WORLD BOOK WORLD BOOK WORLD BOOK 0117 0117
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Chapter 5: TRAVERSING THE WASTELANDS
motes during their especially aggressive mating seasons. Wanderers “fortunate” enough to catch a ride on
a mote to escape danger will find themselves captives,
aloft without water but set upon by a million crawling
bugs eager to make a meal of them.
Mornuus
Deep in the New Dune Wastelands, halfway between
Patnu and Wharia, lies a place few would visit unless
trade or survival depended on it. Even if they wanted to,
it is a place that is difficult to find, seeming to shift in locations in the hard to traverse wastelands. Strewn across
the broad summit of a low, granite mesa, the ramshackle town of Mornuus looms 400 feet above the center of
a shallow, hard-packed-sand basin seven miles across.
Reaching the town requires folk to climb a broad, winding stair around the mesa with only one guarded gate at
its base. This basin and its mesa interrupt an otherwise
featureless stretch of sparse, windblown dunes and lifeless landscape.
A naturally eroded crater born of a powerful meteorite impact, this became the center of an ancient human civilization that somehow predated the traditional
tribes, its capital built within the protection of the cra-
ter. Millennia of weathering and sedimentary deposits
erased or buried any resemblance to its glorious past.
The crater rim and buried city now hardly trouble the
desolate horizons and the mesa is among the few terrain
features easily identified by wasteland travelers.
Above ground, Mornuus appears little more than rubble and ruins. Reused and reshaped time and again by
its people, most buildings and defensive walls use the remains of a gigantic stone temple for their construction.
Once upon the mesa’s highest levels, the temple now resembles a quarry of stones it has become for centuries.
While there are random homes and facilities amid the
town, more rubble and timeworn stone exists here than
people in well-tended homes, making Mornuus more
akin to a squatters’ camp among unidentified ruins.
Below the mesa’s surface is where the true settlement
rests. This subterranean city and its continued use as a
refuge are hidden from most travelers for good reason.
The largest surface building in Mornuus bears a domed
roof, all others being of flat, square construction. Within
“the Dome” are some town offices and the Morningwell.
The Morningwell is a large circular opening near the
center of the plateau and at the heart of the Dome.
Its shaft plunges deep through the mesa’s heart and
a narrow, spiral processional stair coils down its walls.
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