Reef of Broken Dreams
The Reef of Broken Dreams is one of the so-called Filters, created by the goddess Phina to help keep safe the purgatorial paradise of Eden.
An enormous coral reef system, it is located just off the southern coasts of Quadling Country and Yesterland. And aside from presenting all of the problems for watercraft that a typical reef provides, the coral acts as a siphon—feeding off the hopes, ambitions, and aspirations of those who come too close and turning those positive emotions into feelings of hopelessness and despair.
The afflicted who don’t turn back after they’re hit by the doldrums will inevitably run aground, easy prey for the nanlaríx and other marine predators who call the reef home.
Geography
The Reef stretches from the Cape of Shifting Sands in the west to Cape Dodder in the east, picking up protection of Eden from where the western half of the The Desert at the Edge of Existence ends in the south of Quadling Country and continuing on until the eastern half of the Great Desert begins in the south of Yesterland.
Ecosystem
The reef, despite its supernatural abilities being downright deadly to sapient outsiders, has no effect on non-sapient species and no effect on sapient species (such as the halflings and halfling-descended mixers) who have been adopted by the land and its goddesses as indigenous peoples. Therefore, despite what an outsider might think, the reef supports an extraordinary diversity of life. Turtles, whales, fish of all sorts—they call call the place home. Halflings fish here, birds visit to nest or roost on the islands, and there are more merfolk to be found here than in any other place in Eden—even the legendary Mermaid’s Cove in Neverland.
Scary
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I know, right? The scariest things I end up writing end up being as surprising to me as to anyone else. I had no idea I had something so scary ready to come out today.