One of the most beautiful sights in Santharian lands undoubtedly is the idyllic view on Ephirn's Lake and Holmstedt fortress, located east of the Heath of Jernais in the northern province of Nermeran. The lake is up to 100 peds deep and is fed by the Cylian river, which flows from the Troll Mountains into Ephirn's Lake through the Waterfall of Diamonds.

Picture description: The idyllic view on Ephirn's lake and the Holmstedt fortress east of the Heath of Jernais in the Santharian province of Nermeran. Picture drawn by Tanos.

Ephirn's Lake derives its name from the elven legend of the light elf Ephirn, whose thoroughly sympathetic nature for all things human was the cause why he is said to have often left the secure boundaries of the Thaelon forest in order to warn nearby travellers of imminent troll raids and to share supper with them. He set out because he had fallen in love with a human woman who had crossed his ways once when roaming at the heath, alas, she should never return again. In his desperate search for her Ephirn saved many human lives. But when leaving the holy grounds of the sacred forest of the High Goddess the appearance of a light elf is turned to a mortal elf and so on one of his lonesome walkings through the Heath of Jernais Ephirn had to pay the price for his sympathy to his beloved and all things human. It is not known through whose hand Ephirn indeed found his end, if it was an orcish, a trollish or even a human one, who detested the elven way. But it is reported that Ephirn's body was discovered lying in his own blood in the midst of the heath and that in his death he was still smiling. As the Astyrhim light elves at the Thaelon counted Ephirn more to the humans than to their own kind they didn't fullfil the elven Rite of Return on him, but sank his body in the nearby lake according to the nature of the humans which in elven myth are associated to the element of Water. The lake was later on named Ephirn's Lake.

Thousands of years later, in 292 b.S., the plain near Ephirn's Lake was the location for one of the first great battles of the Third Sarvonian War, which should lead the Sarvonian continent into utter destruction: the Battle of Four Swords. In this battle the Holmstedt fortress served as one of the last bastions to defend the Erpheronian kingdom from the orcish invasion. The rage of the invaders devasted the lands around Ephirn's sea, but just like nature regained its beauty in the centuries to come, so the castle was rebuild again and now proudly serves as an important defending institution against trollish attacks from the eastern mountains.