Ashveld

Ashveld was not always a desert. Millions of years ago, a civilization of unknowable sophistication flourished here — their towers still pierce the red sand, fused with a mineral harder than any known alloy. The atmosphere thinned over a geological epoch; the seas evaporated; the builders vanished. What killed them is unknown. Their ruins show no signs of war, no catastrophic impact event, no volcanic layer. They simply stopped, as if every member of the species decided on the same day to lie down and not get up.

The towers of Ashveld are the most studied archaeological sites in the Aethon System — and the least understood. The metal they're made of cannot be melted by any process the Verathen have yet developed. The interior chambers are sealed with no visible mechanism. The inscriptions on the outer walls are not in any known language — not Lethrin, not proto-Verathen, not anything in the xenolinguistic database. Whoever built them, they were here before the Lethrin, before Verath's sapient life began. They were here, and then they were not.