Endless Blue - Week 37.6 - The Islands That Move

Geography

The Islands That Move

One of the most disorienting sights on the world of Endless Blue are the phenomena known as the Floating Islands.  Ranging in size from Colossal to Immense, even at a distance their abnormality can be spotted clearly.  Every other island in the world is the result of the sloping sea bed, either sharply or slowly, rising above the level of the sea.  But these migratory islands are land without support, floating rock that hovers illogically in the waters overhead as life swims beneath its expanse.  Only passive research has been made of these strange formations -- given names, charting course, noting size -- but who knows what secrets could be unlocked should an in-depth expedition be launched to explore them.

Atlantica 

A minor migratory island, Atlantica appears in the open waters between the Mer Currents and the Yaun-Teel Bights.  The islet's claim to fame is the altitude at which it floats through the water.  Instead of bobbing along at the surface of the seas like all other migratory islands, Atlantic seems suspended in mid-depth.  It appears to be neutrally buoyant, niether rising to the surface or sinking to the depths, but instead constantly changing the level at which it hovers.  Early explorers soon realized that Atlantica keeps a constant level between the Shelf and the Vastness, exactly marking the mid-point between the two extremes.  Chelon navigators used this knowledge to aid in the development of the latitudinal system.

Island Size: Tremendous

Broken Chain Archipelago

An anomaly among the anomalous floating islands, the Broken Chain is an archipelago of small, roughly same sized island whose path is followed exactly by each island, forming a chain.  Five islands in all, these links keep roughtly the same heading and speed as their neighbors, somehow avoiding collision over all these years.  It was from observing these five islands that Seamus Lorwynn first formed his concept for the origin of species, which he entitled pangenesis.  Each island has a vastly different ecology: tropical, arid, temperate, boreal, and polar.  With these widely differing climates in relatively close proximity but still isolated, Lorwynn noticed life forms with distinct similarity but very different traits.  He surmised as one species migrated to a new climate, it eventually acclimated to the conditions there and adapted new traits to aid in its survival.  The isles are named Isle of Lamarck, Isle of Wallace, Isle of Darwin, Isle of Mendel, and the Isle of Avery.  The chain follows a current from the Bay of Kouton north-eastward between the Gulf of Locanth and the Cetacean Oceans to the Arctic Circle, and back again.

Island Size: Tremendous

Charybdis 

Believed to be the world's first floating island, the mass floats along the surface of the water, wide and flat, at a constant speed one knot.  It often floats by other islands, masterfully navigating sand bars and other underwater obstacles, coming close enough for animals to make the jump/flight/swim to its lush ecology.  A verdant jungle thrives on the isle of Charybdis, constantly adding new breeds and species with every pass near landfall.  Even the underside of the landmass are fields of coral and barnacles, completely covering every inch of surface.  While species have been seen to immigrate to the island, no witness has ever noticed emigration from it.  This is believe to be caused by majority of botanical life, which has evolved to be carnivorous.

The truth of this floating island is that it is not even an island at all, but an immense creature.  Possibly a tojanida, it seems placid, with no other care than to continually float on Elqua's currents.  It never needs to feed, for the forests of plants on its back burrow their roots and tendrils into the tjonda's carapace in search of sustenance, and in return pass on some of their sugary sap directly to the behemoth's blood stream.  The plants supplement their sap with the nutrients needed to maintain their host by a secondary diet of animals, caught in all manner of ingenious and colorful ways.

Island Size: Immense

Denebris

Slowly, almost methodically circling the portion of the southern hemisphere blocked off by the Spine of the World, the migrating island dubbed Denebris was a massive meteor that impacted the planet long in its past.  Initially fused to the crater it created upon impact, centuries of erosion wore away at the volcanic rock that trapped it.  Free, the meteorite began to float.  The strange ore that comprises its mass shares a similar structure to that of pumice, with a multitude of microscopic air pockets encased in thin layer of glass.  Deeper into the immense mass, these air pockets become larger, to the point where these glass gas nodules lower the density of the ore surrounding enough to float.  It is shaped much like an iceberg, with only a tiny portion cresting the waves in comparison to the rest of its volume.  The island is remarkably stable, and life has migrated to its surface and made it home, just as it has all over the globe.  Lumulus have begun secret expeditions to mine the island of this ore, which is believed to make deartsteel.  Their endeavor may be causing irreparable damage to the island, compromising it buoyancy and may one day cause it to sink.

Island Size: Immense

Horizon's Compass

Another curiosity in behavior, this elongated, elliptical island does not cruise the currents randomly like the other islands do, but stays stationary.  Instead, it rotates in place at varying speeds, its blunted end the axis and its extended end pointing towards the horizon.  It floats many leagues to the south east of the massive undead sargasso that eclipses the Maw of the Kraken and south of the Crèche of Civilization, in an area of  consistent Shoals called Curin's Pass.  Curin's Pass cuts through the normally impassable Spine of the World, but it falls within the ruins of the Kraken Empire, and as such is never traveled.  But with the recent over-population of the Known World, perhaps there is opportunity for those bold few who ignore superstition to follow where the compass points.

