"Ol' fort Yama? Somewhere under yer feet, I dareseh. It's a tragic tale, crumbled under a giant's club. Yama himself'd offended the giant's wife, see?"
"Yama's Keep? Oh, long time gone. Stolen brick by brick, taken by merfolk. I mean it! They crawled out of the sea, and their briny footprints made all the bogs here now."
"No, no- the knights descended into anarchy. Fort Yama was too small for all the mouths to feed. They probably stole everything worth a damn and left the stones to fall into the swamps."
"You want to go where? Oh, you won't find that easy. Go to the salt caves, have a look down there. Billson from the inn does a fine tour of the salt caves."
Fort Yama fell hundreds of years ago, sinking into the marshy ground of what is now the Yammerstills, on the sphere of Daldria. The knights there were champions of civilisation, bringing order to a whole barbaric continent and helping found many of the towns still standing today. There are many legends about its fall- many stories, and many untruths. The popular one this year is that old Yama himself went mad, and gifted the fort to a foreign princess who had it towed away. Last year they said a dragon ate all the knights and shit out the hills that must now cover the old fort. The opinion over in nearby Ristallin is that the fort was never in the Yammerstills, that the grand arches and towers of their own fair town proves it was once known as Fort Yama.
The truth is not something the marsh-farmers of the Yammerstills could wrap their boggy heads around. Old Yama, founder of the order, discovered the truth that his sphere was one of many- a wiseman with a crooked staff showed him the great sky, swirling with worlds and weirdnesses. Yama had brought order to his world- now it was these others he must reach. He had his court magician working day and night to open a breach to such a world, and kept his knights in close reach so that they may rally and march into the unknown at a moments notice.
Things went wrong. Perhaps the magician didn't perform the spell properly. Perhaps the gateway he opened led to a sphere already fully descended into chaos. Perhaps some malign entity influenced happenings. Reality in the fort began to erode, with space itself loosening like molten wax from the aether. The knights battled strange alien creatures and vivid hallucinations as the fort's foundations crumbled as though a millenia had slipped by. The court magician knew little of the forces of chaos, but what he knew was enough for him to realise what this foothold might mean for the rest of the sphere. He advised Yama; Yama gave the order.
The spell he cast cost him his life. It covered everything in the fort in sea salt, briefly purifying the water in the bay nearby. The salt grounded the interdimensional energies so that Yama, choking on the salt as he did, had chance to close the portal. The fort sank into the swampy marshland.
Today, the Yammerstills are a poor trader's outpost, built on the hillsides in the bay. They are a simple people, providing necessities for sailors heading north and farming their sweet marsh-potatoes, for the most part unaware of the salt-crystal caverns underfoot. Until recently...
Strange white figures have risen from the hills. Perhaps roused by the outbreak of another interplanar working of magic, the old magical servitors of Fort Yama were warped by the portal, and fused with the salt by its closing. They toil away in the corridors and halls below, ordering the items left in the fort in order of their magical "radiation", continually cleaning the strange halls. These Salt-Demons, as the locals are calling them, can dessicate a man with their sharp embrace. They can lift huge weights with no sign of fatigue. And they are coming to quietly dry out and organise anything that smells of another sphere...
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