Eordi

Eordi is a continent on the worlddisk of Dadauar, in the northeastern part of the world. It is the smallest of Dadauar's five continents, though Matuni is a close second. (Eordi is actually longer than Matuni, but has a slightly smaller area.) Eordi is the site of one of Dadauar's oldest and most powerful onirarchies, Drithidiach, as well as many other notable nations.

Geography and climate

Eordi is a relatively long and thin continent, the main part of the continent shaped very roughly like an isosceles triangle with a wide base, its apex pointing northeastward. At the northwestern end of the continent a long peninsula stretches southwest almost to Burcady, separated from that continent only by the Bilber Strait. The north tip of Eordi also comes close to touching another continent, the continent in this case being Matuni and the intervening body the Strait of Mazara. The south tip, on the other hand, actually is connected to the continent of Jahanna, via the Green Isthmus. The southwestern side of Eordi, between the Bilber Strait and the Green Isthmus, borders the Restless Sea, while the north borders the White Main. The eastern side of Eordi, between the Strait of Mazara and the isthmus, borders the circumferent ocean; offshore in that direction lie the Murk Islands.

Despite its relatively small size, Eordi is more climatically diverse than any other Dadauaran continent save perhaps Avelax. The western peninsula lies within Dadauar's frigid zone, and is cold year-round, and covered in winter with ice and snow. Much of the eastern part of Dadauar, on the other hand, is in the tropics, hot and sunny. The Veiled Mountains run most of the length of Drithidiach a bit west of the center, reaching in parts amazing heights.

The Longwater, second largest of Dadauar's great spacefalls, plunges onto Eordi, isolating its western peninsula from the rest of the continent and then skirting the edge of the Restless Sea before splitting the rest of the continent more or less along an east-west line. The part of the peninsula where the falls strike is sufficiently covered by ice and rock to be little eroded by it, but the falls carve a ravine over much of Eordi's center, one with many caves opening into its sides that may lead into the depths of Bathk within the worlddisk. Another of the spacefalls, the Ganacar, also tumbles over southern Eordi, falling almost parallel to the eastern coast; a third; the Malwater, barely impinges on a bit of Eordi near the southwestern coast, the majority of the spacefall being over the Restless Sea.

Political structure

The largest nation on Eordi is also one of the oldest and most powerful onirarchies on Dadauar, Drithidiach. Covering a large swath of the center of the continent, Drithidiach is relatively sparsely populated, leaving a fair amount of countryside open for farming and allowing it to grow enough food to export it to other nations (unlike most onirarchies, which must import the majority of their food). Drithidiach is also known as being perhaps the most scientifically advanced of the onirarchies... as well as, since the Drithidian Amnesty seven centuries ago, one of the most progressive and least oppressive.

This latter honor Drithidiach shares with another of the onirarchies of Eordi, the chilly nation of Ivinii that occupies the continent's northern peninsula. Alone among the onirarchies, Ivinii has had the same ruler since its inception, a powerful but eccentric mage named Elêla. Despite some of her outlandish practices, Elêla is a liberal ruler, and life in Ivinii, like that in Drithidiach, is better than in most of the onirarchies.

Not all the onirarchs of Eordi are as benign as Elêla and the part-dreamstuff Guru that rules Drithidiach. The continent's other onirarchies, such as Lalerin, Rueland, Xolia, and Yumaria, are more typically tyrannical. Xolia even goes so far as to kill all its citizens when they reach adulthood, so as to keep their ghosts around to power the onirarchs.

A small part of the continent yet remains free from the onirarchies, primarily along the eastern coast. The largest such nation, Giaden, is independent only in name; for all practical purposes, it is a colony of Seseal, and is under the yoke of its onirarch. If it weren't under the control of Seseal, in fact, Giaden would no doubt long ago have fallen to Drithidiach, which it borders, and which, less despotic than other onirarchies though it might be, would have had few compunctions about annexing it, and little trouble doing so. Underlining its thralldom to the onirarchy, Giaden is known the world over as the source of the name of the zombie dreambuilt, which have become common tools of onirarchs all over the world disk. On either side of Giaden, however, there yet remain a few nations that are genuinely independent, including Braxen and Zayatis to the north and the Sibling Nations of Kerachec, Malchec, and Niphachar to the south.

Life

Along with its climatic diversity, Eordi has a corresponding biological diversity. From the floating pupup and the ghost bear of the gelid peninsula, to the gacuan and sereine of its tropical rain forests, Eordi is home to a huge variety of life forms. Among the largest and most dangerous of the organisms native to Eordi is the wammaroo, a giant ambulatory plant that originated in the jungles but has since spread elsewhere in the continent.

Not all the beings of Eordi are of natural origin. Aside from the batirines and dreambuilt that are common throughout Dadauar, Eordi is home to artificial creatures called uxala, created long ago by the Empire of Borowi and lingering long afterward, their abiological nature letting them survive the Great Plague that depopulated most of the world. Also finding a place on the continent are the extraplanar irigi, from the plane of Darom; a large number of these entities were summoned to the area during the Shepherds' War, and many of them remained there, some of their descendants still found there to this day.

History

As with the rest of Dadauar, the history of Eordi is fuzzy before the Great Plague nine millennia ago. It seems, however, that most of the earliest inhabitants of the continent were darker skinned; the ethnicities now referred to as Istalic, Yasra, and Gcogr all originated on this continent. There is some evidence that the light-skinned Aami may be native to Dadauar too, though it's also possible that they were early immigrants from Matuni. In any case, in the preloimic period these various ethnicities had already dispersed to some degree, and others come from other continents, though it remains in Eordi where the Istalic and Yasra people are most common, if not the Gcogr or the Aami.

A few hundred years after the plague, when much of Dadauar was seeking to pin blame on the gnulu, leading to the period of persecution and genocide now sometimes known as the First Catharsis, most of Eordi acted as a sort of a sanctuary. The level of anti-gnulu sentiment was much lower in Eordi than elsewhere, though not entirely nonexistent, and many gnulus fled to this continent to survive the purges taking place in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, during the Second Catharsis Eordi was not the haven it once was; while still parts of the continent were relatively safe, it was to a lesser extent than had previously been the case.

While Eordi missed by half a millennium being the site of the first modern onirarchy—that distinction would fall to Jahanna—it is the site of the oldest onirarchy still to exist. Drithidiach was the third onirarchy to come into being in the modern age, preceded only by Feunoua and Taxin, but those predecessors have since fallen, while Drithidiach still thrives. Drithidiach further made history seven hundred years ago with the Drithidian Amnesty, a gesture toward the nation's disaffected that had long-lasting ramifications and still today is a factor in making Drithidiach's citizens somewhat more free than those of most onirarchies.