Island Size: Tremendous

Spur Island

 

One of the smaller  migratory island, this island hosts a mass of the mysterious structures known as Spurs. Scattered across its surface both above and below the waves, they make the island seem more like a giant geode than normal land.  It moves perhaps the most quickly of all the migratory islands, its course keeping a wide berth of any densely populated areas.  Life has not spread to the island due to its listing nature, wherein the island will seemingly rotate in a contrary direction than it is moving in and start a new course.  With no single surface exposed or submerged for any length of time, it maintains a rocky, volcanic look.  Those Godless that chart the Vastness can attest that the island seems to find the fastest gulf streams to carry it across the oceans quickly.  The temperature of Spur Island is enough to make what little rainfall the atmosphere produces freeze into ice and snow, which then melted into the world's ocean when the island rotates.

Island Size: Tremendous

Utopia Garden

 

This island is neither mineral nor animal, but vegetable.  It is an extremely tightly entwined mass of entagled sargassum that has existed for many centuries.  As the older sargassum dies, newer growths used the dead plants as a source of nourishment.  This layering of interwoven growths has formed a wicker effect that serves as a habitat on the level of the most richest coral reef.  It is home for a disproportionate number of "border" animals -- life forms that can survive on either side of the ocean's surface.  Here, protected from the predation of the Vastness' aberrations and the fishing of the piscean races, an uniquely pacifistic ecosystem has developed. 

Island Size: Colossal

Endless Blue - Week 36.1 - The Undertow: Under the Rock Under the Sea

Geography

Under the Rock Under the Sea

Everyone has secrets, be they tiny embarrassments of everyday living, to the soul corrupting shame that ruins everything around you.  They are kept by individuals, families, and organizations, but none more so than governments.  Whether such practiced deceit it is for the lauded benefit of their constituents or the puerile reward of their own self interest, every government has things to hide.  In the Known World, secrets abound like lamprey, sucking sustenance from the secluded nooks and crannies where they hide.  One such secret is the Undertow.

Those given to flights of fanciful delusion tend to find depth of conspiracy in even the smallest inconsistency, and the Prime Meridian is a prime example.  Cartography and navigation were demonstrably the creations of the early Chelon thinkers. and while most every aspect of their ingenious system is poetry except for the glaring inconsistency of the Prime Meridian.  For all the sensible reasoning for latitude and longitude, degrees and poles, there seems to be no eminent logic behind the choice of where to position the first line of longitude, 0 degrees.

The official reason espoused by the governing Chelon is that it marks the deepest spot in Elqua's oceans, a point in the Cetecean Ocean's floor submerged by a brine lake.  For the longest time, that assertion was taken as gospel by the less than educated masses.  But as time passed, education became more accessible to the lower class and as a result more of once was mystery about the waterworld has become fascinating but mundane fact.  Individuals began to question the assessment of the Chelon scholars that appointed the Prime Meridian's status, and then flatly challenged it -- most notably by their own people.  In an effort fueled by patriotism, an expedition of Chelon measured a remote area of their homesea called The Abyss and while unable to dive to its lowest depths, incontrovertibly prove that it was significantly deeper that the cetacean plain.

The expedition brought acclaim and fame to the explorers, and raised some controversy that the primary method of navigation was flawed and needed to be corrected.  In response, the Chelon have offered excuse after excuse as to this discrepancy, from the weak challenge that the expedition did not take into account the depth of the brine lake to the blatant ridiculous claim that sea level over the Chelon Seas is higher than elsewhere.  Detractors began to vocally deride the government for its falsehood, and even go so far as to charge that it has led a conspiratorial campaign at discrediting as many participants of the expedition as possible.  Why is there such a narrow-minded, focused refusal by the Chelon government to ignore the Abyss?

The real truth is that the Chelon government has no idea.  It is simply continuing the tradition that was started so very long ago in the Golden Epoch.  At its very heart, it was decreed that the Abyss was to be marginalized.  Why has never been stated, and those in the government that have dared to speak the question have found their political careers stillborn overnight.

There is a reason, and it is all because of a simple bubble.  But not a bubble in water, like the innocuous but embarrassing side effect that comes from respiration underwater.  No, this is a bubble in stone, the very foundation bedrock that comprises the tectonic plate of Elqua's geologic crust.  Located beneath Abyss in the Chelon Sea lurks a massive sink hole, a spot of crumbled rock opening into a vast airy cavern that could very well threaten the stability of the sea bed above it.

The Abyss is a desolate portion of the Chelon Sea, its depth hostile to the native pisceans and its isolation of no strategic import.  As such, it is rare for anyone to pass by the area, let alone investigate deeply enough to find the faint but definitely perceptible vortex of swirling currents cycling around each other as the waters drain into the cavern below.  This is the Undertow, and to speak its name is tantamount to treason.

But what the Chelon government does not know is that through that gyre is not just the emptiness of a cavern, but the ancient beginning of a whole second world beneath the waves, one beneath the rock.  And its genesis began back in the Golden Epoch from which the Chelonite policy was first drawn.

