Iphexar · The Planes
Midralis
The mortal realm. Shaped by four thousand years of catastrophe and recovery, of empires building over each other’s ruins, of a geography that still carries the scars of the event that remade it.
At a Glance
Primary Continent
Auridia
Four regions: Grandal, Lumér, Vasterien, Kält. Seat of the Concordiax and the Auridian Union.
Western Continent
Kyou
Home of the Hino Federation of States. Politically independent from Auridian institutional reach.
Third Landmass
The Veiled Continent
Concordiax designation: Caligoria. Reached but not sustained. Speaks Azaim. Actively unwelcoming to outside contact.
Separating Ocean
Azure Expanse
Atlantic-scale. Island chains thread through it. The crossing is viable if never easy. The Concordiax has been expanding its administrative reach over key ports.
Floating Landmasses
Ephyria
Prisma Current-sustained elevated formations drifting above Midralis. The largest lies near Kyou.
Subterranean World
Cimmerian Depths
Four descending levels. At the deepest, sub-seabed routes connect continents entirely outside any surface institution’s control.
Neo Midralis bears almost no geographic resemblance to Old Midralis. The Elemental Cataclysm remade it: continents shifted, oceans moved, and the scars of that violence remain legible in the landscape four thousand years later. Auridia’s climate does not follow predictable latitudinal patterns, a direct legacy of Cataclysm scarring that permanently disrupted normal geographic-climate relationships. The most temperate and productive regions are in the center of the continent, not at the equatorial latitudes one would expect. This is where civilization concentrated, and where the world’s dominant institutions were built.
Lumér
Central Auridia · Temperate Heartland · Seat of Power
The temperate heartland of Auridia and the seat of the world’s dominant political power. The densest concentration of Prisma Currents accessible from the surface runs through Lumér — the geographic fact that most directly explains where political and economic power has concentrated across four thousand years. More distinct sovereign states in a smaller area than anywhere else in Auridia, because Lumér’s abundance made it worth fighting over and its terrain made permanent conquest of the whole region effectively impossible.
Principality of Luminor
Central Lumér · Concordiax Seat · Matriarchal Monarchy
The most powerful member state of the Auridian Union. Luminor controls the primary navigable passage through Vasterien: a route that is partly natural, partly centuries of accumulated engineering, partly Prismaturgy-maintained infrastructure. This position, the last major temperate city before the desert, made it the economic chokepoint of Auridian north-south trade before it became the political center. The Concordiax was not built in Luminor because Luminor was powerful. Luminor became powerful because the Concordiax was built there.
Empire d’Olgère
Northwest Lumér · French-coded · Matriarchal Monarchy · Cultural Hegemon
A civilization of gold and blue — ornate cathedrals, cobblestone streets, rolling vineyards, misty meadows. Once a genuine maritime power; in the current era, the dominant cultural force in northwest Lumér. The empire is matriarchal, with La Reine de Lumière holding authority both political and spiritual. Behind the façade of elegance, the Clandestii, secret societies operating under the guise of loyalty, conduct the espionage that the court officially does not acknowledge and practically depends upon.
Kingdom of Glast
Northwest Lumér · UK-coded · Island and Mainland · Maritime Power
Occupies the Glast Isle plus a mainland strip giving it access to the Ironfold passes and Lumér trade. Its insularity shaped everything: the island made Glast effectively unconquerable by Olgère across centuries of proximity, and the experience of being surrounded by Olgèrian-controlled waters produced a maritime culture that treats the sea as both threat and opportunity. Glast and Olgère trace cultural origin to the same Norveni people and recognize the shared ancestry. Neither particularly likes what the other made of it.
Kingdom of Thar
Northeast Lumér · Germanic-Slavic coded · Geomantic tradition
Built at the intersection of Brown Prisma and Earth-expression Spiritual Echo: what Tharians call geomancy. Buildings shaped from stone rather than built upon it. Fields enriched through Prismatic working. Battlefield terrain used as a weapon. Three thousand years old and carrying a specific distrust of Dwarves that has calcified from historical grievance into cultural bedrock across two millennia.
Empire of Tafos
Northeast Lumér · Byzantine-coded · Imperial · Agricultural Hegemon
Controls the most fertile stretch of the Carath River valley: the agricultural engine of northeast Lumér. It does not need to conquer because it feeds people. Its leverage is economic and diplomatic: the most elaborate legal code in Auridia outside Luminor, centuries of administrative tradition, and a state church whose theological disputes are functionally political crises and vice versa. The Ageless Empire, its self-designation referring to the continuity of its bureaucracy across political changes.
