The Shiverpeaks · Shiverpeak Mountains
The jotun master the stars
At the height of their power the jotun become legendary stargazers, inscribing their astronomical discoveries on great monument stones and building the Mystic Telescope to read the movements of the heavens.
In their golden age the jotun were expert stargazers who understood the ways of the sky and the movements of the heavens. Many of their monument stones doubled as stellar maps, and their stargazers were legendary. They recorded their knowledge of the stars, the earth, and even the Elder Dragons on monument stones, runestones, and stelae scattered across the Shiverpeaks.
Their most powerful surviving instrument is the Mystic Telescope, an ancient jotun magical observatory now buried in the ruins of Arah. The jotun believed the stars marked the passage of Tyria’s ages, and that the creation of new stars coincided with the cycles of the Elder Dragons’ risings — so they used the telescope to foresee, in the heavens, when the dragons would awaken. Only after the jotun’s long fall were these works reduced to forgotten carvings on snow-covered peaks.