Ranthis

Ranthis (pronounced /ˈræn.θᵻs/) is a world in the layer of Tutun in the cosmos of Oocada. Among its most distinctive features are the canals that permeate its land and its extensive underfold.

The usual gentilic adjective is "Ranthine" (/ˈræn.θaɪn/ or /ˈræn.θin/).

Geography

The surface of Ranthis is topologically equivalent to a 3-fougasse. Most of the land surface of Ranthis is connected into one supercontinent, though it's still customarily divided into seven separate continents by mountain ranges, isthmi, and other prominent geographical features. Ranthis's second largest land mass, Yanther, is much smaller than the supercontinent but still large enough to be usually considered an eighth continent.

Discounting inland bodies of water the size of the Sea of Reeds or smaller, the supercontinent is topologically equivalent to a 3-lace. (It is nonplanar, however, so a bedunic map is not possible without overlaps.) The same is true of the ocean—ignoring Yanther and smaller islands, the oceans of Ranthis are collectively topologically equivalent to a 3-lace (but not a 3-avalone) as well. In fact, the supercontinent and the superocean are each 2-3-laces, which means that there are two separate boundaries between them—two discrete coastlines. These two coasts are sometimes called the Red Coast and the Great Coast, the former being much shorter than the latter.

The largest of Ranthis's conventional continents (and the one with the greatest curvature) is Qendis, though it's also the most sparsely populated, being mostly jungle, desert, and swamp, the last of these primarily surrounding Calabaya Bay. The two continents that occupy central places in most Ranthine maps are Zumbyn and Guldal, both smaller than Qendis but more densely populated. Zumbyn has earned its cartographical centricality by dint of its being home to some of the most powerful modern nations, Guldal primarily by the fact that it was the birthplace of the famous Anra Empire. Connected to all three of Guldal, Qendis, and Zumbyn is the mountainous continent of Kare. Guldal also connects to Zumbyn through the continent of Jinthi, and Qendis, Kare, and Zumbyn all border the continent of Ao. The last continent, Hiagal, is a peninsula connected only to Qendis.

The boundaries of the oceans are as arbitrary as those of the continents, but there are five main oceans by most reckonings, most of their maritime marches held to lie along the mean paths of the suns. The sea with the most obvious borders is the Green Sea, defined by the extent of the almost unbroken algous matting that covers it—which, despite the name, is as much brown or yellow as it is green. Terrestrial varieties of these reets collectively called drywrack even spread over adject parts of the continents the tardle touches, Hiagal, Qendis, and Yanther; those areas are sometimes accordingly, despite their nonmarine nature, considered to pertain to the Green Sea. Alternatively, or in addition to being thought of as part of the Green Sea, these regions may be oxymoronically called the Landsea.

While it touches fewer continents than any other oceans, the Green Sea is unique in bordering every other ocean. Of the other oceans, the largest is the Old Sea, which borders every continent but Jinthi, and the smallest of the five is the Risnar Ocean, which touches five of the eight continents, missing Guldal, Hiagal, and Qendis. The Old Sea is one of only two oceans to border the Red Coast, the other being the Tomesaga, which also borders every continent but Ao and Kare. (Neither of these oceans, however, touches only the Red Coast; they each bound with both coasts.) The fifth ocean, the Alyyn, is the only one not to touch Yanther; it does, however, touch every continent except Yanther.

The underfold of Ranthis is vast and anfractuous, and its full extent is unknown. Like the world's surface, it is locally close to flat, but its passages and chambers join up in ways that demonstrate that on the large scale it cannot be realmar, though the details of its topology remain unclear. There have been rumors of people delving into the underfold and emerging to find themselves on the surface of another world entirely. While it's not impossible that the underfold does connect multiple worlds, most hadologists regard this as unproven.

Maps and directions

Like most worlds of Oocada, Ranthis is typically mapped using a tononic projection. While this projection does inevitably distort the areas, the most common map of Ranthis, the Ulin map, is arranged so that the largest distortions occur in the oceans and most of the land is roughly isographic—the most disproportionate land areas being the sparsely populated Qendis and the most alpestrious parts of Kare.

