A vast desert passage whose streaming dunes carried caravans north until its enemies drowned it beneath an inland sea.
It was a river long before it knew water.
Overview
Before the Drowning, the River of Sand was a desert so coherent that travellers spoke of banks, currents and tributaries. Seasonal winds drove the central dunes north in immense slow waves. Stone shelves on either side remained fixed, forming the only dependable corridor between the southern kingdoms and the mineral country beyond the Crownspines.
Caravans learned to read its surface like sailors. Rippled ochre meant firm passage; silver dust concealed sink fields; black streaks marked glass left by ancient heat. Gizmagrad controlled the safe wells and constructed articulated sand-engines able to cross sections that defeated ordinary wagons.
History
The original Delacroix crossed the basin by air, crashed upon a lonely rock near the buried head of Earin and discovered that he could not die so close to the dead god. After escaping to the wider world, he recognised the place as the key to northern trade and returned to found Gizmagrad.
Centuries later the city's enemies breached the mountain barriers and diverted whole watersheds into the basin. The dunes vanished beneath a rising inland sea. Old roads became channels, mesa settlements became islands and Gizmagrad's monopoly ended in a single generation.
The present record
Modern maps name the water the Sea of New Waters, but sailors still use the old term River of Sand. In calm weather drowned dune crests can be seen moving beneath the surface, suggesting that the desert was not destroyed so much as submerged.
Salvagers hunt lost caravan cities below the shallows. The Delacroix charts are prized because their obsolete wells and mile-rocks now identify reefs, ruins and hidden anchorages.
Notes and record
This article combines campaign record, spoken lore and the mythic account preserved in the Earin archive.