Nytheris

What follows is everything that is known about Nytheris. It is not much.

On the oldest maps of the continent, this region is marked with a single phrase: Do not enter. There is no detailed geographic description. No name of any city. No trade routes, no sign of settlement. Only those three words, written in a tongue older than every known language of the continent — one that linguists have managed to translate, though no one has ever been able to explain why it appears there.

The little that explorers have managed to describe from its borders speaks of a fractured reality — a broken sky, mountains that should not be able to stand, colossal chains crossing the horizon with no visible origin or end, and ruins that, according to those who have studied them from afar, predate the known world itself.

No one who has crossed its borders has ever returned to describe what lies within. This is not an exaggeration or a legend — it is a documented fact. The records of explorers who tried to enter Nytheris end at the moment they cross the border. Their journals, when found, stop mid-sentence.

What is known, by elimination and by deduction, is that there is a dragon there. The thirteenth. The one that completes the chain. Its name appears in no record. The other twelve dragons — those who have been able to speak with their Named — will not answer questions about it. Not because they cannot. Because they will not.

There is also a Named one. Or there was. The oldest records mention "the one chosen for the nameless region" and nothing more. The Forgotten Named. Forgotten not because no one remembers, but because something — or someone — has systematically erased every trace of that figure from every archive on the continent.

At the heart of Nytheris rises, according to the few sources that dare mention it, the Nameless Fortress. No map places it with precision. No account describes its interior. All that is known is that it is there, and that within it lies the final secret that upholds — or threatens — the balance of the thirteen regions.