The Candles

The Candles is a small, secluded region deep within the Burned Canyons. Due to the strange geographical nature of the location and the immense difficulty of climbing through the canyons, flight is the only reliable means of accessing this place.

Appearance
The Candles are a cluster of one hundred and three tall, narrow columns of earth, the same deep, burnt sienna hue of the surrounding Canyons. Each one varies between 10-15 meters at the base and roughly 100-110 meters tall, spaced roughly equidistant about 20-30 meters between each one, organized roughly in a circle. The sides of the candles, while rock, are much harder and more dense than any of the more brittle sandstone of the surrounding canyons, and very difficult to break. Its shear nature makes climbing up along the sides basically impossible, so the only way to access the top of them is by flight.

When night falls, a faint glow can be seen coming from the top of many of these pillars, lending to their namesake. Those who fly up to the top will see that the glow is, as the name implies, coming from small bonfires on the flat surface atop these pillars. The smoke of the bonfires billows around in large clouds around the fires themselves, and onlookers may see small, shrouded black figures moving about within the smoke - but upon approach, they will find it is only apparitions of the smog. Upon sunrise, the bonfires fade out, and the smoke vanishes.

Carved upon the base of each pillar on one side is a series of runes in a long-forgotten language.

Phenomena
While the burned canyons are already a cold, desolate place, the air undoubtedly has a bit of a bite to it standing at the base of the canyons, particularly so when the bonfires light up.

While the amount of bonfires that light up change every night, the only time they all come to light is on evenings of total lunar eclipses - which any occultist will know as a 'blood moon'. On those evenings, the glow of all hundred and three fully lit candles can be seen for miles, the reddish-orange tinted smoke billowing into the clouds. Unfortunate visitors to this place on evenings of a blood moon will see the formerly small, huddled figures in the smoke arise into long, slender forms of proportions and features that can only be described as otherworldly and eldritch. After this abominable revelry, the bonfires atop the candles will go dim for several consecutive days.

History
The gods that ruled the land of Sundry countless eons ago, long before all life ran bereft of the place, were almighty and vengeful in their rule over the people. One particular god, whose name is lost to the annals of time, would imprison those who had wronged him inside stone columns, such that they may go mad within their imprisonment before withering away to death, their soul far beyond salvation at that point. These pillars lay all over the land, serving a constant reminder to people of the tyranny of the god. Some transgressors, though, were too great to let their suffering end - so the god created an unhallowed ground to hold those unlucky few, and within their gargantuan stone prisons, their name in the ancient tongue carved upon their base, he granted the sufferers his protection, making the pillars impervious and the captors within immortal, suffering their mad solitude for all of time.

Eons have passed, and that vengeful god, along with all his kin, have departed the world of Sundry... yet there are faint whispers that remain. Despite the death of the god, his power and wrath was not so quick to die, and those hundred and three nameless prisoners who so wronged him in eons past still remain trapped within their impervious, invincible prisons, tortured in a nigh-endless madness that only an impossible death can quell.