Cozmology: Zarth, the God-Corpse

     The easiest plane to reach after the River of Dreams, the only entities that are regularly conjured to the Material Plane are fire elementals. Despite an inability to communicate with the natives, enough has been gleaned from the rare resurrected person and interviewing other outsiders to paint a picture of the plane.

     The first thing to be understood is that Zarth is massive, as can be expected of the corpse of a god. The most knowledgeable outsider interviewed, a demon under Zorutsok called Tarnathak, described traveling from ankle to knee as having taken him more than a year of traveling without pause. This considers difficulties due to terrain and his ability to outrace a warhorse. When asked why he had traveled to Zarth in the first place, Tarnathak’s reply was a toothy grin.

     Despite the size of Zarth, a rough map can be made. It is unknown just how many settlements exist within the god’s body, but the most well documented region is the left leg. Fifteen known settlements reside within that leg alone, with the largest carved into Zarth’s kneecap. This city, whose name roughly translates to Holes-in-Knee, houses nearly three thousand souls and more than one hundred thousand fire elementals.

Kneecap City. Holes-in-Knee is one of the few locations known to scholars where the souls of the dead regularly can be found. Those that are still within the city after two years slowly begin turning into fire elementals, and in fact this is where most the city’s population comes from. The rest is from souls of the dead that arrive close enough for them to wander into the city’s reach on their own.

     Most souls that arrive leave, seeking the place where they must reach to go to their final destination. Where this is varies from soul to soul, but all feel a pull to where they must go in order to reach it. In most all cases, this final destination is either Urzalak or Yinnola, but rumors always persist of souls being drawn to different planes unknown to scholars. Souls are pulled to the plane that best suits them, those that would thrive matching wits against devils are drawn to the Infernal Empire in Urzalak, while those that burn with curiosity and a thirst for knowledge are pulled to the Dune-Swept Library in Yinnola.

     Holes-in-Knee primarily acts as a place for souls that don’t feel a pull to anywhere. They pick up where they left off before they died, craftsmen continuing to make things and farmers trying to grow food. That the materials are made of flesh and bone and the food grown are corpse-mushrooms is something that the souls of the dead must adapt to.

Bodily Dangers. Though the most well-known, fire elementals are not the only ones that call the corpse-plane home. Scavengers have found their way to Zarth’s body, and despite having feasted upon it for untold millennia have barely made a dent in the massive amounts of godflesh. On rare occasions, these monstrosities find themselves on the Material Plane, where they wreak havoc until put down. Typically stopping these monstrosities require the force of armies, and rumors whisper in dark alleys of some evading patrols hunting them in sewers or the dark of forests.

     The most common of these rare monstrosities take the form of flies or vultures, warped and mutated by the godflesh that they have dined upon. One was captured by hobgoblins in the early days of their empire, and today is the prized pet-slave of the Emperor himself. Though not provided godflesh, it is fed a steady diet of attempted assassins, traitors, and prisoners of war.

     Fire elementals roaming the unsettled regions of Zarth are rarely friendly. For reasons unknown to scholars fire elementals outside of Holes-in-Knee typically attack any that they come across.

     In addition to fire elementals, horses with fur black as coal and manes of fire roam the outside of Zarth's body. Called nightmares and nightstallions, these horses are the creation of Xavran, demigod son of Zarth. It is Xavran that takes the souls of the dead to Zarth, on the back of the first nightstallion Rankop.

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