Yeen

Yeen stands on the banks of the river Zamoyos, on the northern coast of Sothoryos, and upriver to the north another dead city, Zamettar, keeps it silent company. Its walls are built of huge, oily black stone blocks so heavy that moving one would take the combined strength of several elephants; no one knows when they were raised, and some swear the city is older than time itself.

South of Yeen, among the trees, tales speak of apes larger than a Giant, strong enough to fell an elephant with one blow; beyond them begins the Green Hell, the jungle that swallows whatever enters it. Yeen is the exception: though its ruins have stood empty for thousands of years, the undergrowth has never crept over its stones, as if something kept it back. Every later attempt to settle among those ruins has ended the same way, in horror.

When princess Nymeria led the ten thousand ships of the Rhoynar to the shores of Sothoryos, a group of her people settled among the ruins of Yeen, by then already a haunt of spiders and hostile presences that came down from deep within the jungle. For a year they lived alongside those spirits without leaving the place.

When that year had passed, a ship arriving from Zamettar found the city empty: in a single night every man, woman, and child had vanished, with no trace of what had happened. The next day Nymeria ordered Sothoryos abandoned. Legend holds that before leaving, the princess looked upon the ruins and said: "A city so evil that not even the jungle will enter."