Caranus is only one continent on a world, a magic world, where things are not what they seem for the people living there. It is big. Caranus is a continent, it is a wide expansive plain, the Plains of Caranus and it is a river. The River.
Everything is bigger on this world, I began building it in high school and there was an actual map that I mounted on my wall; the lines slowly fading as markers do. I don't have it anymore because of the fire. It did not burn, but smoke and water did it in. It did burn though in my head and it is still there.
Saturn. It is a Super Earth, the size of Saturn. Or there about. That part is not important. It orbits far from the bright sun at the center; that is important: the year is about 25 Earth years long. There are three suns (also important), one blue that no one can see, because it's light is scattered by the atmosphere, one green, that appears yellow to everyone on the surface and one red. The blue is the primary and does the most to heat up the surface. The green and red orbit each other as they orbit the blue. They orbit the Blue once every Earth year, but because combined orbits of the planet and the two suns, it appears that there are 24 years in the orbit. It is all very complicated. The thing is, is that it is scientifically accurate at a level and magical at another.
There are three goddesses and three consorts; that is the simplest part of that arrangement, everything else gets complicated. The three consorts were divided between two moons apiece. So there are a total of six moons. The three consorts, with their dividedness, are most often worshiped. Because they are divided, their areas of control are more readily discerned. They are granted their powers from the divine goddesses, just as their light, is the light of the suns reflected. Their dual nature also allows for aspects, polar moralities to be worshipped separately or together, love, hate and marriage. Bountiful harvest, disastrous, and consistency. War, peace, and struggles. But each is a reflection of the goddesses, but in a way that mortals can use. The direct power of the goddesses can be used sparingly by mortals and so they are not worshipped directly except by the foolhardy.
Each priesthood has been granted one truth that they share only within their upper hierarchy as a way to identify each other. The truth is not apparent to the general public. For example, due to the fundamental nature of the Blue Goddess, she is unknown and unknowable to the people of the world; Reighlee Scattering scatters all of her light, so that there is not apparent source, there is no Blue Sun. In the same sense, her light is everywhere, she is the center of everything, the other two Suns orbit her and she not them, but still she is invisible. The Blue Goddess is Magic. The Green Goddess and the Red Goddess dance around each other over the course of a week. They orbit around the Blue Goddess once a year, so in many ways it is they who are most knowable. The Green Goddess's truth is that she is not life, plants are green too, but that is because they reject her light. Another truth is that due to Scattering, her light is changed to Yellow. She is known to mortals as the Yellow Goddess and so she is the source of falseness, lies and disguise. The Red Goddess is exactly as she appears to be, but is misunderstood. Thought to be about Death, she is about life. When she eclipses the Green Goddess, her light is completely absorbed, she the plants go from green to black, so she is thought by mortals to be the source of all that is destroyed. The red light bathes the land and makes it appear old, her light is the softest and can be looked upon directly even at noon. The Moons, the Consorts, have their mysteries too, but while the goddesses' mysteries are about the fundamentals of the world, theirs are more mythological.
How do I describe the world? It is mostly water. The oceans are huge, I mean when you think of huge on Earth you think the Pacific Ocean, which nearly covers one whole side of the planet, but when you increase the size of the planet, this becomes a different story. With the vary best technology of sailing ships and magic, it took the settlers over a year to cross the ocean expanse. The world runs on all the science that our world runs on but with the addition of magic and divine forces. The continents are formed by plate tectonics, all the creatures evolved and the rules of science hold equally true there's as they do here. The sun still rises in e West and sets in the East. Oh, did I mention that, it spins a different way than our own planet and the weather patterns are similarly affected, but the run the same way. Humanity did not evolve there. It evolved on another continent and had to make the passage to Caranus. No land bridges.
Caranus from the over map view looks like a giant insect or beast. It has huge spinal ridge that extends from the extreme south to the high northern latitudes. It is relatively narrow mountain chain with few passes through it. Narrow is a relative term, the length of the range, if you were to skirt its subtle cressent curved length looking for the said passes, would be over thirty thousand kilometers and thus the relative narrowness is in comparison, three hundred to a thousand kilometers. The narrow west coast enjoys nearly total isolation from the East and they prefer it that way. There are a few demihuman civilizations, the halfling kingdoms in the north, the hollowed halls of the dwarf kingdom, which offeres the only safe passage through the mountains. The elven nations the breadth of the narrow coast. The West Coast is maintained in its non human purity by powerfull spells and vigilance by the Protectors, there are demihumans in the rest of the continent, but here they are pure. The entire west coast recieves healthy rainfall and there is no lack as the conditions here are ideal. Except in one location, a rock desert midway up the coast, the constant rains scour all sand and soil from its bleached surface, but causes no other erosion. The eerie landscape is made all the more creepy by the shadowed forms burned into the rock. If one were to count, the figures would reach the millions, the shadows are burned deep into the rock and the details show that it is the scene of a titanic battle that dates before recorded history. Perhaps this is why the Protectors keep this coast free of humans.
