The Silent Ruins and their Anomalies

Ryl Madol was once inhabited, that much is clear. Cyclopean ruins of streets, plazas, houses, temples, pyramids, walls, statues and monoliths are strewn across its entirety. It seems that almost every point of the island was at one point built upon by this ancient race. Perhaps, when it was once part of a far larger landmass, Ryl Madol was but a city-centre at the heart of a much larger empire. 

But however long ago those days must have been, they are now over. Any border between nature and civilization has long since collapsed. The jungle has crept over everything, every dwelling now only houses spiders and infernal centipedes. The works of intelligent forces are turned to rubble each day under the feet of giant beasts.

Who were the people that built these structures? Some architectural similarity suggests a vague link to the cultures of South-East Asia and the Pacific. Especially the art of interweaving columns of volcanic rock to build structures bears an uncanny resemblance to the Polynesian ruins of Nan Madol in Micronesia, which is what has earned the island its name. Just as intriguing are the large stone blocks sanded down into individual shapes in order to fit into each other like pieces of a puzzle. This polygonal style of building can elsewhere only be found in Peruvian sites like Sacsayhuaman, which was built by the Inca.

But were the people of Ryl Madol people at all? This is a question that naturally occurs if we take the current intelligent race of the island, the Headtakers, into account. Although these reptilians currently exist in an archaic state, is it not possible that they degenerated from a once far more advanced race which had inhabited the island? It is hard to say. Some of the ruins’ dimensions, especially roofs, doorways and tools, do seem quite inhuman, as if made for and built by entities at least 2.5 metres tall. No corpses, mummies or skeletal remains have ever been found of the vanished race. Were they all devoured by the forces of nature and time? Did they perhaps cremate all of their dead? Their remaining artwork also gives little clue. Clearly, they depicted some of the animals they lived with and (hopefully) mythical monsters, but there are no clear depictions of themselves. Found across the island are large monoliths with the relief of a vaguely humanoid face, which evokes Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Is this what they looked like or just a figure of their mythology? Disturbingly, shortly before he died under mysterious circumstances in the streets of Istanbul, the mad Turkish artist C.M. Kosemen had illustrated just such stone features in his reconstruction of the dinosaur Massospondylus, claiming the inspiration to have come from entities encountered during sleep-paralysis.

The Walls

Most spectacular among the ruins are of course the gigantic walls found in two sections of the island, both standing almost 20 metres tall in some sections. The more intact one is found in the southeastern valley, spanning two mountain ranges in order to shield a river-delta and bay from the remaining island. Likely, this area used to be a city, the wall having functioned to keep the large monsters out. The other great wall in the north-west used to be far longer, but is now broken, many of its sections slowly sinking into the sea. The area it circled may have also been a population centre once, far larger than any others, but the unstable geology of the island has caused this stretch of land to sink beneath the sea. Former hills bearing temples are now heavily fragmented islands jutting above the waves. It is likely this instability which has led to the downfall of the civilization, as frequent earthquakes destroyed their infrastructure and tore down the walls, which could no longer protect the inhabitants from the wild monsters roaming the island.

The architectural style of the walls is markedly different from that of the other ruins. Perhaps this is simply a consequence of mechanics, but it could also suggest that a different culture or even species could have built them before the main civilization arrived on the island.

Anomalies

The most baffling aspect of Ryl Madol are “anomalies”, places or objects on some parts of the island which seem to defy physics. These are largely found underground inside subterranean chambers and catacombs created by the vanished race. Some of these create fields which completely negate the effects of gravity, making things float with no weight. In other sections, gravity is increased tenfold, making for invisible but deadly crushing traps. There are holes and pits which seemingly have no bottoms. Stalkers who accidentally fell into them appeared dead the following days atop random pyramids on the island. Some of the recovered artefacts cause madness and schizophrenia, often leading to suicide or worse. Some catacombs have vats filled with “hell slime”, an unclassified viscous liquid that dissolves any biological matter that falls into them. The entire underground of the island seems to be networked by a labyrinthine maze whose entirety has never been mapped and whose depth seems immeasurable. Stalkers who have gone too deep into it and survived later fathered stillborn children.

