Terra Incognita

Myths are too grand for our day-to-day World. Where legends describe nigh-unattainable virtues, suggest Platonic Forms, or otherwise evoke the transcendental, they create the Overworld, filled with realms where the Gods who honor and embody these things reign. Where tales talk of impurity, dissolution, final catharsis, and death, they conjure the Underworld, with its gloomy rivers, shades and morbid divinities. These heights and depths are seductive, and might draw our attention away from The World of balance, flesh, ecosystems, and nations, where life is messy, complicated, and filled with mortal complaints. Yet Gods live in The World, too, and not just young Scions questing for their heritage. Entire pantheons either live alongside humankind, or have made or found mythic folds on Earth, where they reign. Monsters have secret lairs; giants have homelands. They’re called Terra Incognita not because they’re truly unknown, but because they’re connected to the mysteries of legend.

LANDS OF THE WORLD

The World has the oceans, continents, and nations we know, but under the influence of meddling Gods, magic, and obscure, supernaturally twisted history, some of the deep details might be a bit different from what you’re familiar with. You may not know of certain sovereign states — mere dots on a map — that go unrecognized by the UN, but are well-known to many mystics and Scions. Some rivers take different courses, or sprout obscure tributaries. Any country might have whole cities you’ve never heard of, and that’s before getting into Terra Incognita.

HISTORY, SCIENCE, AND MYTH

The World has many histories. The World is a synthesis. The World is many creation myths and epics, collapsed and smoothed over by processes left for contemplation by the wisest Gods, or given to them by the Primordials. When scientists dig, they find flaked stone tools and pre-human hominid bones. When they study flesh and blood, they find mitochondria and DNA. The World’s speed of light is a constant, and its physicists search for ways to unite General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory.

Yet they know myths have standing. The fact that The World rests on the Great Turtle is literally true, but you can only perceive it from a certain point of view. From another such perspective, some humans are descended from bears. This is more than a state of mind. From the right point of view, you can get a glimpse of the shell mighty enough to hold mountains, or see the fanged skulls of ancestors. History follows similar patterns. Archeologists find flint axes and copper helmets from the Achaean period of Greek history, but not the “anachronistic” tripod prizes and other elements mentioned by Homer, unless they also fit conventional history.

MYTHIC BLEED

Even though everyone knows myths represent a certain mode of reality, and they may contradict The World mortals share in common, neither Gods nor mortals can conclusively prove that a strict set of laws separate them, or determine their precise relationship. Philosophers, mystics, priests, and scientists have expended considerable effort in mapping the borders, without success. Leaving aside ethnocentric conceits that one mythic tradition is closer to ultimate truth than the rest, the two basic positions either declare that the natural World is the root of mythic reality, or that it’s a degenerate version of mythic reality. It’s a weird mixture of many myths, or the sub-creation of some theoretical “monomyth” that sets the patterns for all Gods and legends. None of the arguments or experiments for any of it have proven convincing enough to create a consensus.

Mythic Bleed injures any attempt to separate myth and nature. Sometimes, an archeologist in Turkey finds Achilles’ helmet, and it looks nothing like anything else they dig up. Manticores stalk western Asia in defiance of evolution. Mythic Bleed may be partly responsible for Scions themselves, since most of them come from The World, and appear to be governed by mere nature until their divine sides rise. Sometimes Mythic Bleed represents migration from the Otherworlds or Terra Incognita, but in many cases, it’s always been around.

THE LANDS OF CHAINS

The Titans were imprisoned according to the myths of each pantheon, more or less. Gods lie, exaggerate, and omit inconvenient facts. There may be certain conditions the Titans’ prisons have in common, but there’s no single prison realm. The Titan ancestors of the Theoi are mostly imprisoned in the Underworld of Tartarus, beneath Hades, where their rage and suffering fuels the torments inflicted on the Shades of evil mortals. The Tuatha Dé Danann exiled Fomorians to a hidden underwater Midrealm. Even one pantheon may not condemn all their Titans to the same place, so Prometheus was spared Tartarus, so that he could be tortured in a Midrealm in the Caucasus Mountains until Heracles freed him.

The Titans’ prisons all have a few elements in common. They almost always possess powerful, implacable, and incorruptible guards. Their gates are rare and secured with sentinels and safeguards. They don’t connect to Touchstones, and Axes Mundi can’t reach them. No matter what form their restraints take, the Titans can’t break them unless they’ve already loosened them through their plots, or are aided by potent divine power.