Joran Lake

Joran Lake is the only known bottomless lake. Created by the architect Hans Flugelsson on accident, it is located in the middle of the Careless Continent where the nation of Joran was briefly established before it was replaced by a lake. When Joran was founded, its leader, Chief Sergoblant, appointed Flugelsson as the new state's official architect. His first order was to find a way to irrigate the desert land they ruled so that they would have the supplies to raid their neighbors for better food. Flugelsson came up with many designs, but he finally settled on a national engineering project to raise the water table closer to the surface. Nobody is quite sure what process he set in motion, but in AES 845, instead of the water table rising to meet Joran, Joran sank to meet the water table and never stopped. The only reason Flugelsson is considered the first imagineer and not the first thanatologist is the curious Joranite custom of wearing life preservers even in the middle of a landlocked desert. Flugelsson disappears from the historic record after this.

Given that nobody really bothers to try and sort out the history of Careless, we don't know who first populated Joran Lake with fish. But by AES 875, adventurers who dared to explore Careless reported that Joran was well-known not only as a watering hole, but also as a source of delicious fish, and had thus become a warzone. This was to the great consternation of the Joranites, who had stayed on their "land" by building houseboats. Most of what we know about the Joran biome comes from the expedition notes of a Selesteine special ops team that fought its way to the lake in 912 after a rumor made it to Selestei that the fish got bigger and meaner the further down you went into the bottomless depths. These rumors were somewhat substantiated, as the Selesteine expedition reported that the hole got bigger as one went down far enough, and that the fauna were larger once the light started to fade. Sadly, further investigation of this is currently impossible, as Joran Lake became infested with Ravenous Squid-Trees following the completion of the Yggdrasil Project in 939.

Despite its distance, Flandre nevertheless has several National Response Protocol BX designations for things emerging from Joran Lake that pose an existential threat, many of which dictate similar responses as those specified, and recently demonstrated to great effect, by NRP BX-392a.