Geography, Flora and Fauna

Origins

Ryl Madol is a large island which sits almost exactly at the tripoint between the Indian, Eurasian and Australasian tectonic plates. Its geology is thus marked by a violent history of uplift, volcanism, subduction, erosion tearing and sinking. Using Occam’s Razor and thus discounting any supernatural phenomena, Ryl Madol must have begun life as an isolated break-away piece of ancient Gondwana, perhaps having once been its own subcontinent before being torn to shreds by the violent forces of the Earth into its current state. This former landmass may have served as a refuge throughout time where various lineages seem to have evaded the catastrophic mass extinction events of the Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian.

There are infamously much more exotic ideas about its origin. The fact that such a conspicuous landmass did not even exist as a phantom island on any maps before 1908 has raised many eyebrows. Combined with the unusual happenings in the year of its discovery, the extraordinary Palaeozoic fauna and the various physics-defying anomalies, this has led some eccentrics to suggest that Ryl Madol literally did not exist before 1908. Instead it could be a fragment from another timeline of Earth, where maybe one or perhaps all of the aforementioned extinction events did not occur, which a rift in time and space has somehow transported into our reality. It obviously sounds ridiculous, but some of the people who have actually been to the island attest that what they have seen makes it plausible that this truly is an otherworldly place of some kind. The reader is free to decide for themselves on the true origin of the island.

Geography and Climate

Topographic map of Ryl Madol

Ryl Madol is clearly volcanic in nature. Its most obvious feature, if viewed from above, is a large centre lake with many islands, which is actually a huge caldera. Geologic surveys suggest that, despite occasional tremors, the volcano is largely inactive and has not erupted for tens of thousands of years. The lake is ringed by vast swamps, jungle and fern prairies, fed by multiple large and small rivers. These originate in a range of mountains and hills which seem to encase almost the whole island. Southeast of the great crater is another river valley, whose mouth ends in a ruined city. To its west, separated by a range of hills, is a large floodplain with multiple smaller lakes.

The coast of Ryl Madol is geologically unstable, multiple smaller satellite islands splitting off of it and slowly sinking into the sea. Many signs point towards the island having been far larger in the past, with entire sections now possibly being submerged beneath the waves.

As is predictable by its position on the globe, Ryl Madol experiences a quite hot and humid climate. Its mountain ranges help catch a lot of that humidity, leading to almost continual rains across the island, which feed vast rivers, swamps and lakes, perfect for the large population of amphibian and arthropod life which inhabit it.

Flora

Like its animals, the flora of Ryl Madol has a distinctive Palaeozoic character to it, including plant groups that elsewhere on Earth have been extinct for almost 300 million years. Flowering plants and many derived gymnosperm groups are absent. Among the unique flora of the island are also extraordinary fungi and lichen. Some of them can grow to tree-sizes, resembling the ancient Prototaxites of the Late Silurian. Most infamous is the inconspicuous but ubiquitous lichen Rylmadolia toxoprothallium, which is one of the many protectors of the island from the splendors of civilization. Its near-constant spurting of diaspores covers almost all of the island in an invisible cloud of toxic miasma, which the native animals are immune to, but which cause a deadly infection of the lungs in any outsiders. Any attempt at wiping the lichen out to facilitate colonization have failed, as it grows faster than it can be destroyed by conventional means, short of carpeting the whole island with napalm and thus rendering it uninhabitable. 

Baragwanathia, a lycopodian

Trinkophyton, a zosterophyll

Archaeopteris, a progymnosperm tree

Wattieza, an archaic tree-fern

The flora which grows around streams, rivers, lakes and most other non-stagnant waters consists of taxa that are distinctively Devonian in origin. These include mostly primitive spore-bearing plants, Lycopodia, resembling club-mosses or the ancient Baragwanathia. Also present are Zosterophylla, a group of creeping plants broadly resembling ground-pines, unique in the plant kingdom for having evolved both an internal and external bilateral symmetry. Rylian zosterophylls differ from most of their extinct counterparts in that they evolved their own versions of microphyllic leaves and hairs, perhaps independently of other plants. Their discovery here has been of great interest for paleobotanists, as anywhere else on Earth this plant group has gone completely extinct in the Upper Devonian. Also present in these habitats, especially around thermal hot springs, are Rhyniophyta resembling Cooksonia, some of the most archaic known vascular plants, originating in the Silurian and elsewhere already being extinct since the Early Devonian. The trees here consist of gigantic cladoxylopsids (a group of stem-ferns) and progymnosperms, which resemble, respectively, ancient Wattieza and Archaeopteris.