Holy State of Kessahn
Southwest Lumér · Theocratic · Luminor Satellite
Exists because of what is beneath it: a pre-Cataclysm Place of Power of extraordinary Prismatic significance, where White and Black Hue Currents converge in a configuration not replicated elsewhere in Lumér. The theocratic state that developed around this site has managed access to it for centuries. Luminor made itself its military protector after the War of the Fallen Stars — in exchange, Kessahn acknowledges Luminor’s primacy.
Vorsene States
Northeast Lumér · Multi-ethnic Confederation · Compact-governed
A buffer zone between Thar and Tafos where displaced populations settled after the Galekian Empire’s collapse — communities with different languages, religions, and understandings of the territory they share. Held together by a formal compact whose survival across centuries owes less to trust than to the fact that Thar on one side and Tafos on the other make the alternative to cooperation obvious.
Zedd Lands
Southeast Lumér · Amber/Crimson · War of the Fallen Stars scar territory
What happens when a war does lasting damage to the substrate of reality rather than merely to the people and buildings on top of it. The War of the Fallen Stars left Prisma Currents flowing wrong here — in configurations the Guild’s standard protocols cannot reliably chart. The communities that survived adapted in ways that outsiders find difficult to categorize. They are called the Zedd.
Grandal
Northern Auridia · Climatic Anomaly · Cataclysm-Scarred
The most climatically diverse and geographically strange region of Auridia. Grandal contains temperate, arid, tropical, and sub-zero environments in geographic proximity that no conventional theory adequately explains. The scholarly working hypothesis: Grandal sits across a concentration of Cataclysm scars that permanently disrupted normal climate logic. Beyond its own anomalies, Prismaturgy has shaped Grandal’s terrain across millennia — nations that made geographic decisions pure terrain logic would not support.
Reino de Valerios
Southern Grandal · Temperate Mediterranean · Monarchy
A southern-facing peninsula with warm dry summers, mild wet winters, and productive coastal agriculture. The most conventionally liveable geography in Grandal and the natural entry point for anyone moving north into the region. Politically moderate by Grandal standards and culturally distinct from both the Lumér powers to the south and the stranger communities of deeper Grandal.
Oncaya Empire
Matemala Plateau · Cold Arid Mesa · Imperial · Home of the Navin
The terrain rises dramatically into the Matemala Plateau northwest of Valerios — high altitude, cold, arid, canyon-carved. The Oncaya Empire governs here, home primarily to the Navin. The plateau’s natural defensibility has made the Empire historically resistant to conquest: no army moving up from lower elevations has ever sustained a siege at altitude. Its aridity has made internal sustenance a permanent governing challenge and the organizing principle of its political economy.
Republic of Jag’dri
Northern Grandal · Tropical · Republican
North of the Matemala Plateau, the climate shifts to tropical: humid, densely vegetated, warm across all seasons despite northern latitude. Prisma Current surveys suggest a Green and Yellow Hue Focus convergence of extraordinary scale, though whether the Currents cause the climate or the climate shaped the Currents is a genuine scholarly dispute the Conservatory has been conducting, inconclusively, for several centuries. The republic’s political form distinguishes it from the monarchies and empires around it.
The Far North
Grandal far north · Obsidian · Vaelíir settlements
Beyond Jag’dri’s tropical zone, Grandal’s climate becomes progressively erratic — an instability band deepening from Amber to Crimson as one moves north. Beyond it: consistent sub-zero cold. The Far North proper, where the Vael’ír have built cultures organized entirely around survival in conditions that would kill most of Auridia’s other peoples within days. Obsidian-classified.
Vasterien
Central-South Auridia · Vast Arid Region · City-Scale Governance
A vast arid and semi-arid region between Lumér’s temperate heartland and Kält’s cold southern margin. Vasterien has no kingdoms — it has cities, and the frontier settlements that form around resource extraction points, trade route waypoints, and Prismatic Foci worth defending. Water sources are scarce, contested, and the organizing principle of every significant Vasterien community. The deep Prisma Current configurations of Vasterien are among the least-understood phenomena in the Concordiax’s survey records: they do not behave according to standard Current theory and have never been fully mapped.
