The World We Live On

The Planet and Its Companions

The world on which we stand is called Auberean. It circles a yellow sun called Au. It used to have two moons, but one was destroyed about five hundred years ago and its remnants now form an equatorial ring around the planet. The orreries found in Arwic and the Hero Shrine show a sun with two planets--one with one moon and the other with two--and a partial asteroid belt. If these orreries were built during the Golden Age, as seems likely, the planet with two moons is Auberean; if they were built after the Fifth Sending, then the planet with the single moon is Auberean. We have no information on the other planet; for some reason it has never been observed in our night sky.

The two moons, whose names were Alb'arel and Rez'arel, were always strange. They orbited Auberean in such a way that they were always on the far side of the planet from the sun: as the sun rose in the east, the moons set in the west; as the moons rose in the east, the sun set in the west. Both moons, being directly opposite the sun, should always have been full, but they were gibbous, with a dark segment on their southern limbs.

Rez'arel, the smaller moon, was reddish in color and pocked with craters. Alb'arel, the larger of the two, was mostly covered with yellowish-tan swirling markings, like Jupiter or Saturn or Hazahtu, but its dark limb was marked with greenish lights arranged in regular geometric patterns. We have never known what they were, and they're gone now. It would appear that the moons shone, not by reflected light of Au, but by some strange light of their own. If the Empyreans knew the answers to these questions, Asheron never told us.

During the Fifth Sending Rez'arel was destroyed by the ascending Hopeslayer, and its fragments now circle Auberean in an equatorial ring, visible from Dereth as a reddish arc across the southern sky, popularly known as the Hopeslayer's Scythe or Sword. Even more surprising, Alb'arel was knocked into a retrograde orbit: as the sun rises in the east, Alb'arel sets in the east; as the sun sets in the west, Alb'arel rises in the west. It is astonishing that the force necessary to turn it backwards in its orbit did not shatter it to bits. It appears to have lost its cloudy atmosphere--or whatever that was that covered it--and now exhibits what look like lunar phases that have no relationship to the position of the sun or the progress of the month. One month it will be full, another, half full, another, gibbous or crescent or completely dark; unchanging for a month or two months, it will suddenly rise one night in a new form. We still have no explanation for it, except that perhaps it is not really a moon, that Alb'arel and Rezarel were never natural satellites, and what they truly were or are remains a mystery.

Auberean had, and perhaps still has, several continents amidst its oceans. Dericost was a large continent to the southeast; Knorr a small southern continent in the form of a close-knit archipelago, and the Falatacot came from some unspecified place far to the east of Dericost. There were at least two large continents in the northern hemisphere; maps survive showing the continental outlines and Dereth, a tiny speck in the northern ocean.

Dereth (once called Ireth Lassel), until the end of the Golden Age, was a small volcanic island about a hundred klicks across, in the shape of an irregular torus. Even smaller islands surrounded it, forming an archipelago of at least fifteen or twenty members. The major island surrounded an Inner Sea, several times as broad north-south as it was east-west the remnant of a burnt-out volcanic caldera. It appears to have been formed by a mid-oceanic rift, like Iceland on the planet Earth. Because of its volcanic origin, currents of magma surged back and forth beneath its surface. When cooled, this magma yielded the greenish metal called pyreal, which through various treatments could be made into jewelry, armor, or implements of magic. Even more importantly, currents of mana, or magical force, followed the magma channels and made it possible to work powerful magic on or near Dereth.

The eastern part of the island, which we called Osteth, was for the most part green and fertile, except for the sandy A'mun Desert just east of the Inner Sea. Clusters of snowy mountains lay in the north and in the south. The River Prosper rose south of the Esper Ranges in the north and flowed southeast-by-south, widening into Lake Blessed just below Cragstone Falls and narrowing again just north of Rithwic Bridge. South of Rithwic the river water dispersed into the swamps of Sawato before coming together again near Yanshi and flowing southward till it met the sea at Hebian-To.