Because the Ulin map places the oceans on most of the boundaries and makes it difficult to see how they connect, sailors and seafarers prefer to use a maritime map that shows the oceans as connected and breaks up the continents. The most commonly used maritime map is the reaver's map, after a perhaps apocryphal notion that it was first developed by pirates; it places the island continent of Yanther in a central position.

Directions on Ranthis are usually given in terms of nonglobal coordinates. Specifically, a polar coordinate system is usually used, but with a different origin and polar axis for each continent. The center of the coordinate system is not necessarily the geographical center of the continent, but some notable landmark or point of historical significance. There are in fact multiple points on each continent that are used as the origins of the coordinates by different cultures and organizations, but on every continent except Ao there is one that clearly predominates. Locations in the oceans are usually specified using the coordinate system of the nearest continent, though some tarpaulians use other systems, the most common being a simple rectangular coordinate system superimposed on the reaver's map, with the origin at the center of Yanther.

Astronomy

Given the geometry of the space within which Ranthis lies, each of its suns is visible only from a relatively small area at a time. Nevertheless, any given point in most of Ranthis does experience roughly equal amounts of day and night, due to the fact that the suns move not singly, but in long trains called sungangs, each containing a few dozen suns that proceed in sequence along the same path. While any given sun may therefore illuminate a particular area for only a relatively short amount of time, the sungang as a whole is in the sky over the area for roughly half the time.

There are three sungangs that move above the surface of Ranthis, between them passing over every continent. Arbis Dagi transects Guldal before crossing over the Alyyn Ocean to Jirithi; it then follows (and indeed defines) the frontier between the Alyyn and the Risnar before crossing over Ao and Qendis, passing briefly over the Alyyn again, and then crossing Hiagal. It finally overtraces the border between the Old Sea and the Tomesaga before completing its circuit. Arbis Felny traverses Zumbyn, then skirts between the Old Sea and the Tomesaga to Yanther, then between the Old Sea and the Risnar before overspanning Kare and returning to Zumbyn after a brief passage over an embayment of the Alyyn. Finally, the Green Suns are so called not because of their own hue but because most of their path lies over the Green Sea. The sungangs of Ranthis are close enough together that it lacks the extensive intersolar zones of many other worlds of Tutun, though there are a few places far enough from the suns—notably the Fields of Frost between Ao and Zumbyn, the White Coast on the Tomesagan shore of Hiagal, and the centers of the oceans—to approach or attain a pageric climate.

In addition to the sungangs, there are four solitary suns. Three of these, Gargis, Yulji, and Iryal, follow fixed paths over Ranthis's surface. The fourth, Athi, is a wandering sun with a path that appears to be entirely unpredictable.

Along with many local moons and stars, Ranthis has two broad moons visible over many parts of the world (though not at the same time): the large red moon Ulis and the smaller blue Beho.

Time

Both the day and the year on Ranthis are defined by the sungangs—the day by the time it takes for the sungang to make a complete circuit around its path, and the year by the period of its circumition. This is complicated, however, by the fact that each sungang has different periods. Fortuitously, each continent except unpopulous Qendis has exactly one sungang passing over it, so the inhabitants of that continent base their calendars and clocks on that sungang. This means there are two systems of timekeeping in common use: most people of Guldal, Ao, Jirithi, and Hiagal use Imperial time, based on Arbis Dagi, and most people of Zumbyn, Kare, and Yanther use Colonial time, based on Arbis Felny. There is a third time system based on the Green Suns, the Tunukudia, but it is much less widespread and less important on the global scale, though it is used by those living in or near Calabaya Bay.

Social structure

Although Ranthis has gone through several imperial ages in the past, today it has no large empires, but hundreds of independent sovereign states. The largest of these states, Juiestan, does retain a few colonies and is the closest thing to an empire to currently exist. A few areas, including most of Qendis and large parts of Kare, remain unclaimed by any nation.