Abruptness of the mountains is clear to all that journey to them from the East. The great plains are flat with little change for tens of days and then there are mountains. There is no gentle rise, there are no foothills, for most of their length, the mountains start in flat flood plains and rise away quickly. This may seem to be an artifact of creation rather than that of modification, but the great river Caranus, the true Caranus, flows beside the mountains for most of their length. It is an over exaggeration, but the statement holds true for a third of their length. The source of the great river is a mystery, no one excepth the Protectors have penetrated the jungles of the south portion of the continent. If ancient maps and writings are to be believed, the origin is a series of Great Boiling Lakes near the Protector City of Six Teeth. The same writings claim that the entire region is filled with ruins of bygone civilizations and perilous dangers from these forgotten times. What the writings are clear about is that the Great river is navigatable all the way to these mysterious lakes and that all expeditions the reach them have failed or disappeared.
The Great River emerges from the shoulders of the jungles wide and swiftly flowing and into the lower reaches of the Plains of Caranus. The combination of the great easterly winds, the vast plains and the sharp rise of the mountain ensures that the rainforests flanking the mountains contribute a lot of water to the river. The journey north sees that river widen and widen until it is impossible to see across it before it dumps into the northern sea. The river delta is a mass of smaller rivers form a dense marsh for hundreds of kilometers. Most of the smaller rivers are navigatable, but they change so frequently that even the newest updated maps are only good for at best a few months. The river dumps silt and sand deep into the sea and has been extending the lands here for millennia. The water is warm and fresh far from the continent and the waters of the entire bay are brakish and more temperate than other northern reaches.
The space between the Great River and the Desert to the east is a huge plain that is remarkable in its inconsistencies as for it's samenesses. The use of the word "plains" is a misnomer. They are flat on average. They are fertile on average. They are covered with long rivers that feed the Great River to the West. There are open stretches of grasslands, mostly to the east near the desert, but also to the west in the floodplains, but here and there it is broken up by forests, some larger than your country, some smaller than your town. There are lone mountains, tiny mountain chains, low hills and tall hills. There are rain shadows every feature that you might expect for the temperature of the climate. In the north it borders the northern sea and it's cold waters, in the south the tropical and equatorial Glittering Sea. In the west the Great River and the great Deserts in the East. There are large countries of all design and many more smaller ones, many no larger than a single town. Their are nations of demihumans and humanoids. The key to the entire region is diversity in every shape and form.
The Great Desert is two or three deserts and were created in different ways. First there has always been a desert here. There is a second great mountain range that extends from the south along the Glittering Seas and cutting of a peninsula of jungle, extending along the the head of the Sea of Storm and along between the east coastal plains and the desert. The western side is deep in its rain shadow and is thus a very dry desert, which is the foundation of these great landforms. Where the northern reaches of the mountains are the traditional mountains, the ones in the south are not. In the south they are called the Glass Mountains by the maps and it is clear why by all that see them. The western slopes are covered with thick glass as is the mountain base and the plains below for a thousand kilometers. Those that witness this plain also talk about its great curse as after a few days all begin to suffer from hair loss and wreaking pains. The symptoms persist for days afterwards until they die. The eastern side of the Glass Mountains appear to be a jumbled mess of cast stone and boulders.
The third part of the desert is similar to the second, this time though of different origins. According to rumour, their is a portion of the mountains that have been altered by the Protectors. It is a rumour because there is only one account exists of a successful journey in this desert. The winds from this desert are especially hot and the moisture is quickly desiccated from all that approach. As the mountains comes into view it is clear that they are silvered. The first rays of the Suns reflect off the mountains in the early morning and scorch a ten kilometer stretch to hundreds of degrees in seconds before the glimmer vanishes. Upon closer inspection, the account goes on, this is because of a happy flaw in the creation of this artifact, happy because it screens the truth from unwanted prying eyes. The walls of the mountain are one polished concentrating mirror that focuses the light of hundreds of kilometers of intense sunlight on one spot a few meters across. The heat brings all metals and rock to a boil in seconds. The impurities of the material are boiled off and refined to the purest forms. If the account were to be verified as truth, it would mean that the protectors have a refinery that exceeds every other refinery in the world combined in quantity of refined materials, and no other material would be as pure as one refined here.
