Autumn Isles
The Autumn Isles (enari name: Ar-Shau) are a group of islands to the far Corewest of the Broken Empire, named for the forests that cover it, populated by a strange species of tree that remains red-coloured Cycle-round, save for winter years. It is populated by a small but stable population of enari.
It's astoundingly easy to get lost in the islands' many mixed forests, and the local flora seems to carry no nutrition, as if one just ate parchment; as such outsiders have observed very little about their settlements inside these vast, eerily silent perimeters. Additionally frightening for tresspassers is being stalked the local enari rangers, clad in ghost-like landcrab carapace armour. These silent scouts never attack tresspassers, and have likely never needed to: the forests never fail to ingest or spit out the intruders.
Autumn Islanders speak a language known as Shau, a dialect of historical Enari. They are not known to speak Middish Common or any other human trader tongue, making diplomacy with mainlanders all the more difficult.Geography
Description
See also: Image Gallery: Fashion & Scenery of the Autumn Isles (External)The Autumn Isles are a generally alpine and subalpine combination of steppes, forests and mountains. As the climate cools Coreward towards The Sunken Expanse, forests change from mixed deciduous-coniferous to purely coniferous. In both regions, the islands get their name from a unique species of aspen whose leaves are red in all seasons save winter.
Society
Much of what is known about the Autumn Islanders is from field reports of expeditionary scouts of the the Great Juran Empire (likely to gauge whether enari had any objection to their occupation of the mainlands). The islands are far enough from mainland Gondara that the intervening ocean is at high risk of kaiju attacks and other paranormal, Duskscape-based phenomena. Reaching the smaller archipelago requires a great deal of skill and as much luck as Shauku offers.
Occasional survivors of the trip there-and-back bring stories of being stalked through oddly red forests by ghostly humanoids in white, landcrab-carapace armour. They're almost never killed by the locals (though they certainly aren't welcomed either). Instead the outsiders simply don't make progress through the forests and can find little nutrition from the unusual flora, so they must eventually give up and return. There are stories of the enari rescuing and adopting cast-aways, though they are not well-corroborated. No expeditions have succeeded in finding signs of those who previously disappeared.Sample Names
Masculine: Rhys, Eru, Shin, Shu, Sei, Inum, Vryn, OroFeminine: Eha, Aura, Rem, Niu, Illu, Sae, Siv
Traveling Enari
What few enari do decide to repatriate to the Broken Empire are generally treated with suspicion by the locals. This is especially true for Gondaran humans, who believe enari women only take humanoid form when they've shed their seal skins, in order to kidnap and enslave human men for their undersea harems. (This 'seal woman' myth bears some resemblance to the bard goddess Laila By-the-Sea, though she was not known to be interested in harems or kidnapping.) Traveling enari often avoid this by pretending to be particularly pale eladrin from Ilhalvalaut. They're famously tight-lipped about their home nation in the distant seas, though some have told of vast sylvan libraries and unusually large animals ('elder spirits') able to speak humanoid tongues.
Ar-Shau
The Autumn Isles
Quadrant
Gamma
Location
The Broken Empire, peripheries
Population
Unknown
Established
Unknown; ancient
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