Divers forms of government are represented among Ranthis's nations, from democracies like Hohalle and Zilasia to despotisms like Roseland and Aarch. The states with the most unusual systems of government are perhaps Ailomar, a necrocracy ruled by a detic cone of skulls; Zex, a nominal lestarchy, ruled by pirates; and Hygon, where the ruler is elected but the results of the election—and the ruler's identity—are kept secret.

One of Ranthis's most unusual features is its preponderance of canals. Canals filled with flowing water mostly take the place of roads on this world, connecting the cities and serving as the chief conduits for long-distance travel. That travel is done not with wagons, but with barges and other boats, some magically propelled, some powered by sails or oars, but most towed by jowlworms, hippocamps, or other aquatic creatures. Even within most of the cities and other settlements, canals run between the buildings and squares, and townspeople get about in low batelles, passing beneath the frequent bridges that facilitate pedestrian traffic. While some areas had made use of canals long before, it was the Anra Empire that really popularized and standardized them, and it was through the empire's influence that they became as widespread as they are today.

Ranthis is also home to a prevailant and pervasive monial tradition, with at least a dozen powerful monastic orders having significant sway there. This was apparently precipitated by the establishment of a single monastery in the Lurlon Mountains, the Temple of the Hand, which by its works inspired others to form similar organizations. Since that beginning, however, the various orders have diverged and developed along different lines, and in some cases formed amarulent rivalries. While only in the nations of Zi and Olecho do the monastic orders have any official political power, they do in many places exert considerable unofficial influence.

Life

In addition to the expected complement of panasteric life forms, Ranthis has an unusual diversity of terrestrial ctenophores, as well as of habeliids, a clade of arthropods long extinct on Earth. Some notable groups of Ranthine creatures that were never found on Earth include the larphs, a diverse order of mostly terrestrial, trunked holosteans; the uqas, a phylum of protostomes distinguished, among other factors, by their fibrous, flattened endoskeletons; and the jomar, flying creatures with eyes on their bellies. There are also, of course, many noteworthy creatures of Ranthis not associated with these groups, such as the slime stork, the saltigrade squiss, the amadelphous levinkine, and the diaphanous melucrane.

The oceans, of course, have their own complement of marine life, of which maybe the most notable monosteric or oligosteric creatures include the orcbirds, the elrens, and the schnecks. Perhaps more surprisingly, the extensive canals have life and ecosystems of their own, the extreme fersion of many of the canals allowing them to harbor much larger creatures than their external widths would seem to indicate. Among these solenian hydrobiota are the teuthidoid larlars; the plesiosauroid harwicks; and the intangible, glowing allawigs. Given the relatively short amount of time the canals have been in existence, it's unclear for most of these organisms whether they were artificially created, whether they are the result of magically accelerated evolution, or whether they originated elsewhere and adventitiously spread through the canal systems.

Ranthis is also notable for having a much more extensive and densely populated underfold than most worlds of Tutun. Some of the best known of the fauna of the Ranthine underfold are the (superficially) spiderlike tistin, the doridine zeurl, and the serpentine ribwalker. The underfold also has its own flora, some deriving their sustenance in this lightless environment by absorbing energy from the radiation of crackstones, others from nutrients carried from the surface by chthonic currents. One unusual but significant trophic source of Ranthis's underfold is the exemox, immense torpulent undead beings of unknown origin whose continually regenerating flesh feeds legions of detrivores that in turn provide energy to other organisms. In any case, all these sources support myriad fungi and lichens and even some true plants despite the lack of sunlight in the subterrany.

Ellogous folk

The dominant folk of Ranthis's surface is the human, though several other ellogous species exist. Next to humans, the best known of the terrestrial folks of Ranthis are the lemurlike mocock, the isopterous garamute, and the monoculate thech. Few communities on Ranthis, however, are well integrated between folks. Most settlements are populated mostly if not entirely by a single folk; if there are any individuals of other folks present, they usually make up only one percent or less of the population, and are typically scattered around the settlement trying to fit in as best they can, though a few of the larger cities do have enclaves where folks otherwise in the minority dominate and form their own communities.

