on the border of light and lightning, cleaving the landscape in two from coast to coast, a massive geological rift lies.
an immense fault line flooded with water which slowly carved out a long river canyon, the stormlight rift is an impressive piece of geography, dividing open desert from the arid cliffs miles above. it's incredible sheer cliff walls are dotted for thousands of miles with tunnel settlements carved into the old stone, some of the few traditional population centers still left largely untouched by the assimilation of the creeping "progress" culture of the lightning farm, populated almost exclusively by dragons that eat fish. these cliffburrow towns are storied places, lingering centers of the old pre-goldensparc and spire sprawl cultures heavily influenced by close mixing with the light cultures on the border and with many unique twists of their own, all fishing out of the brackish river below, crisscrossing it's waters with walls of nets, devices, and pipes. overfishing is a massive concern, being the only food source many of these clans have consistent access to. efforts at advocating for environmental protection and regulation to the higher levels of expanse government have been made, but as these things always do, fall on deaf and uncaring ears, leaving the natives to devise their own methods of preserving the ecosystem.... or ignore it in favor of greater food bounties. some parts of the river are polluted beyond habitation, where the massive pipes from cities elsewhere empty out lazily into the rift where the factories in question don't have to care about it, it's not their problem anymore.
in some areas the rift river-itself alternatively called cloud eater or rattlemaw, and in areas where the latter is popular highly variable local legends persist of a great sea serpent seeking to swallow the stormcatcher and crashing into the earth-retreats underground through looping watercarved tunnels for miles, leaving the sunkissed dry windy cliffs above an unimpeded view of the dunes at their base hundreds of feet below, parts of the rift having been reburied by geological action. at it's widest the rift is more strait than canyon and at it's narrowest a winding canyon pass, the rift narrows as it nears the sea of a thousand currents. the winds within the rift are legendary-the strength of the constant gusts through it's length is for the experienced flyer only, the location of some of the strongest winds to be found outside the plateau.
it's when these winds channel in and empower the constant thunderstorms brewing outside, empowering already spinning storm systems with saturated lightning magic and whatever magical fallout they can pick up from the many questionable projects and dangerously unstable machines scattered across the osha-noncompliant desert, that it becomes clear why there are no permanent structures on the surface in or near the stormlight rift, and why there is so little sand.
the ferocity of the empowered storm winds regularly strips the landscape barren.
what the winds do not shred into dust, the flooding river drowns.
each season, the cliffs are sandblasted smooth.
even on calmer days, the rift is deceptively deep, and the lower currents deceptively powerful.
increasingly powerful and magically saturated storm systems in recent decades has resulted in a wider area around the rift being subjected to strong storm winds, clearing out a winder swath of sand and leading to the formation and uncovering of the glass jungle region. at the oceanward mouth of the stormlight rift is a stretch of it's length known as the wyrmsthroat, finally arriving at the edge of the rift in the great dam city of surgelight, dividing it from the highstorm harbor from which it devours storms from the sea.
the history of the rift is long and has many times fallen into the hands of either flight, it's status as a marking of the border leading to many skirmishes over it's possession and many awkward situations where a clan on one side is lightning and a clan on the other is light, and making the construction of anything stretching across it a difficult and legally dicey affair.
seismic monitoring stations have also noted a slight uptick in geological activity presently detectable only by instruments since the awakening of the obelisks, believed to be contributing to quicker widening of the rift, and causing a building instability in surgelight city.
i have no idea how geography, geology, or weather works so i'm just working on pure fantasy rule of cool physics since none of the world map makes geological sense anyway, i imagine actual geologists are screaming
imagine something like these but much much bigger and taller and more fantasy like, with one side of the cliffs much taller than the other
[img]https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-hz7RxhVdNfo%2FUXmnKuYMjYI%2FAAAAAAAAAkI%2F4zEKq5PkCKA%2Fs1600%2Fantelope%2Bcanyon%2B(2).JPG[/img]
the myths of the rattlemaw-wip
with stormlight rift forming the stark border between the realms of the lightweaver and stormcatcher, the region plays host to a variable blended cross-domain culture born of millennia of exchange and resulting in an area culturally unique to both flights, combining elements lightning and light from multiple eras and most notably resulting in a heavier emphasis than is typical in the expanse on cultural preservation, with most other populations in the expanse long having been ground down to assimilation by the exhaustion of relentless poverty and stigmatization of the past as being outdated and therefore useless. a common feature of these cultures along the stormlight river is a reoccurring myth of the rattlemaw river, varying wildly across each region's retellings but with most variations sharing several of a few key features in common.