It was a time of war and suffering, with the Cetacean Barbarians invading the highseas that would one day become the Mer currents.  The hordes began a swath of attacks to the southwest of the Mer homesea and curved northward, in effect creating a hook into Mer territory as the spearhead encroached on the Chelon Sea.  The tactic isolated one of the Mer ethnicities early in its development and began carving it from the greater whole.  Retreating from an overpowering enemy they could not defeat, they retreated into Chelon territory.  To save themselves for ensured destruction, the Mer tribe fled blindly, with the ravening horde of Cetaceans right behind them.  Just as the predatory barbarians caught up to the fleeing Mer, the gyer of the Undertow caught the two forces unaware and mercilessly dragged them down into the depths -- a massive sinkhole that would be dubbed "The Bubble Below".

The Bubble Below is a massive cavern system under the silt sea bed that underlies the Known World, so massive in fact it's farthest borders reach under practically all the Fluid Nations.  The initial plunge from the entrance of the Undertow to the midnight waters below is a nearly 1000 foot drop straight down with nothing but stagnant air all around.  The suddenness of the gyre's pull and the lengthy drop before hitting the surface of the sinkhole's waters killed hundreds on both sides when they slammed into the seaweed encrusted surface of the falls' run off.  It is another 500 feet below the level of the Bubble's sea level before the averaged sea bed is encountered.

Stunned by the impact, drained from the flight/chase, the pisceans were ripe pickings for the native denizens of the sinkhole.  The first few years of their entrapment  in the bowels of the earth were savage and desperate, with both races suffering unimaginable casualties.  In the face of the overtly hostile environment, the two combatants put aside their established roles and worked out an accord of mutual beneficence so both could survive together where neither could alone.

Once the new alliance was forged, the Mer/Cetacean survivors became settlers, slowly learning the ways of the everdark and taming it to serve them.  The explored the myriad tendrils of cave systems and underground rivers and were surprised by their expansiveness.  The traced back their tragic path as much as they could until they saw the falls that spilled into the empty bubble, the echoing roar of plunging water so deafening that listening to it unprotected can even destroy the melon of a Cetacean.  But even if the falls had been silent, the half-mile distance straight up to the mouth of the Undertow was an unreachable goal as if they could reach up and catch the moons.  The Falls aerate the saltwater that pours down from the Undertow, and as it flows outward throughout the subterranean ocean it pushes the staler water through tiny rock fissures back into Elqua's surface oceans.  Entry through the Undertow is a one-way trip: there exists no magic to fly, and nothing can swim against the current falling down from the opening (not to mention swimming against the pull of gravity).  With any hopes of returning to the surface seas unattainable, the survivors turned their attentions to colonizing the darkness around them.

As time passed, other races suffered the same cruel plight of the Mer-Cetaceans.  In small numbers, the migrating families of Kouton and Locanth have been claimed by the Undertow, entire squads of Chelon and Lumulus combatants in the Shellback Wars were caught and dragged under, even a few Sahaguin have been lost to the sucking pull of the Bubble Below, eventually trapping enough of each race to barely sustain the gene pools.  Only the Ceph and the Yaun-Teel are unaccounted for in the Undertow, most likely due to the fact their races did not evolve until relatively recently in evolutionary standards.

Evolution has not left the trapped pisceans untouched, however.  Without the light of the sun to shine, coloration of the races has faded away, and now the races have all become albino, their soft rubbery skin a pink-tinged pallor and their scales a translucent milky white.  Like ghostly apparitions, each race is now a banshee-like shadow of their former vibrancy.  But perhaps the most unsettling was the speed in which evolution threw aside the development of eyes, fusing the eyelids over the useless sockets, sealing over the small orbs so they could begin metamorphosing into the most sensitive melons in the case of the other races, but into hyper-acute melons in the cetaceans capable of passive echolocation (using the reverberating drone of the Undertow's falls as a sound source, which carry throughout the Bubble Below as a faint but noticeable rumbles).  These new Cetaceans, calling themselves the Beluga, gave up their violent, expansionist ways and took up the mantle of protector of the "helpless", those that cannot see without making sound.

And protection they needed.  Just like the Vastness above the surface of Elquas waters, the empty but deafening air of the Bubble Below became dangerous.  An undead sargasso began to grow, a festering blanket of twisted vines and limbs, blighted seaweed and flesh, writhing and groping at any spark of life it can reach in a vainglorious need to consume light.  The Beluga formed a paladin-hood dedicated to the destruction of the vile aberrations that sometimes break free of the floating morass that now covers all of the seas below.  The Lumulus have also changed greatly over the generations, having through sheer necessity shed their xenophobia like they shed their glassy exoskeletons.

Here the pisceans have led relatively fulfilling lives, forming communities and families that in many ways have escaped the butchery and treachery that the brethren the left behind had to endure.  It has not been without its difficulties, with roaming undead, their own threat from the Indigo, and possibly the blubbery, bloated lone Kraken that still exists in the world to contend with.  There are also the wonders to discover in the pitch black.