Location from Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
The Holy Desert — a sea of sand concealing the memory of an ancient ocean, sacred to Seven Cities, birthplace of the Whirlwind Goddess, and a place where time itself behaves like water.
Raraku is the spiritual heart of Seven Cities and one of the most ancient landscapes in the Malazan world. The desert was once an inland sea — the White Face Sea — and its memory is so potent that travelers sometimes hear waves, see phantom ships, and find fossilized creatures on the surface that were swimming yesterday by the desert's reckoning of time. The Holy Desert does not obey mortal chronology. Sha'ik was reborn here, and the Whirlwind Goddess — a fragment of an Elder Warren — rose from the sand to shatter Malazan control of the continent. The Book of Dryjhna, the prophecy that drove the rebellion, was written in Raraku's depths. Felisin Paran walked into the desert as a broken girl and emerged as Sha'ik Reborn, carrying a goddess's rage. The desert transforms everything it touches: it stripped Heboric of his faith and gave him jade hands that connected him to a falling god. It reduced armies to bleached bones and elevated beggars to prophets. Raraku is alive in a way that defies the word — not sentient exactly, but aware, remembering, and utterly indifferent to what mortals want from it.
An immense desert of fine white sand stretching to every horizon, broken by eroded rock formations that were once coral reefs and sea cliffs. The heat is hallucinatory. Mirages show ghost-oceans that may not be entirely illusion — the desert remembers being a sea, and that memory bleeds through. At night the temperature drops to freezing, and the stars are so bright they cast shadows. Dust storms erase all landmarks and deposit bones that are millions of years old on the surface.
Also known as: Raraku, the Holy Desert, Holy Desert Raraku, the Holy Desert Raraku