The Black Desert of The Abyss, The Iron Shavings of The City of Dis, The Shadow Sands, The Iron Sands. Also known simply as The Black Sands or The Sands -there exists a truly vile, self propogating evil that if intentionally put to the purpose, could destroy the world. Dark cultes want to build sacrificial pits filled with The Sands into which they might cast their victims, Dry Liches desire to study its mysteries and Dead Kings to upsurp the living by it, and Dragons crave to fill their lairs with it, and Elder Evils wish to set it on the wind and let the whole world slowly decay and fade to extinction. To the eye the sands appear as iron filings or perhaps black volcanic ash, but touching it subjects one to the ravages of negative energy. Thankfully upon death a creature does not become a wight, but rather its body disintegrates become Black Sand itself. However, this means that while it would take truly immense evil to create, anyone could create more as hardly a pinch is needed to kill an insect. The Sands radiate an aura that swallows up light so greedily, it is held that even a daylight spell can light a space where it exists for barely an hour.
Some say that a great quantity of it was created in ages past, but ancient wizard-kings buried it below the deserts of Crescent so it might never be used again. Other accounts say that a Black Desert was drained away through a portal to rid the world of it, but that a single sample remains in an hour-glass hidden in the lost tomb of a Dry Lich. A few hold that a dragon, a high priest of The Night Dragon, became undead and then created it to fill his lair before sealing himself in forever. And still more say that The Sands lie not in any earthly desert, but on the sandy bottom of the Panoceana at the most crushing depths, the realm of Dagon and The Father Styx -a nightmare waiting to loosed on all the world at the appointed time.
