambers, most of them empty and unsettlingly clean, with alcoves in the walls that a traveller can duck into when a worm comes through. It is cold down there.[4] A creature called Erwin made a home in one of the wall recesses.[4]
By the events of Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened the drovigs had gone out of their own tunnels, and only one, curled around her young in a cavern, was still to be found there. Reagan Hideaway could not let go of the question of where the rest had gone.[4][1]
The Heart of the Kella
A wide cavern opens off the tunnels behind a jagged gap barely taller than a man. Its ceiling arches high and is scattered with veins of a glowing mineral that pulses faintly like embers, and every inch of the place is covered in blood red stones, from pebbles the size of a little finger to boulders the size of a body. Drovigs will not come near them, and one that swallowed a stone was seen to sicken.[4]
The stones are what the necklace of the same name is cut from, and the largest of them, the Heart, is a ruby whose pulsing light convinced the people who dug it out that they had found the heart of the desert.[3]
Hexaflare country
Hexaflares are explosive flowers native to the Kella Desert north of Varaar: reddish orange with white centres, unsuspecting to look at, and especially so in the dark. Almost every Varaarian learns of them young along with the danger of straying off the path carved long ago. Aero Ellisvat says they can be harvested and used for a variety of purposes if they are handled in a very particular way.[1]
Rare gemstones are dug out of the Kella as well. Aero remembers them glowing on the market stalls at Zybersia's First Flames festival when he was a boy.[1]
The Avonbourn
A tavern at the outermost edge of the desert, and the only lit establishment at a late hour on the one street of the small town around it, reached along a winding path among tall cacti.[3]
Varaar
A city carved into the walls of a long, wide canyon in the desert, with a colosseum at its centre.[2]
Government
No Sacred Ruler governs the Kella, and the books record no authority over the open sand at all. The nearest thing to one is the five gangs who hold the canyon, and Tab says the one good thing about them is that they do not care who is coming and going through their territory so long as a traveller has kaps in their pockets.[2]
Notable events
- Aero Ellisvat crossed the canyon at night to take back the necklace called the Heart of the Kella from the Rewakan gang, then rode the winding path out among the tall cacti to the Avonbourn, where he fastened it around Noran Daharshi's neck on the night she died.[3]
- Tabitha Glowdish carried Reagan Hideaway off across the dunes to a campsite pitched against a wind worn stone and told her what the Eyearke Stone around her neck was.[5]
- Tab, Reagan and Aero went down into the drovig tunnels after the star scarred worm that had swallowed one of the Olphin Stones. Erwin led them to the red cavern and brought its entrance down on them, and they woke the worm, rode it up through the surface of the desert and fed it the stones until it brought the swallowed one back up.[4]
- Reagan and Aero, riding north through the Kella toward Zybersia, fell in with a crew of Nelazgians carrying several thousand harvested hexaflares to Obellius Kalaar and a stone map of Eslura laid out in the sand. Aero threw a burning stick into the wagon. The blast destroyed the delivery and left the crew dying on the sand.[1] The map is covered at Veskadoth Tunnel System.
See also
- Drovigs
- Gangs of Varaar
- Heart of the Kella
- The Avonbourn
- The Heart of the Kella (short story)
- Varaar