"The Abominations of Yondo" by Clark Ashton Smith

vernal: spring

fumitory: a herbaceous annual flowering plant in the poppy family

profulgent: sending out rays of light; bright, shining. Annoyingly, I can't find a satisfactory pronunciation guide for this word, and the pronunciation recordings on youtube don't quite agree. So another word that nobody seems to know how to pronounce. There are two rather obvious possibilities, and probably other less obvious ones. I went with the one that rhymes with effulgent. Which happens to mean the same exact thing!

lave: wash

gravid: pregnant

basanite: an igneous, volcanic rock with aphanitic to porphyritic texture, it forms from magma low in silica and enriched in alkali metal oxides that solidifies rapidly close to the Earth's surface.

verdigris: the bright bluish-green patina formed on copper or brass by oxidation

gibbous: convex or bulging

The picture used is "The Grey Desert- KKH" by Raki_Man, and used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en).

This desert is in Akto county, Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang, China. It may not be ashen, but it is a grey-sand desert, so probably as close as can be had on our planet.

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/2/the-abominations-of-yondo

This makes me want to read more stories set in Yondo! Unfortunately, I don't think there are any more. Definitely fertile grounds for the budding author of the weird and supernatural!

Or if nothing else, it'd be a creepy and dangerous setting for an RPG.