#91 Stalactroplis, The Hanging City

Age: Millennia Before Humanity

Hidden or Lost?: Lost

History: While countless explorers and researchers have delved deep beneath the surface of the world in search of lost civilizations or ancient people that may have thrived in those dark places, too many focused on what was below, never bothering to look up. If they had, they may have discovered the ruins of Stalactroplis the Hanging City, a strange, dead burg entirely carved into the massive stalactites that hang above the underground ocean known as the Deeper Sea.

Once accessible via a grand elevator that met the shore of the Deeper Sea, the hanging city was created in the time-before-time by the Underthals, a long dead race of pale pre-humans. This hidden people gained a kind of advanced intellect by drinking the rare-mineral-infused waters of the Deeper Sea. Those strange waters granted them Earthsight, allowing for glimpses into the far future and the deep past, but without any context or ability to understand what they were seeing. The Underthals created the hanging city as a blunt reflection of what they saw in their visions, using the only land available to them, the titanic stalactites hanging overhead.

Within those inverted spires, the Underthals created towers riddled with chambers that mimic modern churches, hospitals, and more, with no true understanding of the meaning behind the shapes they were carving. In one particularly large pillar, they carved endless prophetic friezes based on the recurring visions that they all shared. This holy place foretold the coming of wars, heroes, gods, and the final days of the world. In a secret antechamber the wisest among them recorded the names of ‘fatebreakers,’ warlords, royals, and other figures that would come to shape the planet’s destiny.

The creation of Stalactropolis was a triumph, but after dwindling generations in the dark stone city, barely surviving off of the fish from the Deepest Sea, a madness began to spread among the Underthals. Visions of a great blind serpent began to appear, blotting out all other Earthsight.

Thinking that the destined worm could help them understand their peoples’ holy labor, the entirety of the Underthals worked together to fish the serpent from the waters below, trapping it in a vast net of thick roots. The monumental struggle decimated the Underthal people, and nearly brought down the city above. In the end, it gave them no answers, and within a generation of the serpent’s capture, the city was silent, the Underthals having died out along with the serpent in its net.

Eons later, Stalactropolis still hangs over the Deeper Sea, quiet and forgotten beneath the rock. Its secrets and prophecies are still intact, and the ancient bones of the serpent are still in their net. And a single petrified Underthal remains hidden away, waiting to be reborn.

1. Broken Elevator

2. Hall of Remembrance

3. The Deep Fishers

4. High Seer’s Quarter

5. Residential Stratum

6. The Wombs

7. The Secret Stairs

8. Maze of Rooms

9. Walls of Prophecy

10. The Fatebreaker Rolls

11. Great Auditorium

12. Stone Bells

13. Silent Asylum

14. Oubliette of the Petrified Sleeper

15. The Hollow Fang

16. Bones of the Blind Serpent