Avelax

This article is about the continent. For the country, see Free Republic of Avelax.

Avelax (pronounced /ˈævɪlæks/) is the westernmost continent of Dadauar, connected to Burcady by the Isthmus of Calacca. It spans all of Dadauar's climate zones, including tropical regions in the west and arctic in the southeast.

Geography and climate

The continent of Avelax has a roughly triangular shape, with notches cut in the triangle's two southern sides. Alternatively, it can be seen as comprising a core region with extra lobes attached on two sides and the Isthmus of Calacca to the third, the southern lobe being the Xien Peninsula and the western the Talacho.

Most of Avelax lies in the temperate region of Dadauar, but the continent is wide enough for the tips of its peninsulas to enter into areas of extreme climate. Thus much of the Talacho Peninsula is tropical, and is covered by jungles and steamy swamps, and the eastern end of the Xien is icy and barren.

Aside from the circumferent ocean, Avelax is bordered by three seas. Two of these seas, the Akararal Sea on the north and the Sea of Firiti on the south, are shared with Burcady, but the Golden Sea in the west is entirely surrounded by Avelax except at its outlet to the ocean.

Political structure

The majority of Avelax is covered by the Free Republic of Avelax, one of the most powerful onirarchies on Dadauar, and certainly the largest. The Republic covers over half the continent, and all of the continental core save a few small nations along the edge. The second largest nation on Avelax is K'eng, occupying the eastern half of the Xien Peninsula; the western half of the peninsula is divided among a number of smaller nations, including T'in, Ren Gao, and Ikiki.

Not all the continent is taken up by onirarchies. By far the largest undeveloped nation on Avelax is Mapland, which occupies the vast swamp in the southern Talacho Peninsula. Also, a large area of desert in the western Xien is formally not part of any nation, but in practice is controlled mostly by T'in.

Native life

Relatively little of Avelax is left in anything resembling a natural state. The Free Republic has almost all of its area urbanized, and K'eng and the other nations of the Xien Peninsula aren't far behind. Mapland still retains its original ecology, the natives having a much smaller footprint on the land than do the onirarchies, and some jungle, mountain, and desert areas even within the onirarchies have thus far resisted urbanization. Therefore, some of the native creatures of Avelax do retain a foothold despite the onirarchies' presence. One of the most characteristic creatures of Avelax is the davine, a moose gnulu indigenous to the mountains, some individuals of which species have managed to integrate themselves within the onirarchies.

Apparently the ravaged wilderness did not go quietly, however, because it seems to still exist in some ghostly form. Occasionally people in the Free Republic, and to a lesser extent in the northern parts of Ikiki and K'eng, have reported coming across an apparitional forest rather than the streets and buildings they were expecting, or encountered some spectral animal from the vanished woodlands. The Phantom Forest, as this phenomenon is called, is still a subject of investigation.

History

The history of Avelax is only known in any detail in the last seven or eight thousand years. The Great Plague nine millennia ago presumably devastated Avelax as much as it did the rest of Dadauar, but Avelax in addition had a local disaster of its own, the Avelachian Pall. The Pall was destructive enough that it has rendered almost impossible any attempts now to reconstruct its causes, but it was clearly the effect of some dangerous magics, and scholars debate whether it represents the aftermath of a war or some more innocent magic gone wrong. Whatever caused it, the Pall left a mysterious blanket of semi-tangible despair that covered much of the continent for more than two thousand years, stifling growth beneath it and rendering all Avelax a dispiriting wasteland.

The first colonists after the Pall was lifted were a people called the Kenever—who, in fact, seem to have been the ones who figured out how to lift the Pall in the first place. The Kenever lived in harmony with the land, but were increasingly confined into a smaller space by the encroachment of the onirarchies. When finally the immigrants from Burcady came who formed the Free Republic, the last of the Kenever's homeland was taken from them, and most of the Kenever either were assimilated in the Republic or fled to Mapland.