> My vision of the lower Zola Fel in summer is like many rivers in the southwestern United States. They have fairly heavy flows from the time the snow in the mountains melt (if they drain mountains) and during the spring rains, but then sink down. Most of the actual water flow is undergroud, or moving from one fairly stagnant, stinking pool to another. It's better than having to dig a well, but it's not what people normally think of when they say "river."
I don't quite buy that for ordinary years. The Zola Fel has a fisherfolk population and intelligent fish, so there must be some means for both the fish population and the fish to survive even the worst dry spells.
I have no problem with cradle-sized ships getting stuck during dry season, but stagnant stinking, pools don't work for maintaining an ecology that can sustain 2000 fisherfolk and a healthy fish population. (This is from real world work experience with eutrophied pools...)
Either you have a fish population in the river that can survive even dry spells, or you have stagnant pools and fish (and probably fisher folk too) fleeing to the Other Side during dry spells as bad as you describe.
> It is not, however, as severely variable as the serpents out in the waste. They are much closer to being true wadis, where they only fill with rainwater. The Zola Fel stays wet throughout the year because of snowmelt from the mountains. That keeps something that looks like a river flowing through the upper Zola Fel valley, where the river's channel is fairly narrow and comparatively steeply banked. But once you get to the lower Zola Fel valley, the channel widens and shallows (and there has been a lot of evaporation). At that point, it starts looking much more like what I described above.
The Zola Fel may suffer evaporation, but it is still fed by the runoff of the snow covered peaks of the Eastern Rockwoods that sustain a Redwood forest above the Leaping Falls. The bogs help retaining huge amounts of water, slowly yielding it when it gets colder in the Rockwoods and the melt-off drops.
IMO a Zola Fel subject to annual phases of non-flow would be a much weaker great spirit than the one we know. His magic is that of defying the dry spells that hit the rest of Prax - he may be weakened, but he doesn't die.
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