World turtle immobilised part 2

Further exploration of the thought experiment in which we have a world carried on the back of a turtle crash into a spherical one.  This time, the landscape underneath the turtle.

In this post I talked about a full-sized globe planet which has had a second planet, a flat one carried on the back of a juvenile world-turtle, land on its surface with minimal damage.  (IE. we still have two worlds, but they're not in great shape.)  Generations have passed, civilisation has more or less recovered from the turmoil and they're in a position to start looking around and wondering what actually happened.

What's known is that the weather is wetter, there are vast salt marshes forming to the East where the a new geographical feature blots out the sun for half the morning, and strange new animals have been seen in those regions.  And the sages, who have read the antique writings, say the winters are now milder, the summers are hotter and the year is two days shorter than it used to be.  Gods were probably involved, but there's no consensus on who they were punishing or for what.

Expeditions sent by the new empire to explore the area don't actually see the turtle with any kind of clarity.  It's too vast.  On a clear day, from a hundred miles away, you might see a hint of a head or a flipper, with a titanic disc above.  The water pouring off the disc falls into vacuum, which instantly converts it to a fog.  It drifts down, where the jet stream helps by pushing it away to the West.  There's still enough water in the air around the turtle to surround it with clouds.  They figure out it's turtle-shaped by mapping it.  On horseback by land, and by ship where its hindquarters overlap the ocean.  In the process they discover The Bite and the curious effect the blood which is still oozing from it has had on the local wildlife, but that's for a later post.

(I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much water is pouring off the disc if it has the same flow rate as Niagara Falls.  Then I decided that that magic which recycles that water back onto the disc is still working — otherwise it would have doubled the amount of water on the planet's surface in the first five minutes.)

What the explorers actually see is cloud-covered lands with a strange top-heavy mountain at the centre.  It's never truly dark here  There's a bright point in the fog, lighting it from the inside.  Sometimes it's above the mountain, far away and dim, sometimes it's close and the cloud glows with a diffuse light.  (One explorer described it as 'akin to being shrunk down and standing at the centre of a cold candle flame'.)

The turtle is ringed with concentric circles of volcanic chasms because it's slowly crushing the continental plate under it (its magical nature gives it some buoyancy even in death, otherwise there'd be no slowly about it). If you remember the first post, the turtle world is the size of Ceres, which is shown on the left here compared to Earth. Its weight has created a depression around it which has filled with brine, making an inland sea a few dozen miles wide.

The area around the turtle was damaged so badly in the cataclysm that none of its life survived. The landscape is slowly being recolonised by hardy plants and a few animals that would be equally at home in a desert. The only intelligent life is a few small, migratory clans of orcs and gnolls.