Thule

Songs of the Sidhe by David Ross

This great island, found farther northwest than any other recorded locale, is surrounded by a freezing-cold ocean. Here, it is perpetually twilight over the volcanic sea-caves, star-strewn beaches, storm-swept mountains, and acidic bogs. The highest point on the island, Mount Yaanek, constantly belches forth purplish smoke laced with palpable grief. The smoke drifts lazily here and there across the sky and mountaintops and can drive the unwary to despair, disaster, or raving madness. Due to its infamy, few dare to explore Yaanek’s slopes to find the source of its melancholy.

Thule’s most famous resident is the venerable Watcher of the Current known as Crieddylad, the Witch of Fates. Her realm is a south-facing region of sea-cliffs riddled with shining crevasses where stars constantly streak in and out of the earth, dying and being reborn at their lady’s merest gesture.

Thule is fundamentally a place of boundaries, where the edges of Faerie brush against others: the Sea of Thought, the Land of Dreams, and ‘supposedly’ even stranger planar sites. Through vortexes and color pools, the island attracts hags, witches, solas sidhe, angels, oras, peris, devils, and lost souls of countless stripes both dead and still living. They are sometimes waylaid here among the nascent and dying stars, looking for much the same sort of renewal in life or afterlife. There are rumored to be regions on the island where land, sea, and sky blur together in a strange soupy fog. These patches are said to hold ancient secrets, some as old as Faerie itself.