Language: Shen.
Religion: Both Zatolin and Ketolin sects of the Kam-Djen faith maintain an uneasy balance of power among the city’s faithful.
The Sight: Banned as a sacrilegious affront to their god Ni-Kam-Djen.
Impressions: “The humans are a most mercantile people, surpassed only by the rakthor, and the people of the free city of Tanjii are the most trade and profit conscious of all those I encountered in my many years in the Iron Realm. This is no doubt a result of relying nearly exclusively on the import and export of goods through their well-situated docks. By offering docking fees rather than onerous tariffs, and boasting direct access to The Old Border Road, along which goods can travel to four of the seven dominions of the realm, the city has become a hub of commerce renown throughout Onaia. In the months I spent there visiting a fellow rakthor ambassador, I saw how delicately the city elders had learned to balance the Kam-Djen sects of Zatolin and Ketolin, the factions of nobles and merchants, the districts demarcating wealth and poverty, and the interests of the city dwellers and the farmers of the valley. It showed a skill of governing akin to an acrobat spinning shells on sticks atop a moving wagon — a sight I saw once in a palace wedding celebration in Juparti.”
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THE SUN REALM
Indigenous Name: Ranikttak
Capital: Taknaht
Geography: A land of central desert surrounded by coastal plains, thick forests, and occasional jungles.
Trade: Metals, rare spices and herbs, and mechanical devices.
Peoples: The rakthors — a reptile-like people of three breeds, one significantly shorter than the others. An unsentimental people interested in commerce and philosophical pursuits.
Government: A series of elected committees for six cantons, each sending representatives to the Central Governing Committee of the entire realm every eight years. There are also other elected offices at local levels of governance, with candidates required to pass a series of exams before standing for office.
Language: There is a single rakthorian language with very little digression of dialect.
Religion: None. The rakthors hold no belief in gods or unseen powers.
The Sight: Nonexistent or nearly so. Few rakthors have ever displayed any ability to cultivate or utilize The Sight.
Impressions: “The realm of Ranikttak, as the rakthors call it, is a largely barren land mass with vast, inhospitable deserts in the interior, a fitting place for a people who many yutan would refer to as inhospitable and barren of common personal understanding. However, as the continent of the Sun Realm is encircled by often lush forests and verdant grazing land, so, too, do the rakthors possess similar inner, rather than outer, companionable natures. However, like those coastal vegetative wilds, this inner rakthorian conviviality must be cultivated in order to produce a setting suitable for conversational colonization. Rakthors are creatures of rationality rather than feeling, but as such, they can learn to reason their way, through observation, to an approximate understanding of the way the other peoples of Onaia experience life and express themselves. I have witnessed this myself.”
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THE SKY REALM
Indigenous Name: Kratish Tavan
Capital: None. Gerhanach is the largest city.
Geography: Mountains and a few valleys. Cold and glacial with a short summer.
Trade: The Yutans trade in small metal and hand-worked items, but they do not travel and do not often mix with the peoples of other realms.
Peoples: Yutan. A tall, pale people. Possible distant, superior cousins to the humans. Peaceful and culturally sophisticated.
Government: Pods of ten to one hundred yutans collectively decide local issues and select representatives to regional pods, who then select members to the Great Pod.
Language: There are three yutan languages, all variations of the same ancient tongue.
Religion: Yutans worship the universe as the manifestation of a divine force that does not act in the world. The Aasho sect views this divine being as having three aspects: Onn the creative force, Tam the life sustaining force, and Kiv the force of destruction that turns the circle of existence back to Onn and creation.
The Sight: The gift of The Sight is common among the yutan people and cultivated by many for productive and healing purposes.
Impressions: “I departed my home realm for the first time at the turn of my nineteenth year, working as a deckhand on a human merchant vessel bound for the shores the Wood Realm. As there are few yutan trade ships, I found it easier to find working passage with humans, a people who I found an affinity for in their natural inclination to migrate, to see what lay beyond the next mountain, or across the sea. Possibly this explains why, after my eventual tutelage in the ambassadorial pods, I requested a posting in the Iron Realm, a land of people similar enough to my own that we might be related by some distant ancestor, but different in ways that, to this very day, challenge my notion of what it means to be a member of a civilized society.”
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THE STONE REALM
Indigenous Name: Rarag Shak
Capital: None.
Geography: Mountains, high plateaus, and a region known as the Stone Desert.
Trade: Little to no trade. Raw ore for various metals.
Peoples: The roaggs — a large, bear-like people said to have been created by Dark Seers in the Iron Realm to serve as warriors for a Punderrese rhegan. Freed by the urris and given the Stone Realm as a homeland. They are a largely peaceful people seemingly uninterested in the trappings of civilization.