Scaled bark of Lepidodendron

 

Stems of Calamites

The plants which grow in the stagnant swamps and estuaries, as well as the half-artificial lakes created by the beaver-like Castorosaurus, have a Carboniferous flair to them. The most abundant trees here are giant horsetails not unlike Calamites and lycophyte scale-trees resembling Lepidodendron and Sigillaria. Smaller ferns and horsetails also abound. Tree-ferns and archaic conifers of the extinct order Cordaitales can also be found. 

Neuropteris seed-ferns

In the drier lowlands and especially the hilly uplands, the flora takes on a more Permian character, consisting more of seed- than spore-bearing plants. Especially seed-ferns predominate, which bear great resemblance to the likes of Neuropteris, Callipteris and Glossopteris. These grow along cycads and Benettitales. The trees consist of a mix of conifers and gingkos.

Out of these archaic plants, Ryl Madol has also evolved unique taxa which have no counterparts elsewhere in the world or in the fossil record. In most of the jungles can for example be found mammoth ginkgos, giant trees which can grow as large as American redwoods. The semi-aquatic mkodo-fern is no fern at all, but a large, carnivorous zosterophyll, whose water-hanging vines can roll up like a sundew to ensnare and capture small amphibians and fish.

Fauna

Ryl Madol’s most unique characteristic is its primitive wildlife. There are no native birds or mammals, except for a few seals and seabirds that have stranded on the outermost islets. Like all outsiders, they would likely succumb to the toxic spores if they pushed too far inland. While some of the native creatures bear a resemblance to dinosaurs, none so far have been conclusively proven to actually belong to that group, the similarities being merely convergent. Just like the plants, all the animals instead trace their ancestry back to groups which thrived, went extinct or originated in the Palaeozoic Era, with only very few also having a vague Triassic character to them. In the dry regions can be found non-mammalian synapsids and archaic sauropsid reptiles. In the swamps thrive all sorts of stegocephalians, chief among them the temnospondyl amphibians. In the waterways and lakes can be found archaic fish, including even the placoderms of the Devonian and even more ancient jawless armoured fish.

These are all the same animal

Most dominant among the Rylian vertebrates are the “anamniotes”. These are reptiliomorph tetrapods, known from the fossil record through such forms as Limnoscelis, Diadectes or the Lepospondyli, that are closer to us than to true amphibians but still outside the true amniotes (synapsids+reptiles). In their adult stages they have nearly all characteristics we associate with reptiles, such as scaly skin, armour and claws, but they reproduce like amphibians by laying their eggs in water and going through a tadpole stage. This strategy, which from a modern perspective would be merely seen as archaic and transitional, seems to have remained widely successful on the swampy, lake-studded island. Most extraordinarily, Rylian anamniotes undergo a much more complex and lengthened metamorphosis than the likes of frogs and salamanders. In many species, the tadpole will go through multiple aquatic or terrestrial life stages that can differ radically in morphology and ecology from the adult. In some, the sub-adult stages can already be reproductively active and even “decide” to remain in this form instead of growing into a full adult. This way, the biodiversity of the island can seem almost “inflated” for such a restricted place, with multiple different types of creatures in different niches actually all being members of the same species. This also leads to the somewhat funny phenomenon where, depending on the climate, some “pseudo-species” can seemingly go extinct in one year and then suddenly reappear again in the next.

