Laija Canyon Pit

Place

Place Name:

Laija Canyon Pit

Biome:

Canyon Pit

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

The Laija Canyon Pit is a large hole in the Plains of Worrindel. The Plains are an otherwise unremarkable place — so unremarkable that they themselves sometimes get referred to as Laija, even though this is technically incorrect. Many rivers flow through the Plains of Worrindel, and they all flow towards the Canyon Pit. Hence the walls of Laija are covered in waterfalls, where these rivers meet the brink and flow over it. Worrindel never gets very hot, very cold, very wet, or very dry, so the weather in Laija is about the same year-round, though at some times of the year you get light snowfalls.

This constancy of the weather keeps the rivers constant, and the waters neither grow nor shrink. The waters that flow into Laija get out of Laija by flowing off an underground cliff and into an underground network of caves that lead who knows where. Nobody’s yet volunteered to find out where the water goes after that because it flows pretty dang fast in there. But at least Laija is a Canyon Pit and not a lake, thanks to those caves. The fortress of the Uyrral clan is built on a large hill of stone near the center of the Canyon Pit.

They dug a moat around the stone hill, diverted a river to flow through the moat, built a bridge which can be retracted if necessary, and started carving the hill into a castle. The walls are half stone, and half earth and timber. There are trees planted on the highest points of the stone hill, and these trees have all been turned into treeforts. They’re now used for lookouts and towers, and do a good job of it, too. This fortress’s name is the Redleaf Holdout. It is the home of the chief of the Uyrral clan. A small village lies near the Redleaf Holdout.

It used to be on the banks of a river until that river was diverted to fill the moat of the fortress, so now it’s just on the banks of a dry river. This was the dwelling place of all men who ever lived in Laija before the Uyrral arrived, and it’s also the place where most of them died. Any tactician with half a brain could see the innumerable ways to defeat a small army dwelling there. Position archers on the small cliffs over there which overlook the village, sneak down those cliffs on ropes tied to the trees at the top, set a tree on fire and roll it down onto the village.

Or if you wanted to attack from the side where the river used to be, there were no less than three fords so shallow a man could fight there essentially unhindered by the water that would have run past his feet. And the paths to get to these fords all have the cover of maybe a hundred trees and bushes. Attacking this village would be easier than attacking a village in a flat field! Of course, there’s not room for all of the Uyrral in the Redleaf Holdout, so they built some towers and walls at the site of this village to make it a bit more defensible, so they could live in it a bit more safely.

Plants

So all the trees in Laija are red or orange or yellow or brown. Even in summer and winter. And no one knows why. So someone might ask, ‘Are they still alive?’ Good question. And the answer is, sort of. The autumn ashe trees of Laija (that’s what everyone calls them, even though most of them aren’t really dah) can’t absorb nearly as much sunlight as they need to survive, because their leaves aren’t green. They can still absorb some light, but it’s not enough to keep the tree growing or alive. Or is it? None of the autumn ashe trees have begun rotting yet — not even their leaves.

Their roots still absorb water and nutrients from the soil and their wood is still green, bleeding sap if you cut it. (The sap is a useful sap for medicines, if you care about that sort of thing.) The thing is, the autumn ashe trees don’t produce seeds, don’t produce fruit, and don’t grow larger. So it’s still debated whether or not these trees are still alive. Another fact that reveals an interesting facet of this debate is that if you plant an ordinary sapling in Laija, it’ll turn into an otelra after a few years, and then stop growing. (Evergreens, of course, are immune to this “autumn disease” as some call it.)

The “autumn disease” in the soil of Laija causes interesting challenges to the living things who dwell upon it. Not that the kin’tonis need to grow food — but the animals that live in Laija do need to find some. The thing is, no ordinary seed of any plant will sprout in the soil of Laija. Not even trees; the only way to get a plant to grow is by planting a plant that has already grown to some extent. Even then, the “autumn disease” will get into it eventually, and, by suspending it in the same kind of stasis that the autumn ashe trees are in, the disease will cause it to stop growing.

So then, what kind of plants do the animals in the Canyon Pit eat? Aquatic plants. For some reason, aquatic plants are entirely immune to the “autumn disease”. Nith, which is grown in extremely damp soil, is also immune to the disease, though nobody has discovered that yet. The most basic aquatic plant that grows in the many waterways of Laija is a sort of seaweed. A humble plant, but a nourishing one: most of the creatures that live in the waterways feed quite a bit on it. A more sophisticated aquatic plant would be the dalrarikora.

This flowering plant which floats on the surface of the water, connected to the bottom of the riverbed by a thin but tough strand of living material, has petals which are a violent shade of blue. Its cousin, the nethrikora, has no strand anchoring it at all — naturally, it only grows in stagnant water, and attracts many, many insects. But the insects also attract birds, so that’s better.

Animals

The waterways of Laija are full of syalci. These muscular fish pass freely through the Canyon Pit, since they are able to swim up waterfalls. They also don’t seem to fear jumping into the chasm that the water in Laija drains into. Syalci eat mostly insects — and there are a lot of insects in the Canyon Pit — but they don’t mind munching on certain bits and kinds of seaweed or even smaller fish. (And there are smaller fish in the Canyon Pit: tiny little mairalas that live their whole lives in the waterways of the eternally autumn forest.

These fish exist mostly to eat the seaweed in the rivers and to be eaten by the syalci.) syalci make great fishing for fishermen. But syalci also make great fishing for bish'rans and eh'oraas — though there haven’t been any bish'rans in the Canyon Pit ever since the first zu’aan came and slew them all, eh'oraas do still nest here (because they can fly), and they’re happy to steal any fisherman’s catch. Occasionally a migrating hayth will take a rest stop in Laija for a day or two, but there aren’t any hayths native to the Canyon Pit. They always move on eventually.

Smaller birds, particularly hual'bakalars, also make their homes here. Hual'bakalars love drinking the nectar of the adra and nethrikora. It’s a good thing there are lots of those lilies, because they’re the only flower that grows in the Canyon Pit. Were those flowers to disappear, so would the hual'bakalars. There are other birds, but their population sizes are restrained by the population sizes of the bugs that they eat. And the population sizes of bugs are finite. But some birds are notably better at catching bugs than others.

And have accordingly higher populations: mainly, the rohar and the sparrow. The bish'rans that once lived in the Canyon Pit probably fell down from the plains above. Theoretically, they could do so again, but now that the zu’aan and kin’toni have taken over Laija, it’s unlikely that any bish'rans that make their way down would survive a year. And that’s assuming they don’t get hunted by the Canyon dwellers; starvation is likely a bigger problem, what with the amount of syalci caught by the fishermen of the Canyon, and the lack of other creatures to eat.

There’s an extremely venemous species of spider-like lifeform that lives in the Canyon Pit. These spiders, called yalaica'daolas, can walk on water, swim, and hold their breath for long periods of time. Their prey are the mairalas that swarm in the rivers. A yalaica'daola will spin a long line of silk — sometimes a whole net of silk — and will attach some attractive looking bait at the end. When a mairala comes to investigate, the spider leaps at it from wherever it decided to hide, and bites it, injecting it with a large quantity of venom. Then it wraps up the dead fish in silk, hides it away in its spidery den.

Sometimes dragging or carrying its food long distances. It’ll later eat the fish. Yalaica'daolas have been observed teaming up with each other to catch whole syalci.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Uyrral Kin'toni Clan

Place

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Laija Canyon Pit

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This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.