Government: The roaggs live in a network of small tribes whose leaders occasionally hold special joint meetings to deal with issues affecting the entire realm.
Language: There is one roagg language, but there are numerous dialects that often leave speakers from one region unable to understand those from another.
Religion: The roaggs believe that all things possess a spirit that is transformed into another state of being upon death or destruction. Thus, a flower might become a rock, which might become a stag, which might become a roagg.
The Sight: Infrequent, but not uncommon. While not incapable of using The Sight, few roaggs seem interested in doing so, largely due to the stigma it carries from their creation as a people in servitude.
Impressions: “I participated once in a roagg hunt, throwing my spear to fell a stag, singing the traditional hunting song as I helped my hosts dress the carcass, sharing in the meat roasted over a spit above an open fire, weeping at the ancient poems of their people’s betrayal at the hands of the sheetoo (the humans), and laughing at the young cubs sneaking to the fire late at night to spy on the strange outlander keeping their parents awake into the darkest hours of the night. I think of that evening whenever I see a deer in the distance, a memory calling to me across time and seas and languages.”
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THE WOOD REALM
Indigenous Name: Orne Klaad
Capital: Winthaal
Geography: Dense forests, wet jungles, and wide savannahs.
Trade: Rare lumbers, spices, herbs, fruits, silks, worked metal, and jewelry.
Peoples: The wyrins — a diminutive people with thick fur and animal-like faces. An industrious people who live in harmony with their natural surroundings, although prone to frequent wars over what would seem to be plentiful resources.
Government: No central governing body. Various forms of government, from collective tribes to hereditary local monarchies, all dominating various regions and frequently in martial conflict with one another.
Language: The wyrins have numerous languages that are all related, each with various dialects that are largely regional.
Religion: The wyrins worship the spirits of their ancestors in request for guidance and protection from powerful, dangerous spirits and beings.
The Sight: There are seers in every wyrin community. The skill is not uncommon and
often used for violence in group combat.
Impressions: “While physically the smallest of the peoples of Onaia, the wyrins are a people of large feelings and great passions. To argue with a wyrin is to set oneself to scaling an impossibly high cliff with the hope of falling as one’s only comfort. As passionate as they are about their opinions, which often seem to be the cause of their intra-tribal conflicts, they are the most exceptional and generous hosts. So much so that my presence once constituted the rationale for an impromptu truce between two villages battling over water rights to a woodland stream. So concerned were the wyrins with providing for their guest that they suspended their fighting until I passed on to the next cluster of villages.”
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THE ICE REALM
Indigenous Name: None
Capital: None
Geography: Mountains and wide plains of ice and deep snow.
Trade: None
Peoples: Uninhabited.
Government: None
Language: None
Religion: None
The Sight: None
Impressions: “I am one of the few yutans, and the only one living, who can claim to have stepped upon the snow packed grounds of the Ice Realm. I cannot, however, claim to have journeyed there through intent. A trading vessel I purchased passage aboard suffered damage in a storm and ran aground on the ice and rock coastline of that realm. We stayed there a week, and while the crew made repairs, I took the opportunity to document the geography and wildlife, such as it was, to preserve a record of the least hospitable of all continents. I learned later, to my mild embarrassment, that several contingents of rakthor and human explorers had already fully documented the realm, one expedition even going so far as to trek across its interior. I found myself exceptionally jealous at that news.”
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THE FORBIDDEN REALM
Indigenous Name: Unknown
Capital: Unknown
Geography: Unknown
Trade: None
Peoples: Unknown. Possibly the urris, although little to nothing is known about them.
Government: Unknown
Language: Unknown
Religion: Unknown
The Sight: Unknown
Impressions: “It is a significant sadness to me that the realm I desire to visit the most is the one that is denied me, as it has been denied to all others before me, by a pact with a people who have remained largely unseen since they appeared to apparently assist the yutans and other peoples in colonizing their respective realms at the Origin Time so many thousands of years ago. I dream of what it would be like to speak with an urris. My dreams, of course, vary in the depiction of those elusive beings, as all recorded sightings of them differ throughout recorded history. Occasionally, they look as fellow yutans, sometimes as malformed humans, often they are simply cloaked in shadows and misshapen colors. I am most curious to know their true appearance.”
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A MISCELLANY OF FRAGMENTS
AND ARTEFACTS
THE URRIS
“They appear without appearing. They see but are unseen. They speak even as they hear all. They know the hearts of all peoples yet punish not the wicked nor reward the good. They enforce their edicts even as they ignore all pleas and prayers. They created us in their image. They found us floundering and saved us. They gifted us this land. They tore us from our land. We are their children. We are their prisoners. The urris are gods. The urris are not gods. Are the urris gods?”
— From a fragment of text by an anonymous Pashist priest sometime before The Great Conflagration.