Though there are some humans who eke out a subterranean existence, the dominant folk of the underfold is the kyik, a species of strange, segmented beings made up of large, ellogous colonies of archaeans enclosed in a stony exoskeleton. Other subterranean folk include the tusked lorlen, the sinuous eleen, and the fungoid kalj. The oceans are inhabited by folks such as the crustacean heelah, the leptic moril, and the daletate quith. Even the canals have their own ellogous life, including algal towudi and blue-green barasias.

History

There are at least three places on Ranthis where cities and civilization seem to have arisen independently. These cradles of civilization include the Shell River watershed near the Tomesaga coast of Jirithi, where the ancient civilization of Tsu arose; the northern shore of the Sea of Reeds in Ao, birthplace of the city-states of Dukumi; and the edge of Qendis between Kare and Calabaya Bay, where the culture of Ixiojo first formed. Each of these three ancient civilizations, or their descendants, left their marks. Tsu and its inheritors are notable for their innovations in mathematics and technology. The successors of Dukumi created the first canals that would be the precursors of and inspiration for the far more extensive modern canal system. Ixiojo made remarkable achievements in magic, especially fersion, and the hidden mysteries of their fersive islands in the Calabaya Bay are still being explored today.

Though many other civilizations rose and fell in the following millennia, it was about three thousand years ago that arguably the most famous empire of Ranthis's history came onto the scene. The Anra Empire was not the largest empire ever to exist on Ranthis—both the earlier Uphadi and the later Zeňýa exceeded it in area—but it was perhaps the most influential, with many later cultures appropriating Anran customs and philosophies, and borrowing many words from Yala, the Anran empire's official language. Even today, in most languages many placenames are cognate to the Yala names used in Anra, including the modern names of all the continents except Hiagal. As mentioned above, it was the Anra Empire, too, that expanded the limited canal transportation system pioneered by Dukumi, and constructed canals over most of the world.

The Temple of the Hand was founded two thousand years ago, though there are contradictory accounts of the nationalities of its founders, and some historians believe those founders may have been of extramundane origin. The monks of the Temple of the Hand developed a reputation as champions of justice and reform, and inspired others to found similar organizations. The rise of the monastic traditions coincided with a worldwide decline in imperialism, though there's some debate as to whether these two trends had any causal relationship.

Magic

The use of magic is common enough on Ranthis that nearly everyone knows at least a few simple spells. Historically, the form of magic most widely and consistently practiced on Ranthis has been shincraft, to the extent that when an inhabitant of Ranthis speaks of magic without further specification, it is generally shincraft that is meant. In earlier times, various entailments were in customary use, including song, dance, and sigils; nowadays, most shinners eschew any such entailments. Poppetry is also well known on Ranthis, but nowadays is usually seen as an isagogical arcanum, suitable primarily for young children first learning magic—somewhat unjustly so, since a skilled poppeter can be a match for any other sort of mage. Formerly, agriurgy was also commonplace in Ranthis, but its use has declined over time; conversely, since the Anran era the practice of channeling has grown more frequent, perhaps metaphorically inspired by the motion of the canals.

The ubiquitous canals serve a purpose beyond facilitating transportation—the constant flow of water through the canals sets up a sympathetic resonance that makes alchory especially potent on Ranthis, and gives rise to many new frikes that mimic the canals' paths. The practice of alchory is accordingly very common on this world, both gestically and through chamulcar devices of intricate clockwork that moves components in the proper paths. Alchemy is another form of paracarminical magic widely practiced on Ranthis, perhaps also inspired by the presence of the liquid-filled canals, but it's not nearly as omnipresent as alchory. Even a poor commoner on Ranthis is likely to know a few simple gests, but alchemy remains the province of specialists.