Lnnai

Lnnai (pronounced /ləˈnaɪ/) is the Norgan capital world of Er, goddess of death. Befitting this association, much of the world is taken up by cemeteries and sepulchers, where the dead from all over the empire are interred. This isn't to say, however, that Lnnai has no living inhabitants. It of course houses the headquarters of the church of Er, as well as the workers who maintain the cemeteries, but it is also home to large numbers of (living) people with no direct connection to either of these establishments. More so than the living, though, Lnnai is inhabited by the undead—according to some estimates, the undead outnumber the living on Lnnai by a margin of as many as six to one. For the most part, these undead fill the same roles in Lnnaian society as the living; they run shops, work at trades, provide services. However, because the undead require less upkeep than the living (they require no food, for one thing, and often demand less living space), they often can get by with less work, which some of the world's living residents resent.

Geography

Lnnai's two sides are very different, and it is the side called Ter Qadh that is the one most people visualize when thinking of the world. Specifically, the usual image of Lnnai's surface is that of a vast cemetery, an endless expanse of seriate gravestones, broken by the occasional marmoreal tomb. Not all of Ter Qadh fits that description, but certainly much of it does; most of the plains, praries, and deserts, in particular, really are as packed with polystichous headstones as is commonly imagined. In the forests and mountains, where the terrain lends itself less well to such a layout, there are nevertheless graves, although more irregularly arranged and more imaginatively marked. Even the glaciers of the far polar regions bear graves, the bodies themselves visible through the translucent ice. There remain a few spots of Lnnai, swamps and jungles mostly where gravesites are difficult to dig (though not impossible—there are cemeteries in the swamps and jungles as well, just not in all of them).

Ter Qadh's living inhabitants, of course, don't just camp among the cemeteries; there are certainly cities and other settlements on the world. However, most of them might not be obvious as such to a casual observer, bearing a closer resemblance to a mausoleum complex or a necropolis than to a conventional, populated city. Entire towns lie within what look like crypts, their interiors much larger than their outside dimensions. Others live underground; in an inversion of the situation in other worlds where the dead are often interred in undercrofts beneath churches and manors, in Lnnai often the living occupy tunnel complexes underneath cemeteries left to the dead. (The underground is not the exclusive domain of the living, however; many tunnels serve as catacombs as well.)

The other side of Lnnai, Ter Bol, is a somewhat poorer match to the traditional image. Ter Bol is mostly covered byocean, with a few mountainous islands breaking the water's surface. These islands are mostly metallic, primarily of dense metals such as lead, though there is enough soil to support some plant life. Like the land of Ter Qadh, the islands of Ter Bol are mostly covered with graves, though given the difficulty of excavating in the metal a large proportion of the gravesites are actually aboveground tombs and cairns.

Life

Except perhaps for Axa, Lnnai has the smallest living population of any of the capital worlds. However, it has by far the largest population of undead, which more than make up for this and put its total population on par with that of Meed or Chee. Both the living and the undead of Lnnai come from all the races that populate Norg, though the most common among the Lnnaian population are humans, firassyn, glashans, atipong, and selekanen. Of course, many of these citizens are no longer normal members of their original races, but have become Erites.

Because of its watery side, aside from Thaior Lnnai has the largest underwater population of the capital worlds, although this is a bit of a cheat since many of those inhabitants are undead who would be at least as comfortable on land. Still, a few aquatic races do call Lnnai home, including peshrocks, basarias, and ylyysts. These individuals are as likely as their terrestrial counterparts to be undead, Erites, or both.

Lacking the heavy urbanization of most of the capital worlds, Lnnai retains a thriving abundance of wildlife. Among the gravestones in the fields still roam great grazing animals; the forests still teem with life of all kinds; the oceans hide a huge variety of organisms. Of course, many panyparic life forms are found on Lnnai, as are many other panasteric life forms found throughout Piobagh. But Lnnai also has some life forms of its own not apparently natively found elsewhere. Herds of shaggy volgines frequently knock over tombstones, which many of Lnnai's residents are employed to replace. The sky is often blackened with enormous flocks of dllagans. In the oceans of Ter Bol swim tiny daidghans and huge billowfish.

Government

Formally, Lnnai's living and undead populations are treated in many ways as completely separate political bodies, with separate rulers. The ruler of the former is the Lord of the Living, often known colloquially as the Daylord; his counterpart the Lord of the Dead is similarly called the Nightlord. The current Lord of the Living is a human Erite named Ishivadi Dasovar. The position of Lord of the Dead is held by a selekane hehkuva named Eoa Iada Iinara.

In practice, there is often overlap between the jurisdictions of the Lords of the Living and of the Dead. Each is empowered to deal with matters solely concerning inhabitants falling under their bailiwicks, but often matters arise that will affect both the living and the undead, such as decisions about the development of a territory. The Two Lords generally work together to hammer out a compromise in such affairs, but if this proves impossible they may appeal to the archprelate of Er, who officially has the ultimate authority over Lnnai's government anyway. The current archprelate, a gastworn Erite named Thousand, follows the precedent set by his predecessors of the last few centuries in concerning himself primarily with religious matters and not taking a hand in the secular operations of the world except when the Two Lords request that he do so.

The division between the living and the undead continues at lower administrative levels. The government of the living is split into 124 sectors, each overseen by a viceroy who reports to the Lord of the Living. Each sector is in turn segmented into a number of divisions. The government of the undead, on the other hand, partitions the world into 170 dioceses, each ruled by an undead exarch subject to the Lord of the Dead, and each in turn divided into a number of yards. There is no particular correlation between the borders of the sectors and the dioceses; a sector may overlap several dioceses, and vice versa.

Economy

Lnnai's most notorious source of income is burial plots and funeral services. Citizens from all over Norg want the prestige associated with interment on the World of Death. So popular are Lnnaian burial plots that one past archprelate became concerned that with so much space going to the graves of paid customers, eventually there may not be enough left for those of the faithful of Er, who were the ones that (in his opinion) really merited being located there. He seriously considered passing an edict that only those in the upper echelons of the church of Er could be intered on Lnnai, but ultimately assented to a compromise in which anyone could be buried on Lnnai, but with the understanding that their remains may be removed and relocated elsewhere if it became necessary to make room for the burial of an Eran hierarch.

In practice, this contingency never came into play, for several reasons. For one, many if not most of those highly positioned in the Church of Lnnai pass into undeath, and therefore don't require burial plots. Furthermore, it became increasingly the case that the available space for graves was not limited to Lnnai's land surface. Underground crypts run several layers deep all over Lnnai, and more are still being excavated. Interments beneath the surface of the ocean have become increasingly frequent—indeed, now more than eight percent of Lnnai's ocean floors are occupied by submarine cemeteries, still leaving plenty of room for further expansion there. Another major factor in increasing the available space on Lnnai was the increasing use of multum in parvo; it's quite common now for mausoleums to be far larger on the inside than the space taken up by their exteriors.

While graves and funerals may be what Lnnai is best known for, the World of Death has other exports. The world is relatively rich in mineral wealth, especially the metallic mountains of Ter Bol—and when a mine is played out, it can then be turned into a catacomb or into living space for the world's living inhabitants. Many of the world's undead inhabitants in particular have plenty of time to perfect crafts and magical techniques, generating a good supply of trade goods and talismans that can be sold to other worlds. Some of Lnnai's wildlife provides other export opportunities: rare dyes from some native insects and mollusks; herbs with alchemical or medicinal properties; spices, scents, and other compounds extracted from its flora and fauna.