The great stone walls of the Icithra jut up from the sea floor miles below, splitting the Straight of the Adder in half. The water churns and pounds against the jagged walls, foam spraying over the top, only a few feet above the sea. In six places, four on the east wall, two on the west, the rock has broken, allowing thousands of gallons of water to cascade over the edge every minute.

The falls crash against the rock with a mighty cacophony of splashes and booms, echoing all throughout the Icithra Valley. The water flows in six massive rivers, each miles wide, into a gargantuan maelstrom in the center of the valley, called Othra’s Eye by the Sordinians, and the Adder’s Maw by the Arsunians. The water is sucked even deeper into the earth, where it evaporates as it touches the hot lava only a hundred meters below the Icithra. There it seeps through cracks in the stone, widened by an eon’s worth of steam to be big enough to fit a Pythagean Hawk, back into the Straight of the Adder.

But today, the denizens of the Icithra are leaving in a hurried panic as the weakened Arsunian army loses precious ground to the Sordinians. Pythagean Hawks swoop in and out, crashing against the Sordinian ships, their riders shooting flaming arrows into the hull. The small Arsunian navy darts between the Sordinian’s Behemoths - giant whales spawned in the sulfurous waters of the Gold Sea- desperately avoiding their titanic maws.

The Sordinians have pushed the Arsunians up against the wall of the Icithra, and the desperate Arsunians have engaged the Sordinians in guerilla warfare in the small islands lining the walls of the Icithra, and are losing.

The Sordinian ground troops have set up catapults along the islands now, and launch flaming stones against the walls, cracking off huge boulders and sending them spiraling into the valley below. The ships have also lined the wall, and more flaming stones issue forth. The Behemoths crash their massive bulks against the 30 foot thick walls, and cracks began to slither across the rock.

Then, suddenly, the east wall collapses. Giant stones drop from the center of the east wall, throwing up mushroom clouds of dirt, and then the boulders begin to avalanche down. Water spews from the holes, first in concentrated blasts, but the force of the water widens so much that it comes down in great streams.

The whole wall buckles inwards, and water rushes in, the full force of the Straight of the Adder knocking aside boulders the size of mountains. The water and boulders crash against the opposite West wall and it explodes as the added force of the east side of the Straight of the Adder hits it. The torrents of water crash against each other, and the Icithra valley is flooded, the Adders Maw buried under a mile of water.

The Arsunians fly off on the backs of the Pythagean hawks, resigned to defeat. The Sordinians cheer, the noise of their celebration so loud that both sides of the Straight can hear it. But then, suddenly, the water begins to churn.

The water starts to spiral at incredible speeds, whipping up mountains of foam and spray. The sea level of the Straight actually begins to drop as the water is sucked into the whirlpool. And then, steam erupts from the ocean in massive geysers, and the cracks in the earth that the steam traveled through break apart. Compressed magma rushes up, hardening as it touches the water, but still rising. The tips of the lava spires break the surface of the Straight, punching up through the Sordinian ships.

The whirlpool, which could only be the Adders Maw – nothing else in the world has the power to push lava out of the sea- begins to spiral slower as it sucks in the lava, and the great spirals of the whirlpool begin to harden into hot, gooey rock.

The Sordinian ships are literally turned to stone as the lava envelopes it. The Arsunian army returns to see the amazing occurrence and the hawks circle over the frozen Adder’s maw. Now, what used to be the Icithra is a giant calcified whirlpool, ringed by great spires of harden lava.

Years later, when the war is over, and the two races, Arsunia and Sordinia, coexist again, the survivors of the Fall of the Icithra come here annually, to celebrate and remember the most important event in all of both races history.