the common central component shared by nearly every regional version of the story is the giant hungry serpent, which is depicted as anything from simply a desert serpent to a metaphorical form of another elemental god to a mortal dragon who became greedy or unfaithful or committed some other sin by their culture's standards to a manifestation of the shade to any of a number of other potential characters.
the typical basic story seen in most areas regardless of the serpent's identity is of a giant serpent which in it's ever-growing hunger swallows the stormcatcher, but becomes so heavy that it falls and crashes into the ground, it's body so large that it cleaves the continent int two from coast to coast and it's body either becomes or is trapped far at the bottom of the rattlemaw/cloudeater/ect river. it is typically held that the reason for the ferocious currents lurking beneath the deceptively deep surface and the giant storms funneled through the highstorm harbor towards the thousand-current sea is that the serpent is still trapped at the bottom, always trying to swallow the dragons by the canyon's sides to feed it's endless hunger, and devouring each storm that comes it's way vainly trying to eat the stormcatcher again.
theory in what little archeological community lightning has is that snakes, shattered serpents, shadow serpents, and their ilk are common in desert ranges and were even more numerous in the pre-industrial era, before the rise of the spire sprawl to the western coastal cliffs coincided with increased hunting of "unwanted" species and devastation to the environment. shattered serpents and their cousin species never stop growing and rare individuals have been known to have grown large enough to hunt moderately sized dragons, and though serpent and snake species are numerous to this day, in the shifting expanse it's much rarer for them to reach their full potential sizes in modern times. archeologists believe that the much higher population of extremely large serpents in the past contributed to both the creation and prevalence of this story, since many ancient dragons would have been familiar enough with serpents to not necessarily dismiss out of hand rumors of serpents even larger.
also in modern times, in the wyrmsthroat and surgelight city region the tale of the serpent that swallowed the storm has started being seen and used as a parable about greed, specifically the greed of an ungrateful lowly employee seeing to claim what they don't deserve from their superiors.
some variants of the story do away with the stormcatcher's involvement and have the rift simply have been dug out by an enormous serpent.
towards the tail region of the rift closer to the sea there's another more unusual series of variants of the story in which rather than a giant serpent the rift was created by the tidelord. the version commonly told closest to the sea is that when the stormcatcher was created by the war of the tidelord and windsinger, he was born by tearing from the tidelord's skull with a raging bolt of lighting so powerful it scarred the land and the water the tidelord bled filled the scar. a second less common version of this story told around the area where the typical serpent story an the tidelord story's populations blend together is an odd mix of both the serpent and tidelord legends in which instead of the serpent it's the tidelord which seeks to devour the stormcatcher, the currents of the rift which pull in the storms and unwary swimmers being created as an effect of the tidelord realizing his mistake in allowing the stormcatcher to be created from the remnants of his shed power and attempting to reclaim said power. in this mixed version, the tidelord's fury is believed to be the cause of the yearly monsoon, the ocean rising up and trying to wash the rogue magic down the river again. in both of these areas, the river is less often called the rattlemaw or cloudeater and more often referred to as simply the bolt.
outside of the stormlight area a more common belief is that stormlight is simply a crack stomped into existence by a raging earthshaker, with vary degrees ofmythologizing about it. workers of monitoring stations and labs along the rift and those who have spent an amount of time living on it's shores alike speak of it with great, almost reverent fear, telling outsiders to the region that it's something one must see with their own eyes, and that to witness it's power leaves one a changed, shaken dragon. the ferocity of the weather in the region inspires it's witnesses to be more inclined to belief in the wrathful power of the gods. the listening stations in particular are known for developing their own fearful quasi-religious micro-cultures of a hushed, seasoned-sailor bent, tiny pockets of three or four stationed scientists becoming increasingly superstitious, increasingly treating the rift as some sort of powerful spirit that they must be careful not to speak of too lightly lest the offend it and have their station ripped from it's foundations as they hide in it's basement or their equipment fail as all delicate scientific tools do. leaving small toys for their instruments so they don't get jealous and stop working, preforming small nervous rituals with each daily powercell cleaning outside tentatively to appease the rift, just in case it really is watching.
yes this is based on greek mythology
