The Doomgrinder continues marching west, at about 3 miles per hour (!!)
People are quickly discovering that The Bloody Waste, as some are calling it, is impassable.
It starts with people accidentally slipping down the slopes into the pools of blood.
Those people, dissolve. Be they living or undead.
Avoiding the pools of blood is difficult, as one must navigate stone slabs sticking hundreds of feet into the air, half a mile wide.
Or they must avoid crevaces whose bottom cannot be seen.
Or walk across ground as rough and broken as a home flattened by a tornado.
The air itself is strange, and there is a red tinge to it.
Breathing it makes one feel exhilarated and strong - or deathly sick, or both in alternation.
The problem gets worse.
Imagine a hundred paper cuts on your hand, crisscrossing each other.
Imagine the blood welling through, slowly.
There are thousands of crevaces in the Bloody Waste.
Through these crevaces, magma from the Oerth's interior is welling up, slowly, like blood.
The Oerth has been wounded, and it is bleeding.
The lava superheats the air, fills it with sulpher and volcanic fumes, making breathing difficult or impossible.
The lava runs into the pools of blood.
The blood, does not evaporate.
The blood, rises up over the lava, MERGING with it.
The blood-lava then continues to rise, filling many of the craters.
It pours down into pools of water, water poisoned by the Shade.
Water, blood, and lava all merge into one substance.
This substance (which, obviously, is magical) is thick and gooey like mud, cool to the touch (although nobody is touching it), and it radiates a bright vivid red color.
Soon, the entire sky above the Bloody Waste is crimson from this light, from the Nyr Dyv to the Wolly Bay, from the Shadow Throne to the Kron Hills.
As more and more lava pours forth, more and more of the blood and water combines with it, and great lakes of the strange, glowing substance are created.
When captured prisoners are driven into this substance, screaming in futile protest, they dissolve.
Even those pulling back dissolve. The substance, once on them, cannot be removed, and it eats away at them until nothing remains.
Any force which wishes to strike east at the Shade or Dark Union, or west at the Allies, is going to have to go north, around the northern side of the Nyr Dyv (which is glowing a faint reddish-purple light now) in order to do so.
As for what the strange and lethal substance in the Bloody Waste is, and more importantly - what it might be evolving towards, and how much of it is ultimately going to be created, is anyone's guess.
A final note: this substance devours all the millions of corpses in the Bloody Waste, those of Vecna's Legions and those of the allies alike.
Only the fallen near the edge of the Bloody Waste were able to be retrieved, and only when men and women worked in a hurry to retrieve those bodies.
As the corpses are dissolved, the red radiance flares up higher, more brilliantly, ever greater in virulent power.
The emanations of magic from the region grow ever stronger.
Interestingly, emanations of strong good and strong evil, both, are coming for the afflicted region.
)
