End'ete Crag Gardens

Place

Place Name:

End'ete Crag Gardens

Biome:

Crag Gardens

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

End’ete is known to the outside world as a mountainous wasteland. The Garden of End’ete lies within that mountainous wasteland. The large amount of land that this wasteland spans supposedly belongs to some other kin’toni clan, but they’ve never found a use for it and don’t even bother to guard it. They’ve explored it pretty thoroughly and come to the conclusion that the wasteland of End’ete has neither metal worth mining nor trees worth chopping nor animals worth hunting and besides, they have enough land to guard anyways. Why guard this worthless place too?

Thus the Et’woro were able to sneak in, successfully and secretly claiming the free real estate. The wasteland is a dangerous place, and has frequent avalanches. It has a few waterfalls and rivers as well, which can suddenly flood the narrow passes which constitute the majority of the roads. It’s not an entirely accurate observation that there is no metal worth mining in these hill. As a matter of fact, there’s some extremely valuable metals here. It’s just very rare, and no one has found a single sample of it yet. The low assessment of the wasteland’s trees and animals is fairly accurate, however.

Well, there are eagles, if you want to hunt those and flex on your fellow warriors by fletching your arrows with eagle feathers. The Garden of End’ete is guarded by high, practically unscalable cliffs on all sides and has only one entrance. The tops of the cliffs and the exterior of the entrance are as barren as the rest of End’ete. But if you do find the crack in the back of a small cave that forms the entrance to End’ete, as incredibly unlikely as that is… then, after some two hundred feet of a narrow, confined passage, almost too small for a full-grown man to squeeze through in some places…

Then you see the first crystal. It shines a brilliant blue, illuminated by phosphorescent moss that grows on the ceiling. There was once text carved into this crystal: text damaged, but legible. Karizatha restored the text to full legibility, but none of her followers could read it. So she sent the most intelligent warrior of her clan on a quest to find someone in some land who could read this text. This man returns once every four years to the Garden of End’ete to report that he’s still alive and searching, and he searches still to this day.

Karizatha, as a compromise between the unknown artist of old and herself, added a second inscription to the crystal, which reads, in the common tongue, “Advance, wanderer, and do not dare to return from whence you came, for you have stumbled upon a secret which I cannot allow to spread.” When her questing warrior returns, she means to teach her whole clan the unknown language, and make it her clan’s official language. After passing by the crystal and through another passage, a much larger passage, then you come out into the sunlight, and see the secret garden of crystal.

Plants

The Garden of End’ete is full of trees that have been carefully trimmed to perfection. Fused with the bark of every single one of these trees, are crystals. These crystals come in all colours — the Et’woro have discovered the means and materials by which the crystals may be dyed — and they form images on the bark of these trees. The Et’woro carve the bark while the tree is still growing and let the crystals grow into the scars. Even when the tree grows taller and higher, the crystals grow with it, and the crystalline designs and artwork remain undamaged.

The crystals are fed by water, just like the trees, and the Et’woro usually feed both at once, with the same water. Into this water they put the exact minerals the crystal needs to become whatever colour they want it to become. This carefully mixed water seldom has an effect on the colour of the tree. But when it does, Karizatha takes it and looks after it herself, since these colourful trees are too rare for her liking, and she dares not let a pair of hands inferior to hers take care of one of these colourful trees. There are other styles of crystals that grow here, besides the encrusting style.

There are pillar crystals, such as the one in the entrance cavern, which grow completely straight in one particular direction, and can be as thick as the crystal gardener likes. Immense bridges of pure crystal have been constructed by utilizing this pillar style, since the pillars can also be grown sideways. Then there’s the spiked style, which is when the crystal gardener lets one grow somewhat naturally: the crystal will, most of the time, form a cluster of seven crystals or so, all of them extremely sharp. They’re a bit brittle to be used for weapons, unfortunately.

But that hasn’t stopped some adventurous artists from trying to make weapons out of them. As for the different kinds of trees, Karizatha thinks that some of these trees were not originally part of the unknown artist’s design for the garden, and invaded at a later date. She has spared one kind of these invader trees, the willow, because of its peculiar and beautiful interactions with the crystals, but the rest of the invaders she has had destroyed. Keeping only seedlings from each tree, in case she later changes her mind. The majority of the trees are oaks, which have excellent bark for carving on and growing crystals into.

Other trees, are grown strictly for their wood. Since she hates running any risk of discovery, Karizatha has her clan grow common farm crops such as laidla and grain, with which they raise livestock, which they feed on. This way it will never become a necessary choice for the Et’woro to either leave the Garden of End’ete or starve to death. Besides trees, crystals, and crops, there are also vines which drop down from the cliffs above, giving the Garden of End’ete a thoroughly majestic overgrown appearance.

Animals

The Et’woro kill every animal that enters the Gardens of End’ete (other than their own livestock, which I suppose they’ll kill eventually anyway). They make no exceptions, not even of the majestic eagles that occasionally descend to make their nests in the Gardens. The Et’woro slay them all, and they have no regrets. Some of their livestock is worth consideration, however — particularly their baer and their ualrtias. These animals interact in peculiar ways with the crystals that grow here. An Et’woro warrior brought back a beehive one year, saying that he liked the taste of fresh honey almost as much as zu’aan blood.

And wanted to farm it for himself. He also thought that it might help the fertility of the crops. Karizatha approved of his decision. Then she had one taste of the honey he brought with him and approved of his decision even more heartily. As a result, there are now many beehives in End’ete. Then, one day, someone opened up a beehive to access the honey. But, though there was ordinary honey inside, some of the honeycombs themselves were blue — they were made of blue crystal. Upon close examination, it was found that some baer had tiny crystals growing on them.

And that they dealt with these ever-growing crystals by biting them off and using them to build their hives. Astonished by this discovery and thoroughly pleased, Karizatha commanded the construction of a whole new section of the Gardens of End’ete, which she was determined to fill with crystalline honeycombs. To this day, the honeycomb style of growing crystals remains her favourite, and she doubts if anyone will ever discover a better one. There are beetles in End’ete that eat crystals. They don’t really do more than scratch the surface of the crystals, but they definitely eat them.

They’re called desecrators, because Karizatha hates these beetles, these desecrators of perfection — so much so that she allows the ualrtias that the Et’woro own to wander free, and to wander even in her personal garden, just so that there will be less of the crystal-devouring beetles. When, some weeks after the ualrtias were set free, a hen laid an egg with a shell of crystal — no one was really that surprised. The insides of the eggs were as edible as before. If the eggs had baby chicks inside them, they’d still be able to break out of the shell, even though it took them significantly longer.

Karizatha has a collection of these crystal eggs now, since she couldn’t think of anything better to do with them other than to display them in a cabinet with windows of clear crystal. The crystals seem to have no effect whatsoever on any of the other animals that the Et’woro keep. Though many experiments have been made, especially after the ualrtias began laying crystal eggs. The most that the experimenters have accomplished is to get crystals to grow on the backs of their cows — admittedly, that’s not such a terrible feat, since it does improve their aesthetic.

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	Et'woro Kin'toni Clan

Place

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End'ete Crag Gardens

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