City of Giris
Northern Vasterien · Border City · Cultural Mixing Point
Sits at the northern edge of Vasterien where the desert begins to assert itself against Lumér’s temperate margin — the last major city before the desert proper, the first point of entry for anyone moving north out of it. Neither fully Lumér nor fully Vasterien in character: a mixing point for both regions’ cultures, a trading hub for goods moving into the desert interior, and a place where people go when they want to be harder to find without disappearing entirely.
Zahar’an Sands
Southeastern Vasterien · Nomadic · Sol’Arin communities
The deep desert interior, home to the Sol’Arin — nomadic communities whose navigation of Vasterien’s terrain and seasonal water sources represents knowledge accumulated across generations that no outside survey expedition has been able to fully replicate. The Sol’Arin’s relationship to the Concordiax is functionally one of mutual non-interference: neither party finds the other’s presence in the deep desert especially convenient.
Kält
Southern Auridia · Former Galekian Heartland · Dracovian & Dwarven
The southernmost region of Auridia: cold, geographically austere, and carrying more historical weight per square kilometer than any other part of the continent. Kält was the heartland of the Galekian Empire. When the Empire collapsed, Kält contracted rather than emptied. The Dracovian remnant states that remain are sparse, independent, and historically self-aware in ways that three thousand years of aftermath have only deepened. Alongside them, Dwarven cities that predate the Empire entirely remain in pragmatic coexistence: shared geography, economic interdependence, and mutual respect for the other’s insularity.
Ecclesiastical State of Avaldorin
Kält highlands · Theocratic · Neutral Mediating Institution
Not a Dracovian institution, not a Concordiax instrument, not aligned with any single Modern God’s church. Avaldorin is a genuinely neutral ecclesiastical authority managing the relationship between Kält’s Dracovian remnant states and its Dwarven cities. This neutrality is Avaldorin’s entire political value and its constant vulnerability. It is also unusual in Midralis for being one of the few places where Dwarven communities maintain active religious practice — through the Hearthforged Assembly, a collective of seven gods whose origins are specific to the Kält highland community.
Dracovian Remnant States
Kält · Sparse · Independent
The surviving successor states of the Galekian Empire. Sparse and independent, they know precisely what their ancestors built and precisely how it ended, and have had three thousand years to develop a relationship to that knowledge. They are not nostalgic for the Empire, exactly. They are its heirs, in the way that heirs to complicated legacies tend to be: shaped by it whether they choose to be or not.
Dwarven Cities
Kält · Pre-Empire · Mountain Communities
The Dwarven cities of Kält predate the Galekian Empire entirely. They remained through the Empire, through its collapse, and through three thousand years of aftermath — their insularity and the defensibility of their mountain positions making them essentially unconquerable to forces that were more interested in Dracovian ambitions than in hard sieges at altitude. Their relationship to Avaldorin is the pragmatic coexistence of neighbors who need each other and know it.
Kyou
Western Continent · Hino Federation of States · Independent
Home of the Hino Federation of States: a multi-state framework that evolved from the military alliance that held against the Galekian Empire’s 200-Year War assault in the 1st Age. Kyou’s political structure differs fundamentally from Auridia’s, and its relationship to the Concordiax’s authority is one of principled resistance rather than formal rejection. That distinction matters: Kyou acknowledges the Concordiax exists and maintains diplomatic relations with it. It simply continues to implement its own regulatory framework for Prismurgy, and has done so for three hundred years.
Hino Federation of States
Western & Central Kyou · Multi-State Framework · Temperate to Tropical
The Federation’s heartland occupies Kyou’s temperate-to-tropical center and south. The most significant of its states is the Zhiyao State, where the central imperial court is located. The Seiryuko State contains Seishin Harbour: the primary Azure Expanse gateway from western Kyou. The Kiriyan Steppes in the vast interior are home to the Erdenezuun and exist largely outside Federation administrative reach.
Hinyō Lands
Eastern Kyou · Kyōshin Culture
The eastern coastal and interior regions of Kyou, associated with Kyōshin cultural tradition. The Hinyō Lands maintain distinct cultural practices that parallel the Federation’s governance without being fully absorbed by it — one of several examples of the Federation’s approach to internal diversity, which is to manage it through formal recognition rather than homogenization.
