A travellers guide
This world, Iphars, is finally changing. It crashed with our Ashtara, who's magic swept into Iphars. It now shall have to learn and survive this "new" strange powers. Let's see if their false gods will protect them from this...
Iphars is a world of change; of devastation and recovery. Its has been recently gifted with magic and now, its lands are changing and evolving, and its inhabitants are fighting to adapt and survive, learning this power called magic and outsmarting the changes of the worlds to avoid extinction.
As a second world, named Asthara, crashed into Iphars, new people started appearing around the globe, bringing new gods and cultures, wishing to claim land as their new home. With them, also came land from the other world, which most stayed floating yet some fell.
The strange power of magic wasn't as strange for Ashtarians than for Ipharians, but they quickly realized that the magic they once knew was changed in this new world of Iphars, making their magical technology useless and turning their tamed magic into a chaotic power they weren't able to control.
As if the changes weren't enough, portals started appearing and disappearing scattered across the land. These unstable portals gave hope of finding back home to Ashtarians, yet the instability of them made them impossible to predict and thus turned them more dangerous than anything.
The world
Branul is one of the continents, which has islands around its coasts, some of which became floating islands. It is a diverse land, filled with tundras and grasslands, mountains and cave systems, and water and lava bodies.
It is home to nine countries that constantly fight for territory on the underground caves. The people tend to stick to traditions and values, and hold quarrels that last generations and love keeping history alive. Religion is strong in Branul, which justs gives people even more reasons to fight each other, yet if you asked, people will claim they don't like war. Lava powered technology has been lately developed.
Emea is another of the continents, filled with mountains, swamps, forests, and lakes. Its chaotic surface and coastline have done nothing but worsen after Ashtara crashed into Iphars, which also lead to revealing new entrances to the massive cave systems under the continent.
Its people tend to be looking towards new things, new experiences, but when pieces of Ashtara fell onto its land or stayed afloat over their heads, welcomness was not part of their vocabulary and instead a fight to keep the old started.
Izura used to be a big archipelago with big islands, but after the crash, these islands have been quickly separating each other, forming many new smaller islands, and changing. These islands are cold, mostly covered in boreal forest and tundras.
The people in the islands are in a constant state of adapting and surviving the changes in the islands. This holds little space for other things, but they take it to quarrel with each other over the ownership of the broken islands and new ones. They don't like ousiders, be from the rest of the world or from other worlds; they have their hands full already with dealing with each other.
Kliras is a small archipelago brimming with life and nature. Its islands are fully covered in jungles, and most of them have a volcano at their heart. This beautiful place affronts devastation as the inactive volcanos became alive once more after the crash.
The people of Kliras are very warm and welcoming, and try bothering nature as less as possible when living. They had to learn to control nature quickly to protect their homes and all the life that are found in the islands, as the crash caused lots of violent forces of nature start appearing around the islands.
Adea is but a ghost of the beautiful land it used to be in Ashtara before the crash. Looking around, one can now mainly see ruins, wastelands, and husks of places that used to hold life. Its shape in Iphars is not even stable yet, it had much more territory when it crashed but pieces of land keep breaking and falling as time passes.
Its people are in crisis. Their once powerful civilization rendered nothing. Their power of magic taken and reshaped in a way that they do not know how to use it anymore. Panic and fear is smelt everywhere, and wishes of being back home are said around each corner.
Outer space
Iphars has two suns, a bright yellow big one, Gaes, and a muted white small one, Zaul. They dance around each other, and the small one disappears of the sky for two months each year.
The world also have four satellites. 3 of the satellites are natural moons that have always been there, yet one of them appeared around the same time of Ashtara's crash.
Out there, somewhere, there is also Ashtara, the home planet of the Ashtarians. About 50ish years ago, the planet partially started crossing portals that made it crash with Iphars, leaving the planet destroyed.
