Serpent of the Sands
Along the road known as Serpents' Delight, there lays the ancient skeletal remains of an ancient, massive serpent. It has laid in the same space since the Age of Wonders and has had many tales passed down about it over time. Though many of the tales have varied across the millennia, a few consistencies tend to remain. The first is that the creature's name is Caurala and is always spoken of as a guardian type figure. What she protects has changed often with the lore, though common themes are the Zerapheshi Desert, snakes as a concept, Karnor, and Ransera as a whole. She is also often spoken of as a mother to many things, including all serpents. But being from so many years ago, it is hard to confirm any of this.
Her resting place is unique in many ways. It serves as a nesting ground for what appears to be the majority of all snakes and snake like creatures within Karnor, regardless of their propensity for living within the Zerapheshi Desert. Whenever it becomes time for mating, nesting, birthing, or egg laying seasons for many serpents of Karnor, including serpentine Rathari and Animus mages in serpentine forms, there appears to be an invisible drive that leads them to the deserts around Caurala's corpse. Beneath her are endless caverns where millions of serpents will breed, seek shelter from winter, and so on.
Additionally, the bones of her corpse appear to be eternal. Every time they've been damaged or removed, even having been destroyed by magic so that seemingly nothing is left, at next sunrise, her body is made intact, and the removed bones are missing. This phenomena has been documented and studied repeatedly, but despite all this, it is unknown what causes this to happen. And there's never been an instance where it hasn't happened. Because of this phenomena, many have visited the area for both scientific and magical research as well as novelty tourism purposes.
With the high concentration of serpents, of all sizes here, it does make this stretch of desert and the road that travels from Zaichaer to Zeraphesh, especially dangerous. Deaths and disappearances within this area are quite common. Additionally, new variety of serpents seemingly adapted to the rapidly changing world have begun to seemingly spawn from Caurala's grounds. Among these are snakes that have active camouflage, snakes designed to live specifically within city environments, etc.
Most recently, however, are the newly arrived Wyverns. They range in size from a few feet to several hundred feet long. They have been an especially difficult problem as of recently, as they seem to have an extremely large hunting range and their primary sources of foods are dragonshards and other types of aether crystals. They seem to be able to detect them from extremely far away, and once they've caught the scent, go into a frenzy to acquire and consume them. This has led to the small ones attack people all throughout Karnor for their personal shards, while the largest ones have lately taken to attacking airships and ripping their dragonshards out, leaving them to crash into the landscape below.
