Eolo

Eolo (pronounced /iːˈoʊloʊ/) is a planet of Narlovia whose inhabitants have gone on to colonize other planets in their system, and even a few planets beyond. Magical starships now frequently ply the space between the worlds of the system, and that space itself has been colonized through space stations and starshees. By no means have the entire surfaces of all the planets yet been explored, and there are still many frontiers to be confronted—not to mention the increasing prospect of further colonization of distant worlds as well. While thus far each planet colonized outside of Eolo's system has been the result of powerful divinations, special circumstances, and a good deal of luck, and no reliable method has been discovered for travel to such worlds.

Even before colonization of other planets, Eolans had long been interested in colonizing the air above the planet's surface. Eolo teems with shees, none larger than a few dozen kilometers across but their total area covering scores of millions of square kilometers. Many inhabitants of the higher shees have developed magical methods of flight, or even rely on simple technological means like gliders, and delight in various aerial recreations.

History

One of the most defining periods in the history of Eolo was the War of the Mountains, which decimated Eolo's population and arguably set its advancement back centuries. During this war, civilizations used powerful magics to mold the earth and cause it to swallow up enemy cities and nations, including literally dropping mountains on them. It is thanks to the War of the Mountains that Eolo's geography today is so seemingly reasonless, relative to other terrestrial planets; the shapes and contours of its landmasses have been formed not just by continental drift but by their large-scale deformation and displacement during wartime. Buried within that tumultuated earth, beneath new hills and mountains and cast deep within the planet, are still the cities and relics of the civilizations involved in the war, sometimes collectively known as the Underlands. Occasionally a new buried city will be discovered by a farmer or miner, and fortune-hunters and explorers often specifically hunt them out for the knowledge or treasure contained within.

After the War of the Mountains, Eolo's levels of magic and technology did eventually recover, though they met with another setback a few hundred years ago in the form of Poesism, a movement dedicated to the proposition that society focused far too much on the advancement of material knowledge, and ought to be content with what they had in that regard and be more concerned with the development of the fine arts. Starting as a relatively harmless philosophy, over time Poesism increasingly attracted extremists who resorted to terrorism and wholesale attacks on universities and other centers of research and education. Eventually, Poesism declined and its influence over the pace of magical progress waned, though even today some of its marks remain.

Of course, a more recent watershed event was the onset of colonization of other planets, which began only about a hundred and twenty years ago, with the first visit to Abagane (after an earlier planned visit of Lauset was aborted due to the planet's heat). This touched off the Planetary Age, when all the nations of Eolo with the capacity to do so raced to colonize and settle the other planets of the system. In the beginning of the Planetary Age, no one really knew what to expect on other planets, and only the most daring braved their unknown dangers to make claims for their homelands. By now, all the planets have had at least a cursory examination, but wide regions on most of them remain unexplored, and there are still many mysteries to discover and frontiers to be defended.

Geography

By the most common conventions, Eolo has seven continents and five oceans—although, even more so than most terrestrial worlds, the definitions are somewhat arbitrary, since their contours have changed so much from their natural positions. Eolo's mountain ranges, the product of bombardment and magical reshaping rather than of natural processes, are discontinuous and haphazard, spotting and meandering over the continents, and plentiful inland seas and lakes exist where earth was scooped out of the centers of continents to be dropped elsewhere. Artificial islands created in the event dot the planet, the life that has already reached them somewhat belying their relatively recent nature.

System

Eolo is the third planet from the star in its system, which comprises nine other planets plus a distant asteroid belt. The two planets closest to the sun, Tili and Cili, share the same orbit, as well as similar size and other characteristics, and are sometimes called the "inner twins". Another pair of similar planets, the "outer twins", bracket the system on the other side, just outside the asteroid belt.

The system's largest planet, a gas giant called Alen, is the eighth from the sun, and has a number of moons. The sixth and seventh planets are also gas giants, though not quite as large as Alen.

Eolo's sun itself is known to astronomers as Bund, though to Eolans it is generally just "the sun".

Life

Though Eolo's terrains and ecosystems were no doubt badly disrupted by the War of the Mountains, they have made a good recovery, and Eolo now is as replete with life as any other terrestrial world. If the weird patchwork arrangement of its forests, deserts, and plains, following its artificially distorted climate and geography, seems disordered and unnatural, at least the biomes are diverse and healthy, however strange their placement.

Certainly Eolo is the only planet with the right conditions to support nonmagical terrestrial life, but various life forms do populate other planets in its system, tolerating their hostile conditions through magical protections. Furthermore, a few of the larger moons of the system are inhabited. Alen, in particular, has life on most of its moons, though the ecosystems of one moon bear little resemblance to those of another. Yiri, the Dreaming Moon, is particularly notorious, the beings that inhabit it having truck with strange entities from other planes.

Furthermore, Eolans have formed colonies on many planets and moons; no world in the system is without some outpost of Eolan life, even though on some of the more hostile worlds such colonization requires heavy magical protection or modification to account for temperatures or chemicals hostile to terrestrial life. On some worlds this colonization takes strange forms; the Jovian Maunset has been "paved" over a large part of its surface by a series of habitable shees and wolks.

Though humans predominate among Eolo's ellogous life, they are not alone. Other common races include the amphibious halm, the dracenate wheetock, and the laplock, which many magobiologists believe to be connected in some way to the still not fully explained spark storms that frequently form. Furthermore, just as Eolans have colonized other planets, some life forms from other planets have immigrated to Eolo. The hkane from Lauset and the gaun from the moon Chaloran are the species that have come to Eolo in the greatest numbers.

Culture

Though there's less overt backstabbing now among Eolo's spacefaring nations as there was during the early days of the Planetary Age, there's still a good deal of competition over the resources the other planets have to offer, and over the colonization of the parts remaining unsettled, and espionage and sabotage are rampant, though kept as quiet as possible. On many Eolan colonies elsewhere in the system themselves, a frontier attitude prevails, with a thin veneer of order over a fundamental lawlessness.

While Poesism doesn't exercise the near-strangehold over magical development that it once did, its effects can still be seen in some aspects of Eolan society. The influence that artists gained through the movement they have not fully relinquished; respected artists wield considerable social and political power, and the most renowned artists are as powerful as major heads of state. "Colleges" of like-minded artists organize to combine their members' influence and jointly work to bring about their ends; some of the most successful colleges are real forces to be reckoned with in the sociopolitical arena. Another vestige of Poesism is the prevalence on Eolo of magical paintings and sculptures and other objets d'art. Such pieces remain popular no doubt at least in part because they serve as an unconscious reminder of the synergy that ended the tyranny of Poesism, and a safeguard against its recurrence.

Magic

The most common system of magic on Eolo is the same Narlovian magic common to many other magical worlds of Xi. This arcanum is divided into fourteen arts, of which the translocational is perhaps the most developed on Eolo, relative to other worlds.

One form of magic that seems to be unique to Eolo is planetary magic, which draws somehow on the ambient magic surrounding the planets themselves. Attunement to a particular planet requires a physical visit to it. However, planetary magic works best when the planet one is using is distant, and is at its weakest when one is actually on that planet, so planetary mages never focus on the planets where they reside. (This also explains why planetary magic was not developed until after travel to other planets became common.) One more specific subarcanum of planetary magic is the rather quirkily-named moonsmagic, which draws specifically on the relationships between the ambient magics of the moons of Alen (and which in contrast to normal planetary magic does not require the practitioner to have actually visited those moons). Presumably a similar arcanum could be devised utilizing the relationship between any collection of immagiated worlds, but it would require considerable work to do so.