The Island
Keth Moran lies two miles off the eastern coast of Morhalis. On clear days, it may be seen from the mainland as a low, dark shape against the waterline. When fog comes in from the deep water, the island disappears entirely. The name Keth Moran is commonly translated as the Isle of the Damned. The older root moran may also signify one condemned beyond pardon or cast out from the ordered world. No surviving account records whether the name was given for what lies beneath the island.
The Holdfast
The Holdfast was raised around the mouth of a hollow descending through the living rock at the island’s heart, long held to be a gateway into the hells. The first work laid upon it predates reliable record. The accepted account holds that it was no more than a mass of stones dragged across the opening by men whose names did not survive, a cairn seal born of urgency rather than craft. The stone-wrights who came after did not remove the cairn. They set the wall around it. It bears no crenellations, no battlements, nor any proper works of war for it was not built to repel assault from without, but to hold fast what presses from below.
Of the Shaft
The depth of the shaft has never been established.
Concerning What Lies Beneath
The theology, such as it can be reconstructed from the folk traditions of the Morhalis coast, holds this: that in an age before men kept record, the gods cast something down. They did not destroy it. The fragments are consistent on this point and return to it with an insistence that suggests the distinction mattered a great deal to whoever carved the words. The thing beneath Keth Moran was not killed, because it could not be killed, or because the gods chose not to kill it, or because the act of killing it would have cost something the gods were unwilling to pay.