AyJay's Clan

The place where Carrion Canyon opens into the channel between the Shifting Expanse and the Sunbeam Ruins is harsh and chaotic. The desert is only moistened by storms that are just as deadly as the dryness, and the winds that howl down the canyon often uncover the ruins of old lairs as proof of the region's mercilessness. Underground, it's different, but not less dangerous. Remote areas are good for mad science labs, so strange magical forces, mutated beasts, and decomposing vessels of Shade litter these caverns like land mines of madness.

At the very bottom of these caverns, there is a lake of clear, fresh water. The bold maren who discovered it call it the Prism Grotto, due to the smooth quartz stalagtites that disperse light into rainbows. A flamboyantly plumed spirit called Yowamtao took a liking to those maren explorers and chose to be their patron and host. Yowamtao exerts its magic to tame the Prism Grotto and its immediate surroundings, making it a stable, safe place for the maren to use as a home base for further exploration. Eventually, a faction of maren settled in the Prism Grotto and established a permanent village.

After many decades, or perhaps centuries (it's hard to track time without day or night), Yowamtao fell ill. Its sickness was magical in nature, and none of the brightest magisters or scientists could figure out a cure. Just when all seemed lost, a pair of strange leviathans arrived from the ocean who called themselves dragons. The first was a mystic who claimed he had dreamed of the solution to Yowamtao's illness, and the second was his partner, a storyteller who seemed to hold the entire world's knowledge in her head. As it turned out, the dragons themselves were the solution. Yowamtao had been unwittingly weakened by the Shade; being a creature of pure magic, the Shade was literally eating it alive. The undertide dragons vanquished Yowamtao's Shade parasites and used their own magical energy to replenish it.

Prism Grotto has been a mixed settlement of maren and dragons ever since. It has expanded up to the surface as well as outwards in all dimensions, and most of its adults consider themselves wardens of all the eldritch horrors in the deep.