Invertebrate life on Ryl Madol is also full of wonders and horrors. Giant eurypterid “sea scorpions”, both herbivores and carnivores, are found along the waterways and coast. In the undergrowth and deep chasms crawl terrestrial trilobites, some adapted towards carving flesh off carcasses, as well as wingless insects and palaeodictyopterans. Most striking on land are giant arthropods which resemble those of the Carboniferous, including giant millipedes, griffinflies and scorpions, not at all diminished in size from their ancient counterparts Arthropleura, Meganeura and Pulmonoscorpius. Their existence here in a modern atmosphere has revived many debates about insect size-limits, the real constraint perhaps being ecology rather than oxygen. Though some have interpreted these creatures more as another of the many anomalies of the island. Notably, all of these giant arthropods circumvent the problem of having no structural support during molting by simply doing it in water, making them just as dependent on the island’s waterways as the amphibians. To the relief of all archnophobes, so far no species of giant spider is known from Ryl Madol.

The shallow waters and reefs just off the island’s coast also have surprises in store. The reefs themselves consist of tabulate and rugose corals, both taxa which went extinct at the end of the Permian, as well as stromatopore sponges. Brachiopods are abundant instead of clams and a few genuine ammonites, graptolites and blastoids can be sighted on occasion. The strangest beings to sometimes wash up on the Rylian coasts are homalozoans, an ancient group of echinoderms which gave rise to both bilateral as well as completely asymmetrical members.

History of Discovery

Hell is hot. That is what everyone would agree on. But nobody ever told you how wet it would also be, oh, so oppressively humid. And green. Indeed, hell might not be at all much like what the church has taught you, for it is a place you can visit while still alive. Hell on Earth, it is an island in the Indian Ocean, west of the coast of Sumatra. Its name is Ryl Madol.

The Black Sistrum, drawn from the notes of Michael Lustig.

Despite its size, the history of this place is shrouded in darkness. Despite sitting close to historic mercantile seaways, there are strangely no definitive accounts or even legends of its existence by either natives or colonials before its official discovery in 1908. The closest possible pre-modern mention is an offhand account linked to an artifact, written down by Vasco da Gama after his first voyage to India. In 1498, Samoothiri, the King of Calicut, had given his fleet a few presents as a sign of hospitality. Most of which were simple and customary, except for one, a rattle-like instrument, called the Black Sistrum, named so for the colour of the mysterious oily stone from which it was crafted. According to Da Gama, Samoothiri told him that it had come from an island far to the East, later named Valusia or Valucia by the Portuguese, inhabited by blood-thirsty snake people, said to rise out of the sea only once every 3000 years. Some have later theorized that the king had gifted the Sistrum to them simply to get rid of the accursed instrument. The Black Sistrum spent the following centuries in the royal treasury of the Portuguese crown, until it was played one day for the amusement of ambassadors from Spain. The result was disastrous, as the instrument’s music allegedly caused madness and nightmares in all who had listened to it. Without mentioning said anecdote, it was then covertly given as a present to Maximilian I., King of Bavaria. From thereon it spent its last years in the Antiquarium of the Munich Residenz, exhibited, but never used or anthropologically studied. In the pre-war years, only a single researcher had shown interest in it, the visiting astronomer Michael Lustig, but his notes are near-useless and seemingly written in a drug-fueled stupor, for he claimed the instrument allowed him to make contact with a moon of Jupiter. Rumours persist that, as a last-ditch effort during the final months of World War 2, the SS investigated if the Sistrum’s alleged capability for psychological damage could be used as a weapon. If there is any truth to such claims, the efforts were likely cut short before they could even begin when the Antiquarium was partially destroyed during the bomb raids by the Allies. When it was rebuilt under West-German rule, no remains of the Black Sistrum were ever found again.

1908

1908 was a year of global anomalies. It was the coldest recorded year since 1880. A massive typhoon devastated Hong Kong and another sunk a small island beneath the sea off the coast of Australia. Sailors in the Arctic could not use their compasses for a full three months. With his radiocommunication experiments, Nikola Tesla claimed to have received signals from Mars. And on June 30th, the same day as an explosion of unknown origin devastated Tunguska in Siberia, the island of Sumatra was hit by a titanic earthquake, almost as devastating as the eruption of the Krakatoa had been 25 years prior. In the subsequent days, a large cyclone of fog and storm formed to the far west of it. Navigators and surveyors around the Indian Ocean began noticing geological and magnetic anomalies. Their epicentre was eventually narrowed down to the cyclone. The Dutch Colonial Empire was the first to send a ship to investigate. Perhaps, it was thought, the earthquake had lifted up some new piece of bare land from the sea, as has happened in recent years off the coast of Pakistan. New land that could be claimed for the empire. But the Batavia never returned, its shipwreck and lost crew having yet to be found.

