The Black Rift is not simply a canyon. It is a wound in the continent, a place where geography and old catastrophe refuse to separate cleanly.
Western chronicles describe the Rift as a river-cut chasm. Older accounts are less certain. They speak of a violent descent, a pressure in the air, and stone split open as if the land had been struck from above.
The canyon now runs from the high country northeast of Mydya toward the Zo River. Travelers avoid its deepest shelves, where sound behaves strangely and ordinary bearings become unreliable.
Readers report that the Rift is difficult to look at for long. Its patterns do not settle. They pull the eye downward, as if the land remembers the impact more clearly than the people who survived it.