Mount Yun
Mount Yun is a starshee that occupies a stationary orbit around the Narlovian planet of Eolo. Although it orbits far outside the planet's atmosphere, a potent rhegus keeps the air from floating into space. The occasional clod of dirt, rock, or bit of organic matter inevitably falls off the shee to plummet to the planet's surface below, but apparently something in the enchantment also replenishes these losses. (Either that or, coincidentally, the amount of matter brought to the shee by visitors or by the impact of small asteroids happens to be just enough to counter the losses, but that seems substantially less likely.)
Inhabited for hundreds of years, Mount Yun has now become a fairly well frequented byway for interplanetary travelers, with small but functional spaceports in two of its five populated communities. Its orbital position also makes it useful to astronomers, who make good use of its several observatories. Still, its isolated position, the fact that most of it remains undeveloped, and some of the dangerous life (or unlife) living on and within the mountain make it a less popular destination than it might otherwise be, and contribute to the common perception of it as something of a regressive backwater.
History
Mount Yun began as a landbound mountain on Eolo's surface, near the northern edge of the continent of Nantia. While the War of the Mountains, despite the name, did not consist entirely of the movement of literal mountains, but some were indeed hurled across the world or even into space. Mount Yun falls into this category, being caught up in the powerful magics of the war and tossed into what became a stable orbit. The mountain was not barren, and not only had plenty of vegetation and wildlife but even had two cities there. Of course, once the mountain was cast into space, all its inhabitants suffocated, with only some microorganisms and tiny extremophiles surviving in torpor.
The orbiting mountain remained barren for several centuries thereafter before being colonized. This colonization, however, was not by people from Eolo below, but by jagathi from Fanian, who enchanted the satellite to give it an atmosphere more congenial to their own biological needs, settling it apparently as a precursor to their intended invasion of Eolo itself. The undead and other dangers of the mountain proved enough to make it less convenient for the jagathi's schemes than they had hoped. And, of course, when the jagathi's plans were thwarted, it left Eolo again uninhabited, but now with new enchantments and new structures for its eventual rediscoverers to find.
That rediscovery occurred early in the Planetary Age, and it wasn't long before its discoverers realized the utility of such a large preexisting orbital platform, and the mountain was quickly settled again—though, of course, not before altering its atmosphere to one more like Eolo's than Fanian's. These newest inhabitants, too, found some challenges there, not only the life forms that had troubled the jagathi but also some of the enchantments and defenses the jagathi left behind. Still, they managed to persevere and thrive, and today Mount Yun has over twelve thousand permanent inhabitants.
Geography
As seen from above (or below), Mount Yun is shaped roughly like a scalene right triangle, albeit one with strongly rounded corners and a concave hypotenuse. It is as mountainous as its name implies, with two peaks, the higher peak closer to the shorter leg of the triangle, and the lower peak closer to the opposite angle. From these peaks, the land slopes down in most places more or less gradually toward the shee's edges, though there are parts of the mountain that are steeper. Most notably, on one side the mountainside falls off in a steep drop from the higher peak toward the hypotenuse of the triangle, a place called Salamander Cliff (or often just "the cliff" by natives).
Several streams and rivers make their way down the mountainside, having their origin in most cases at springs near the peaks and flowing down toward the mountain's edge. None of these waterways ever quite reaches the edge, however, collecting before then in a lake or pond with connections to the mountain's interior, whence the water is magically elevated back to the springs at the top. Four bodies of water are large enough to merit special mention. The largest body of water on Mount Yun is Lake Thu, located in a depression on the side of the mountain between the two peaks. Three rivers flow into the lake, two from the higher peak and one from the lower. Second is the oblong Verge Lake, at the farthest edge of the mountain from the higher peak. The Bowl is a lake at a corner of the mountain, fed by Bowl River, the only major waterway on Mount Yun not originating near a peak, and Taiman Lake is essentially a broad spot in Spiral River.
Mount Yun is honeycombed with internal tunnels and passageways, as well. While some of these tunnels were excavated by the jagathi or their Eolan successors, many of them predate the War of the Mountains, having been present when the mountain was still on the planet's surface. Not all the mountain's tunnels have been fully explored, and some wonder if there may still be some important secrets hidden within.
Life
For the most part, Mount Yun's surface life, of course, has its origin only in or after its settlement by Eolan spacegoers. Not long ago a barren chunk of orbiting rock, Mount Yun now has thriving forests covering large areas of it, and even the barest parts of the mountain sport hardy grasses and lichens. Animals of many sorts roam the mountainside, from plentiful insects to squirrels and lizards to larger beasts such as wolves and deer. Some magical entities such as wisps, mudchicks, and at least one goblin have also found their ways there. There are persistent rumors of a yaron that has made its home in the forests of Mount Yun, but no reliable evidence of its existence has yet surfaced.
