Sai Kahleek

Sai Kahleek is a vast expanse of sand and loosely packed rock in eastern Shurima, and the most feared stretch of desert on the continent. Northerners call it the Bone Sea, but that name is a mistranslation. To the Laaji tribes, who have never seen an ocean, a sai is a plain of loose sand and rock, slow and painful to walk, its ground pockmarked with tunnels. Travelers know they have entered the Sai Kahleek when they pass the skeleton of a dead god, its huge ribs raking into the sky. The sai is the nest of the Xer'Sai, burrowing Voidborn that hunt anything moving across the surface. Their queen is Rek'Sai, the largest and most dangerous of her kind, a predator who senses vibrations through the earth and has honeycombed a territory spanning hundreds of miles with tunnels. Her brood ranges from shrieking Callers and glowing Lamplights to the dunebreakers, the only xer'sai with the mass to break through the veins of bedrock that snake through the Great Sai. Her presence turned the Sai Kahleek from a trade route into a death zone, and the nomads who survive it speak of the Terror Beneath in hushed tones. Only the desperate attempt a crossing. Caravans barter for guides who scout ahead with teams of expendable boys and a camel, flagging burrows that vent poisonous vapors and moving with the silent step taught by veterans like Shahib, who walked the sai for nearly ten years: steps soft as a mouse, strides long as a gazelle. The sai hides something worse than hunger. In an isolated valley whose cliffs are cut apart by Rek'Sai's tunnels through solid rock, her burrows form a pattern of intersecting circles flowing with ink-black energy, a half-built gateway to the nightmare place where the Xer'Sai were born. Rek'Sai pulls dark energy from her prey and weaves it into the unfinished structure. The young guide Jaheje escaped to tell of it only because Shahib gave his life to draw her away. The sai still shapes the fate of eastern Shurima. The town of Xolan lies across its northern reaches, and when Taliyah sought to lead Void-displaced refugees there, Kai'Sa warned that crossing the nest was a death sentence. The refugees took another route while the two women crossed together on a floating bridge of stone, above tunnels where a deeper Void passage runs beneath the sands.