A hot, dry, rasping breath swept unhindered over The Territory. Once the kingdom of Darisam had stood here, but that had been over a thousand years ago. That had been before The Collapse. Now there was nothing but sand. Nothing flew under the searing, baking sun in the cloudless sky. Nothing slithered across the immense dunes that stretched from horizon to horizon. Nothing slept in the relative sanctuary of burrows or shadowed nooks under sedimentary rocks.
As if enraged by the absence of an audience, the breath intensified to a raging sirocco.
The energies of the realm should have manifested here. The constant winds caused by the churn of rising hot surface air from the burning sands being replaced with cooler air from distant shores should have delighted the air elemental, Enlil. He should have created sentient storms to scour the utter vastness of the desert. The stone elemental, Ki, should have celebrated the endless rolling landscape of fine stone and raised sand beings to stride those dunes; and the fire elemental, Nusku, should have rejoiced at the constant, unfettered burn of the sun and created raging things of flame to churn among them all.
But they did not.
This was a dead place, poisoned by dark ambition.