Three hexes northwest, six north of Alakran.
Hundreds of years ago, the people who tilled the land packed up their things and slipped halters on their beasts, and each family pried a cornerstone from its house's foundation. Then they humped their loads over the unfriendly slopes of the Flood Ridge to the north, and settled down by the lake now known as Tubatti. This lake, known as Rukamnat, coalesced from the flow of the riverlet Nahlu-Galal.
As the legend goes, Nahlu-Galal was an inconstant flow in those days, and so the people made a deal with its spirit (or more properly, the spirit that dwells in the geological rift beneath the Scarp and supplies all the fresh springs and qanats that bubble up from underneath that great barrier). They would have a lake, a constant supply of water, and Nahlu-Galal would be praised until the end of time.
But the people were clumsy and untutored; they gave the wrong offerings; and so Nahlu-Galal in her wrath decreed that the lake would in three days inundate the village, whose foundations would sink to the depth of a wind-bowed palm. Only by fervent pleas and the intervention of a prophet did the folk convince Nahlu-Galal to cause another lake to spring up to the north of the Flood Ridge for their settlement. This place was called Tubatti ("bargain"), for it was bargained for.
If this story seems capricious and implausible, so are the spirits of deep water. A moment's glance as one rides by the lake is enough to confirm that the drowned foundations of Rukamnat's village, each one incomplete, are still there.
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