South Kyou — The Forever Wars
Southern Kyou · Ongoing Conflict · 15th Century
The contested territorial zones of southern Kyou, where the Shadow Ork land grants of the late 2nd Age and Erdenezuun territorial claims over the same ground have produced a conflict now in its fifteenth century. The Forever Wars have no formal end in sight. Both parties have outlasted every outside attempt to mediate a resolution. The Concordiax stopped trying in the 4th Age after three failed diplomatic interventions.
North Kyou — Red Zone
Northern Kyou · Crimson/Obsidian · Spirit Realm fracture damage
The Spirit Realm fractures of the late 3rd Age transformed North Kyou’s terrain in ways that make sustained habitation dangerous. The red zone designation has not been lifted in over four centuries. What the fracture left behind in those transformed landscapes exists nowhere else in the world. People go there anyway.
The Azure Expanse
The ocean separating Auridia and Kyou. Atlantic-scale in breadth: a serious voyage, measured in weeks across open water that has swallowed enough ships to develop its own mythology. Island chains run through it at irregular intervals, providing waystation infrastructure that has made the crossing viable since the 2nd Age. The island populations carry layers of Auridian influence, Kyou influence, and indigenous cultural identities that in some cases predate either continent’s serious interest in the crossing. In their oldest communities, they are something genuinely distinct from either.
In the current era of the 4th Age, the Concordiax has moved systematically — through trade arrangements, administrative appointments, and the selective placement of Verbum licensing offices, to establish indirect control over the most strategically significant Azure Expanse ports. No flags planted, no garrisons deployed. The Concordiax does not need to own a port to determine what passes through it. The Hino Federation regards this as slow encirclement. Federation diplomatic objections have been raised through formal channels. The Concordiax’s formal responses have been courteous and non-committal.
The Cimmerian Depths
The vast subterranean world beneath Neo Midralis. Older than the surface civilizations above it, deeper than any surface institution has fully mapped, and structured in descending levels of increasing darkness, hostility, and mystery. The Depths run beneath all of Auridia and, at their lowest level, beneath the seabeds of the Azure Expanse itself — providing sub-continental routes that exist entirely outside the Concordiax’s maritime control infrastructure. This is not a fact the Concordiax advertises.
Level 1
Lurkmere
Semi-darkness · Accessible
The transition zone. Luminescent fungi, subterranean birds, bioluminescent insects. Humanoid cavern communities with maintained surface contact. Concordiax administrative reach extends nominally into its upper regions.
Level 2
Vorkulth
Near-total darkness · Bioluminescent
Rivers of bioluminescent liquid. Giant blind insects. The Prisma Current configuration here deepens rather than dissipates with depth — suggesting subsurface formations the Guild’s standard surveys were not designed to document.
Level 3
Zorgarok
Profound darkness · Crystal formations
Intricate web-like cave networks lit only by luminous crystals. Monstrous arachnids and echolocating predators. The Prisma Currents here flow in a pattern the surviving survey notes describe as “organized.”
Level 4
Throkul’gor
Unfathomable darkness · Sub-seabed
The level at which the Depths extend beneath the Azure Expanse, providing routes between Auridia and Kyou that bypass the surface world’s political infrastructure entirely. Infrastructure here was built by multiple civilizations across different historical periods. The oldest sections were not built by the Dwarves.
The Zonal Demarcation Framework
The Concordiax administers a five-zone territorial danger classification system across the known world. Zone classifications are not merely safety advisories — they affect investment licensing, trade route authorization, and settlement permits. They are, in practice, political instruments that determine which territories the Concordiax is willing to administer and which it has decided to designate rather than enter.
| Zone | Classification | Character |
|---|
| Indigo | Safe Areas | Heavily monitored. Major roads, trade hubs, capitals. High security presence. Regular patrols. Maintained infrastructure. |
| Verdant | Guarded Wilderness | Largely safe, less controlled. Outskirts of cities, secondary trade routes. Occasional patrols. Generally safe for prepared travelers. |
| Amber | Wildlands | Unregulated territory. Deep wilderness, uncharted regions, areas beyond administrative reach. Standard operating environment for expeditions. |
| Crimson | Dangerous Frontiers | Known significant dangers. Fallen kingdoms, cursed lands, extreme elemental instability. Little to no official presence. |
| Obsidian | Forbidden Realms | No effective state control. The designation is a statement that the Concordiax has no adequate framework for the contents. The Far North and Far South are Obsidian. Deep Vasterien interior (specific zones, not publicly mapped) is Obsidian. North Kyou’s red zone uses equivalent classification. |