Mallus, the World-Pit

Mallus, often called the World-Pit or the Crucible, is the shattered metallic core of the world destroyed in the old legends, now lodged at the very heart of the Eightpoints. When that ancient world was unmade, its dense iron heart survived the cataclysm and drifted through the void until it came to rest at the nexus of all realms, where the pressure of Chaos energies bent reality around it.

The World-Pit is a place of terrible significance. Some shards of the old core were scattered far, the greatest of them drawn up into the heavens of Azyr, where the God-King's smiths mine it for the blessed metal of his warriors. But the vast remnant buried in the Eightpoints became a wellspring of corruption, its exposed depths seething with the blood and malice of the Dark Gods' dominion.

To the servants of Chaos, Mallus is a prize beyond measure, for it is a fragment of a whole world and a foundation upon which Archaon has raised his empire. Scholars of Order regard it with dread and longing alike, seeing in it the last physical relic of everything that came before the Mortal Realms. Whether it is merely dead iron or something that still dreams, none can say, but all agree that whoever commands the World-Pit commands a keystone of creation itself.