Once a beautiful planet, it started suffering changes about a 100 years ago that changed the world, but the worse happened about 55 years ago, when the world started crossing portals, piece by piece. The remains of the planet are now pieces of land floating where the planet once was, still orbiting its sun and staying together by magic alone.
Most, but not all, of the Ashtarians that escaped to Iphars through portals are now living in Adea, unaware of the fate their planet suffered and wishing constantly to return home.
Magic
Iphars magic used to be tricks that played with illusions and the perspective of the viewers, nothing real. That was until the crash of Ashtara. When portals opened in the sky, spewing land, creatures, and gods know what else, magic was part of it. It quickly expanded around the world and started changing things and giving magical propieties to things or creatures that didn't have it before.
Ipharians are curious about this strange new power, it opens the natural limits they used to have, allowing (for example) the creation of lava-powered machines. Ashtarians, on the other side, feel betrayed by the magic, as it is quite different that the magic they once knew.
The dawn of magic
Also known as the "crashing" or the "end of the world" by the Ashtarians, the dawn of magic is an event that happened around 50 years ago in Iphars. It was the end of a world and the start of a new one. The event itself didn't do a lot of changes on Iphars, but started a lot of year long processes that started changing the world.
In Ashtaria, the "end of the world" started much longer ago, around a 100 years ago. It lasted for many decades and the world was changing towards destruction more than anything else. It is unsure when it was considered to end (if it even ended), as Ashtarians have no idea what was the fate of their world, but another big part of it was that all that ended up falling into Iphars spent many years on a nothingness before portals throw them into Iphars.
Portals
Portals started appearing in Iphars after the dawn of magic, it was one of the consequences of it. They were the entrance to Iphars for Ashtarians and their land.
Portals in Iphars are extremely dangerous and unstable, one can never know when they open or close and where they lead. There hasn't been found a way of controlling them and thus aren't used for the most part. Many accidents have happened with portals, even some loses of extremities or lifes while trying to cross them.
Even after knowing how dangerous they are, this hasn't stopped people to try and learn how to use them (with hopes to control them eventually). These, so called, Portalhoppers hunt down portals, take notes of everything they can, and if the portal is still open, they try crossing it and returning as fast as they can. They believe crossing portals and learning about them will be the key to eventually be able to use them safely.
People
Iphars holds two groups of people living in itself: ashtarians and ipharians.
Ipharians are the original inhabitants of Iphars, who have appeared and evolved with the world. As much as they evolved with the world, they also changed it to benefit their own needs, making themselves believe the owners of the world and its rulers.
Ashtarians are new to Iphars. Originally from Ashtara, they now found themselves in a strange world with next to nothing on their name, and need to either fight or pact with the world's inhabitants for ownership of some land or acceptance in their towns.
Gods and religions
Gods and religions are a common thing across both worlds, but they are quite different between Ipharians and Ashtarians.
Ipharians' have many gods and religions, many of them have the same concept for a god yet they are different as the religion is different, and their existance have never been proved.
Ashtarian gods, on the other side, are fewer in number yet their existance have been proved many times; religions are still diverse and try appeasing gods in different ways.
Calendar
While Iphars is very diverse and with a lot of different cultures which their own calendars, for the last few hundred years it has had a general calendar to make things easier although some cultures still use their own calendar and have this general one as secondary. It is based on Iphars' three moons.
A year is 211 days long and has 11 months of 19 days; the year follows the Naero, the biggest moon of Iphars. Every month follows the rotation of Igur and is divided into 3 weeks, the 2 first weeks are 7 days long, while the last week is 5 days long. The days are 16 hours long, with 6 hours of light, 9 hours of darkness, and an hour for the sunset and sunrise.
Every 5 years, there is a leap month of 10 days (with 2 weeks of 5 days each). This leap month is caused because the rotation of Naero is not aligned with the seasons that the suns create, and every 5 years the difference of the season marked on the calendar and the real season is too big to be overlooked at, so at the start of the year a month is added (matching the big, 10 days long, eclipse's season that also happens every 5 years), named Centhas.
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