The western part of the island in many places was still as fair as the east, but in the wars of the Yalain against Bael'Zharon (which will be discussed later) the southwestern region was blasted by powerful magic, creating the Obsidian Plains where little or nothing could grow. The whole region was thereafter called the Direlands, or simply the Dires; they were full of fearsome creatures that had been magically changed from their original forms. Slender land bridges connected the two parts of the island at north and south.

Several other islands lay scattered around the principal island of Dereth, chiefly to the north and west. These included the ash-strewn island Aerlinthe to the northeast, with its active volcano Tenkarrdun, rich in pyreal magma; the swampy Vesayens to the southeast, Marae Lassel to the northwest, which had been a nature preserve in Empyrean times and whose fauna was very different from the rest of the archipelago; Asheron's island and Aphus Lassel, the Tusker Islands, to the east; and the Viamontese Islands also to the northwest, about which we know almost nothing.

The volcanic origin and nature of the islands was clear both to one looking at a map (or observing from the air, assuming one could get high enough) and to one walking over the ground, examining the landscape. From the Crater high in the northern Esper Ranges (which in spite of its snowy slopes was linked to Tenkarrdun in Aerlinthe and, whenever Tenkarrdun erupted, broke forth with infestations of Flammae and other fire elementals); to the headwaters of the Prosper, which instead of collecting from melted snow-water seeped out of the earth in three great swampy lobes, and all the way down the river to the sea, one would see shallows and swamps so warm that water-lilies six feet across grew there; and on the riverbank little fumaroles, miniature waist-high volcanoes that belched forth acidic fumes.

The outlying islands, though sometimes visible from Dereth itself, were too far away for swimming, and were closed to our ancestors until portals were opened to them, which occured at many times through our history.

The Land Is Changed

During the Fifth Sending and the Cataclysm, which will be discussed in greater detail later, the land was ripped apart by physical and magical forces beyond our power to imagine. Aerlinthe and the Direlands sank, never to be seen again. The portals to Marae Lassel were shattered and it was cut off from the rest of Dereth. The A'mun Desert sank into the Inner Sea. The regions of southern Osteth, around the Linvak Ranges, were torn from the rest of the island and pushed violently southwestward to become the Linvak Massif. The remainder of Osteth split along a line south of Shoushi and north of Baishi, Hebian-To, Nanto, and Mayoi, and the southern half was pushed northeastward so that it now lies due east of Osteth, and we call those lands Omishan. Each of the fragments was further broken apart into a dozen islets, and the land rose and fell into high peaks and steep cliffs. Water channels run between and among them, and the River Prosper has become only one of many channels that flow through Osteth and Omishan. To give only one example: the walled town of Arwic once lay on a plain among gentle hills, to the south of the Esper Ranges. Now it stands atop a rugged mass of stone three hundred feet high, and the Espers lie southwest of the town. Yet its tall buildings did not fall as the earth trembled; perhaps they were protected by magic.

The Vesayen Islands, graced by the ruins of the Ithaenc Cathedral, still remain as part of Omishan. Marae Lassel, now split asunder like the other islands, has recently been rediscovered and is now known by its Dericost name, Arramora. What other islands may have survived, out of sight and not linked to known lands by portals, we have no way of knowing. Early reports from the explorers Ramen and Citan tell us that the shape of Knorr has also changed.

Most of Osteth is still green and fair, except for the Chaos Planes, blasted by magical warfare, to the north of the crater lake. Its volcanic vents seem to have burnt out, but it should be noted that hot springs flow into Cragstone moat and into the remnants of the Prosper north of Shoushi, so that even during the coldest winters those waters never freeze. Below Lake Blessed the water once widened into Lake Artefon, on the old site of the Sawato swamps; recently the water was diverted into other channels by a series of dams at Rithwic and the Artefon bottoms, an old necropolis, have been laid bare. Omishan is a land of swamps and jungles, rich in wildlife. Linvak Massif is cold, much of it frozen for most of the year, some of it under permafrost and undying ice. Since it lies slightly to the south of the other regions, one must assume that a warm ocean current flows from the southeast, warming Omishan greatly, Osteth a little, and Linvak not at all.