The most notorious of Mount Yun's "wildlife", however, are the undead that haunt its surface, remnants of the unfortunates who asphyxiated when it was cast into space. Called melums, these ghostly beings have the ability to suck the breath from others, causing them to undergo a similar suffocating death to the one they suffered. Fortunately, the melums tend not to wander too widely, but stay near the areas of their deaths, and are therefore avoidable by those familiar with their locations. By far the largest concentration of melums is in the otherwise abandoned prewar village of Troutside beside Taiman Lake. Occasional other undead of more recent provenance have been sighted on the mountain, such as ghosts and skeletons, but these are much rarer.
The mountain's present-day living humanoid inhabitants are mostly human, though not exclusively. A handful of wheetocks, mabans, and grims also make their homes among the humans there. There are also tales of several kinds of turnskin who found Mount Yun a congenial home, including apparently a whole secret village of werewolves hidden somewhere in an isolated corner of the mountainside.
Mount Yun's interior, too, bears life—life, in fact, far older than the life on its surface. When Mount Yun was propelled into space, some of the beings within it reacted in time to seal off the passages to the outside, keeping in the air inside the mountain and allowing life there to persist. Noetic life of the mountain's interior includes grillochs, gastlings, and rylins.
Society
Mount Yun's people are an eclectic lot. The majority are rural villagers, who apparently think little of the unusual nature of their home; many of them have grown up there, and in the couple of generations since the mountain was recolonized any novelty has largely worn off for them. Among these provincial rustics, however, live sophisticated scholars who make their home there to have a good vantage point from which to observe celestial bodies, and cosmopolitan spacegoers who like the convenient location for their journeys. While many inhabitants of Mount Yun live their lives there without venturing off the shee, those that do choose to travel between the mountain and the surface often travel there on the backs of great piturians.
Although Mount Yun supports plenty of trees and other flora, its rocky sides and limited area make farming problematic. Trade would be an option, but is one that is not done on as large a scale as it could be, perhaps largely because of the difficulty of transport—what trade is done is largely through bearhouses with enchantments to translocate their contents to and from matched houses on the surface, and while more bearhouses are under construction, there currently aren't enough to supply all the people's needs. Much of the mountain's food supply, therefore, is provided through small farm plots enchanted to generate much more food than would normally be possible.
While food is not a resource in plentiful supply on Mount Yun, though, other resources do exist. Some gems and valuable ores are extracted from the mountain's interior, but the miners occasionally come into conflict with the beings within. Aside from these, Mount Yun's limited exports largely comprise manufactured materials. With few farmers, the mountain's population is made up disproportionately of a variety of skilled craftsmen: woodcarvers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and fashioners of more specialized products.
Contact between the inhabitants of Mount Yun's surface and those of its interior is infrequent and generally brief, in part perhaps because of some of the latter's strange and incomprehensible practices. For thousands of years, the underground life of the mountain has been eking out a fragile existence in isolation from the world below or from any other living beings. Because of this solitude, these beings have developed along divergent lines from anywhere in the world below. The unique culture of Mount Yun's subterranean inhabitants remains little understood, and to most of those on its surface the tunnels of Mount Yun are a mysterious otherworld they dread to enter.
Settlements
While the distribution of the beings of Mount Yun's interior is unknown, the people of the surface mainly live in five settlements. The largest by area is Graytown, on the shore of Lake Thu, built on the site of a preexisting town. This preexisting town bore melums and other dangers, however, that led to Graytown's having to be spread out to avoid them, leaving large plots undeveloped in its interior. Because of this, while the largest by area, Graytown is not the most populous settlement of the mountain; that distinction goes to Addleton on the side of the Bowl. Perhaps the most unusual city of Mount Yun is Scarpside, set into the Black Cliffs behind Riddle Falls. Lower Sarric is at the side of Verge Lake, while Upper Sarric is at the top of the mountain's lower peak.
The higher peak of the mountain is also developed—not by a village or town, but by the Yun Observatory. While it has no permanent inhabitants, the Yun Observatory is a mecca for astronomers all over Eolo.
Relations
Mount Yun has remained formally independent of Eolo's landbound nations, operating more or less as its own microstate—or perhaps as five separate states, since its five settlements operate separately with no overall government leading them all. Its continued independence results much more from its dearth of desirable resources and the logistical difficulties in invading the satellite than from any defenses the inhabitants are capable of putting up.
The mountain does, however, have several regular trading partners, several of which do exert enough pressure on the nation to operate as de facto overseers. The most prominent of these nations include Patherby, Gabber Pit, and Ganica. What prevents any of these nations from cementing control over Mount Yun is mainly competition from the others.