The east coast is a landmass of forest and jungle that stretches from the south to the north. Its coastline is said to equal the rest of the continent and its area is greater than the Plains of Caranus, but that it has never been inhabited before. There are myths and stories that this was not always so, that there was a civilization there that predates the Desert of Shadows and the Glass Mountains, it may have even predates the Protectors. But the region has ample protections. First the jungles of the South, near the source of the Great River are long and wide so journey is effectively cut off from the West Coast. Access from the Southern Kingdoms of the Plains, is cut off by the Glittering Seas, which where it crosses close to the southern tip of the continent, gets very warm, in excess of 40°C, with very high humidity to boot. Skirting the more northern waters means passing close to the Sea of Storm, a great swirling hurricane that has been sitting in place since the world began, the result of a horrible magical disaster or a natural phenomenon, created in by winds buffeted by mountains and warm water currents adding energy to the storm. The storm's eye is thought to be hundreds of kilometers across and contains the flotsam of a million wrecks of all ages and their survivors descendants. The deserts and the mountain ranges prevent access. Travel from the North is hindered by lack of people, the north was only recently settled, by an insular race of men with a strong cultural aversion to sea travel. If anyone has made the difficult trip to this place, they have not reported back. The Protectors are vague about what is there or was there, but they are not vague about the dangers therein, common looking mundane things being alive and hungry. Carnivorous trees, speaking rocks with a taste for flesh and tribal humans that look more like animals.
The North is rock and inhospitable. The clash of landforms and weather was enough to turn most settlers to better areas. Those not deterred face another prohibition. The Protectors, denied them access. Saying for thousands of years that the region was for someone else. Someone else is there now, and only now some hundred years after it has happened, the people's of the continent have learned this and they are curious. The Protectors have removed themselves from their sentry posts and it appears that who ever has settled this land are ready to come out. The land comes to a point in the north, separating the Northern Sea where the Great river dumps its waters and the east coast with tropical currents that sweep from the deep south and clash with cold currents coming south. They clash creating vast raving whirlpools and eddies, the cold currents stir up nutrient rich materials and the warm currents mix here creating a wealth of sea life, which attracts another sort, massive sea animals and monsters from the deeps. The warm waters bring rain, the cold cause fog and together they cause great storms that wrack the coast. And it is far north. Further north does not exist on this continent and the summers here are longer than elsewhere, but the winters are longer and colder too. And darker. The coastal mountains stop this weather. In the interior the weather is different. There is summer and crops can be grown, but there is winter too, true winter with cold temperatures and snows that are too deep to pass. The lake's surfaces freeze ten meters thick. But in the summer, that is where the Empire gets its grain.
On Weather
Let's be clear. There is a slight tilt to the axis and years are measured by all as the time it takes for the dancing suns to get get smaller and bigger once, but this is not an actual year. A year is how long it takes the planet to go around the invisible sun at the center, the same point that the celestial dance partners dance around. The "year" is measured as to start and end on the days that they pass between behind the central sun and are eclipsed. But that real year is many times that in length. The summers and winters are long affairs, the ebb and flow of the Dancers affect the temperature of the world subtly as the dance and eclipse each other over the course of the week and orbit away and closer relatively to the planet and then briefly disappear entirely from view. There is a yearly seasonal trend to the weather caused by the Dancers, but the most significant measure is brought by the tilt of the planet and where it is in its orbit of the central sun. Like on Earth, winter has shorter days and summer has longer days in proportion to the latitude on the planet. Because the true seasons are six years in length and not three months, there is less variability to them. The lands and the seas heat up slower and remain warm for longer. When the jet stream moves north, it moves further and slower and is thus less variable. The Dancers add to the variability. So it is in the higher latitudes where the most dramatic effects of weather are seen, where the Dancers dance away for up to twelve years at a time and never set for an equal amount of time. Where lakes heat up to bath temperatures on summer and freeze solid in winter. In the equatorial climes there is a different sort of weather. The days are persistent in length for the whole true year, but two seasons of unbearable life threatening heat spaced with two seasons where life persists with only great uncomfortability. In the tropical climes, the weather is deadly warm for a season of six years and nearly uncomfortably cool for another. The climate of the Plains of Caranus is temperate, the summers are hot and the winters are cold, but not too cold. Nearer the river there is a boost to the daily temperatures from the heat of the river from warmer climes. In the Northern Empire, the warm ocean currents keep the climate uncomfortably wet and temperate through the entire winter occasional snowfalls are very heavy and melt quickly.
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