The British were far more successful. The HMS Caprona was able to pierce through the cyclone and venture on calm waters. After passing through a narrow gap between two large reefs, their arrival in this terra incognita was heralded by the sighting of what was at the time identified as a sea serpent. Soon after, they were perhaps the first ever humans to gaze upon the island of Ryl Madol. To their surprise, it was not a craggy rock that recently rose out of the sea. A massive landmass lied there before their eyes, clad in a bright green jungle, out of which jutted heavily eroded mountains and cliffs. A massive wall, clearly artificial, 20-metres tall, could be seen from the sea. Its ends were slowly sinking beneath the waves, along with other massive pieces of cyclopean stonemasonry. Inhuman shrieks, and perhaps voices, screamed from the steaming jungle. This was an ancient land, which had lied here for uncounted millennia unseen by modern man.

Immediately after landing, about one fourth of the Caprona’s crew died from a horrific malady of the lungs. It was soon discovered that across the island grew a small, almost inconspicuous fungus, a lichen, that almost ceaselessly pumps its malevolent diaspores into the air. The local wildlife is perfectly immune to this toxic miasma, but in humans that spend too much time on the island it causes a violent infection that fills up the lungs with water, making one drown even while standing on dry land. The crew made-do with pieces of cloth wrapped around their faces, but this was only of partial help. Seven more men succumbed to the spores. Another fourth of the crew was eaten alive by the island’s animals. Ungainly, ugly and primitive, but all the same huge, ferocious and malicious creatures called this place their home. All of them were reptilian, amphibian, arthropod or some horrific in-between in nature. No mammals or birds lived on the island. As later researchers concluded, nearly all of the wildlife on Ryl Madol traces its ancestry back to lineages which should have gone extinct somewhen during the Palaeozoic Era. With half of the crew gone, the Caprona soon departed before more lives could be lost. While the British laid a controversial claim to the island and its wonders, its inherent hostility made it impossible for them to enforce that claim and the international debate around Ryl Madol stagnated thanks to the outbreak of the First World War.

Aftermath

The advent of chemical warfare and widespread use of gasmasks during the Great War made it possible to explore Ryl Madol for longer times without succumbing to the air. At the same time, the storm system surrounding the island subsided. Colonialism reared its ugly head again and the Dutch, British, French and even the Portuguese sent expeditions to the island, both out of scientific interest but also to stake a claim. It proved all in vain. Every attempt at an outpost on the main island was doomed. Nobody was able to eradicate the toxic lichen, gunpowder weapons were barely a match for the armoured hides of the reptilian behemoths and the newly discovered intelligent inhabitants showed themselves to be hostile, untameable and indecipherable.

By the 1930s, attempts at colonizing Ryl Madol were given up. Yet private ventures continued, such as in 1933 when a French film crew landed on the island in an attempt to film a documentary-style adventure movie. Due to horrific accidents, the recorded material and most of the actors were lost, so the filmmakers instead tried to recuperate their losses by capturing one of the native flying reptiles and bringing it back to Paris. On its first exhibit, the brute “gargoyle” broke out and wreaked havoc in the city, until it flew off never to be seen again. There are rumours it now lives on the dragon mountain of Pilatus, where it continues to snatch children and cattle.

The last major act in the history of the island was the Second World War, during the occupation of the Dutch East Indies by the Japanese Empire. Pretending to send a fleet to the island in order to create a new war-time harbour, Winston Churchill tricked the Japanese navy into pre-emptively sending its own forces there, where they were devoured by the same hostile forces as everyone before them.

Although sitting in Indonesian territorial waters, in the post-war years, Ryl Madol has become internationally recognized as lying outside any nation’s jurisdiction. Although various countries still continue sending scientific teams to it, this has unfortunately attracted a whole different group of people.