Itzan Klertal
A sunken city on the floor of the New Sea, thirty-five feet below the surface.
Itzan Klertal does not appear on most charts. The ones that do mention it use different names — the City Below the Waves, the Stripped Palace, the ruins near the southern shelf — and none of them agree on exactly where it sits. Finding it requires a precise anchor point, a calm day, and someone willing to look straight down into dark water and trust what they see.
What they see is a city.
Walls still stand. Streets still run between them, silted over and carpeted with growth but unmistakably deliberate in their layout. There are broken tables, overturned benches, and fountains that have not moved water in centuries. A statue of Mishakal stands in one of the interior chambers, undisturbed. Lion statues flank at least one entrance. An obelisk covered in symbols no one has been able to read occupies a side room, its carvings intact.
The ruins have been partially looted — coastal sailors and treasure hunters have picked the upper levels over for years — but the deeper chambers remain largely untouched. There are reasons for that.
What Has Been Found
A heavy volume of brass plates bound on hooked rings was recovered from the seafloor here — the Bronze Book. Too heavy to lift by hand. The mast of the recovery vessel did not survive the process intact.
The deeper chambers contain at least one flooded room where wild magic manifests as radiant bubbles rising from the floor. The effect ceased when the room’s occupants were killed. Whether it returns is not known.
Three items were recovered from that room after the fight: two unusual steel coins bearing a crowned face and a temple, a mass of silver coins fused together by salt corrosion, and a shark-tooth necklace with symbols scratched into the largest tooth.
What Lives Here
Something. The ruins are not empty.
The party encountered two aquatic humanoid creatures in the flooded bedchamber — capable of telepathy, psychic attacks, and apparently aware of what they were doing and why. One of them, when offered a chance to surrender, refused on the grounds that the only direction away from the party led somewhere worse.
That direction is deeper into the ruins.
Dangers
- A thirty-foot shark patrols the waters near the southern ruins. It has been independently confirmed by Barrish Stormwrap and is not considered an exaggeration.
- The current above the site is unpredictable. Anchoring requires care.
- The script found in the ruins is unreadable by conventional means. The Bronze Book alone required the mast of a ship to retrieve.
Rumors
- Fishermen who anchor above the ruins overnight report dreams they cannot fully remember.
- A second statue — described as dragon-like — was observed in a lower chamber. Its significance is unknown.
- The obelisk symbols do not match any known written language. At least two scholars have looked at sketches and declined to comment further.
- Whatever the wild magic in the flooded bedchamber was connected to, it stopped when the creatures died. Whether that means the source is gone or simply quiet is an open question.