Armaidan

The Armaidans, sometimes referred to as the 'Old Armaidans' to distinguish from their descendants in the Sunscald, were the people of the Armaidan Empire, one of the great 'arcanist empires' of antiquity. The Armaidans boasted the largest empire in the history of the known world, covering much of the interior Sunscald and what is now the Great Fissure. The people had strong agricultural and mercantile traditions, creating thriving communities in the interior's formerly fertile riverways. They were also strongly associated with arcanist magic and artifacts, which were seemingly omnipresent in core Armaidan territory. Though they were largely limited to the interior of Sunscald, they established small colonies in areas such as Medaris for the purposes of acquiring rare and exotic resources.
Following the arcanist disaster that destroyed the Armaidan Empire, the surviving Armaidans fled the resulting Great Fissure, with many arriving at the surviving colony of Medaris on the northern Sunscald coast. Armaidan refugees were extremely culturally influential in the Sunscald, and expanded across most of the region's north. Armaidan cultural influence is still heavily felt in the Sunscald today, with their old cultural institutions often existing in some form in most modern Sunscaldic city states. Some in the northern Sunscald consider the region's modern Armaidan-descended populations a direct continuation of the Imperial Armaidans, while others consider these populations to be distinct enough to describe them as Nearmaidan, or 'New Armaidan'. Others still take a more regionalist approach to the modern Sunscald, claiming that the 'Armaidan' population has since diverged into distinct cultures congruous with modern city states, for example splitting the peoples of Medaris and Argyria into Medarians and Argyrians rather than (Ne)/Armaidans.