| “ | Ry'leh is the strangest planet I've ever seen. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that it's an old world. At some point in its past the local star must have gone nova, blasting much of its matter away into space to leave a colder, smaller core. Soon after that Ry'leh's atmosphere must have frozen, leaving it looking like a great cue-ball hanging in space. The frozen jacket doesn't fit tightly though: the heat from the planet's core has melted the interior layers of ice back into an atmosphere, leaving valleys, fissures, channels and plains with an oppressively solid sky hanging above them, supported upon the pillars of the mountains. | „ | |
| ~ Prof. Bernice Summerfield (EXP: All-Consuming Fire) |
Ry'leh is a fictional alien planet created by Andy Lane for his novel All-Consuming Fire. It is the location where the supposed "Azathoth" has been imprisoned, in a city known as Kadath in the Cold Wastes.
Description[]
Ry'leh is a cold icy planet with an extraordinarily odd appearance. It is speculated that, at some point in time, its sun cooled down to the point that its atmosphere was frozen. However, internal heat resulted in the creation of a habitable hollowed space between the planetary surface and the frozen upper layers of the atmosphere, which form an ice sheet supported by mountain ranges that serves as the "sky" of this world. Sunlight passes through the ice, supporting an ecology rich in mobile carnivorous plants and balloon-like animals whose flesh is edible and tastes like chocolate. The local fauna also includes 5 ft long tripedal rat-like creatures with bodies covered in greyish-green scales and a mane of black fur along their spines.
Ry'leh's gravity is similar to that of Earth, and the ground is mostly purple in colour. Although habitable for humans, it is an inhospitable world, uncomfortably cold, with a frigid constant wind blowing. Refracted through the ice sky, the sunlight is too diluted to cast shadows.
Despite being located hundreds of light-years apart from each other, Ry'leh and Earth are aligned in the folds of spacetime continuum in such a way that the chanting of specific spells can open up a gateway between the area of Ry'leh known as the Plain of Leng and the Earth region of Jabalhabad, India. (EXP: All-Consuming Fire)
Behind the Mythos[]
The name of this planet is an obvious reference to R'lyeh, the sunken city in which Cthulhu and his spawn are imprisoned in the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Coincidentally, the animated film Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom similarly portrays R'lyeh as an ice-covered world which can be accessed from Earth by magical gateways.