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THE ORIGIN TIME
Slip time and folded time,
Sunken time and fallow time,
I sing now of the Origin Time,
Of dark days and jubilant nights,
Of old wrongs and new rites,
And the outer world of inner sights.
Where came we from before the now?
Where go we hence before the plow
Of death that turns our soul beneath the bough?
These queries made the first Ghang
As she built and the people sang,
While the primal city bells rang.
Mother to child she nurtured the root
Of human endeavor bearing fruit
That built a city and made it moot.
For the Ghang brought truth in word
The leaving people could not herd
Into their hearts nor minds so whirred.
And so they cast her down below
The ground of the seeds they’d sow,
And ended the future in a single throw.
To fear past is to end the present,
While leaving behind all good intent
And losing all the time one’s spent
In becoming what you be
And seeing what you see,
For time is never free.
— Ancient Kytain poem from approximately 200 years after the Origin Time.
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THE FORBIDDEN REALM
Voyage 77: Day 32
“We survived the storm. The central mast snapped. The sails are shredded. The hull leaks. But with pitch and tar and bucket and bail, the waters will not claim us.”
Voyage 77: Day 42
“Food stocks will last some time yet on short rations, but our fresh water runs low. Several water casks were damaged in the storm, and we did not notice the leaks until finding them empty. I have put the men on three cups a day and made prayers for rain.”
Voyage 77: Day 53
“Still adrift at the mercy of the currents. The stars show us far off course. We drop the knots to gauge our speed every hour. The navigator says we near land, but not land we can land upon. I’ve checked his maps and his math, and I concur. The storm did not claim our ship nor our lives, but our landfall likely will.”
Voyage 77: Day 61
“A brief storm gave us relief. The first mate organized the men to fashion what remains of the sails into collection funnels and managed to replenish the water casks. We each drank our fill as the storm subsided and the setting sun broke through clouds. The men took it for a happy omen until the lookout called down from the nest. A shadow above the water and behind the sun. The coastal mountains of the Forbidden Realm. We drift toward our deaths.”
Voyage 77: Day 63
“A miracle this day. The tide brought us within casting range of the rocky sands along the shore of the Forbidden Realm. Closer than any sailor has seen in all known maritime history. The men stood in silence on the deck, praying as they waited for their doom. I made my prayers as well, but took time to note and sketch what I witnessed. No captain has seen what I have seen. All those who departed with the intention of landing on the shores of the Forbidden Realm failed to return. All attempts to circumnavigate the continent were lost in fogs, the fortunate ones finding themselves thousands of miles off course. I and my men saw mountains give way to forests and a rock-strewn coastline. Trees with such sweeping wide branches that one might expect them to take flight. We marveled until the bilge boy spotted the mist and called out. The damp, sight-killing cloud enveloped us before we had proper time to panic. The men huddled in the center of the deck, fearful of what might climb over the railing out of the fog. Nothing came from the fog, and it soon faded away on a strong breeze to reveal a wholly different, yet intimately familiar coastline, one dotted with docks we all knew by sight. The urris had not killed us. It, they, had carried us to the piers of Tanjii. The men cheered and cried, and I ordered a cask of wine brought up from the hold.”
— Remnant of a Tanjii captain’s log from the last year of the Second Great Dominion of the Iron Realm.
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THE PACT
“As is known, the roots of The Pact were lost among the shattered rubble of the first incarnation of Kanhalla as it burned during the great c
onflagration of faiths that birthed the dominions of the Iron Realm. Buried in those ruins from the Origin Time, I have discovered something quite extraordinary. A key to the past that unlocks tomes of knowledge previously inured against comprehension.
While excavating the tombs and catacombs of the rhegans of Old Kanhalla, I uncovered a chamber hitherto unknown to previous explorers revealed, I believe, by a great ground tremor that struck the city the week prior. Pushing past the crumbled stones of an ancient wall, I discovered a small tomb in a state of disintegration. The ceiling long ago collapsed to crush the slate sarcophagus in the center of the room, a large slab of granite resting on powdered bones.
Upon examination, the upwards facing side of this stone stele revealed inscriptions. It took some moments, but I eventually recognized them as ancient Mumtiba, the language of Punderra and Juparti. The engraving was a text known to every scribe and scholar of every land: the words of The Pact, the decrees handed down by the urris at the height of the Origin Time. The rules that have guided all peoples in all realms in ways profound and trivial for hundreds of generations.
‘This world is given unto the four peoples in four realms, each unto their own for all time.
The right of travel and trade between realms is unabridged, except by those very realms themselves.
No realm may make war against another.
No realm may send expeditions of any nature to the Forbidden Realm.
Failure to abide by these conditions will result in harsh penalties.
Enforcement of this pact provides protection. Compliance ensures preservation.’
The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1) Page 83