What Happened to Sarnath?

Sarnath was destroyed exactly one thousand years after it destroyed another city, by what that city had left behind. The Archive files its ruins as UNCHARTED. They lie on the shore of a still lake in the land of Mnar, where a wonder of the ancient world stood for a millennium before its people vanished in a single night.

Ib

The older settlement was Ib, a grey stone city on the same lake shore. The dossier describes its people as green, bulging-eyed and voiceless, said to have descended from the moon in a mist long before Sarnath was built. They worshipped Bokrug, a sea-green idol-god, and they had discovered fire. Sarnath's young warriors killed them to the last body, for the crime of being strange to look at. They did not touch the corpses; they pushed them into the lake with spears. They carried off the idol as a trophy and set it up in a temple.

The doom

Sarnath prospered. On the thousandth anniversary of the triumph, at the feast, the account records what the lake sent up and what it did to the city, and that nothing and no one in Sarnath remained by morning. The idol, which had been carried to Sarnath, was recovered from the ruins. The city that took it was not. Bokrug's dossier is filed as regional and retributive. It notes that the idol did the avenging but that the crime was against Ib's people, who for that reason have an entry of their own.

The ruins today

Travellers find marshland and broken stone, and little reason to linger. The route is the one that once led camel-trains and pilgrims to the city. The Survey draws the lake on the Dreamlands chart, but the accounts never tie Mnar to Ulthar or the other places on it, so the placement is a conjecture, as the gazetteer notes.