Trikoya

The Shape of the Serpent Spear:

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On the Lyceum globe, Trikoya hangs below Jaiphora like a spear-blade carved into the shape of a serpent.

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Its northwestern horn reaches up into the Sunbridge Gulf, staring across mangrove labyrinths and blue water toward Jaiphora’s southern deltas. From that horn, the western coastline runs almost unbroken and grim, a thin strip of stony lowland pressed hard between the ocean and the vast wall of mountains rising immediately inland. Sailors call these heights the Broken Spine; geomancers prefer “Skyspine”; the Serpentborn simply say, “the Bones of Quirasha.”

 

From north to south that spine is nearly continuous, a continent-length ridge that splinters into multiple fanged ranges in the south. Its summits are often above the cloud-line; its lower slopes, when not bare rock or ice, are furred with forest and terraced in stone.

 

East of this spine, the land drops in steps into the Verdant Basin—a green ocean of forest and water that stretches almost from one end of the continent to the other. Seen from the decks of a skyship or from the higher terraces of Quirashal, the Basin looks more like liquid than solid: immense snakes of reflective water twisting through a surface that constantly ripples and shades.

 

Beyond the Basin rises the Eastern Shield: an old, worn plateau gnawed into mesas, sky-pillars, and long stone escarpments leaning toward the eastern ocean. Here, cliffs drop into the Emberwake Sea, whose warm currents tie Trikoya’s northeast to the southern coasts of Krioslos and, by long looping routes, to Eagren.

 

Southward, the whole mass of the continent narrows and flares again. The Broken Spine hooks inward; glaciers creep down its flanks; winds scour broad plains of grass and scrub known as the southern pampas. Finally, at the continent’s southern tip, rock and ice divide into fjords and islands, and the land dissolves into the roar of the southern seas.

 

Trikoya is long, tall, and layered. It is not a continent of gentle transitions. You are either climbing or descending, drowning in green or standing above cloud, riding open grass or negotiating ice and fjords. Even its myths say the same: that this land was created when the Great Serpent shed her first skin and dragged her body southward, pulling mountain and river into coils behind her.​

 

Stone, Fire, and the Spine of Quirasha:

 

Geologically, Trikoya is a child of collision and subduction. An oceanic plate still dives beneath its western edge, pushing up the mountains that define the continent’s profile and feeding the volcanoes that pock the Broken Spine.

 

The Lyceum divides this great orogen into three principal segments.

 

In the north, the Cloud Crown is a tangled fortress of peaks. Here the Spine is young, sharp, and restless: ridges rise in stacked ranks; valleys plunge steeply toward the Verdant Basin; volcanoes speak frequently in ash and rumble. In some places, entire mountain flanks are fresh scars where lava once flowed. Orichalcum-rich veins lace these heights, and rains wash their glittering dust down into rivers, tinting water and soil with a faint metallic shine.

 

In the centre lies the Sunmirror Plateau, where the range flattens into a high tableland. “Flattened,” here, is relative: the plateau’s floor lies far above sea level; its hills would be mountains anywhere else. Yet compared to the chaos of the Cloud Crown, the Sunmirror is a broad, open palm. Valleys cross its surface, wide enough for terraced cities and long canals. From the plateau’s edge, you can look down on cloud-banks and watch storms drift beneath you.

 

To the south, the Broken Fangs segment splinters into parallel ridges and knot-like uplands. Here, old volcanoes sag under their own weight while new vents open unexpectedly. Glaciers squirm between peaks; landslides write sudden new lines on the landscape. The Ember Root—one of Trikoya’s major Heartwells—boils beneath these mountains, sending up hot springs and fumaroles into valleys otherwise dominated by cold and wind.

 

East of all this, the Verdant Basin occupies a vast sag in the continental crust, a basin formed as the western margin rose. Sediment shed from the Spine—ash, eroded rock, organic matter—has filled it over ages, building deep, fertile soils. The land here is barely above sea level in many places. A shallow gradient allows rivers to wander freely. In some eras, an inland sea filled much of the depression; in this one, freshwater dominates, but the memory of that drowned past remains in subtle salinity gradients and fossil beds.

 

Beyond the Basin, the Eastern Shield is a fragment of crust older than the rest of Trikoya. Granite and gneiss predate the Broken Spine; ancient stone towers—tepui—rise from the plateau like teeth. These pillars are remnants of a higher surface eroded away. On their tops, entirely separate worlds of ecology and spirit persist.

Under all of this runs the Sunspine Vein: a continental ley superline that threads Trikoya from north to south. It rises nearest to the surface beneath the Sunmirror Plateau, veers east under the Verdant Basin, brushes the roots of certain Eastern Shield mesas, and finally dips toward the deep earth beneath the southern fjords.

 

Where the Sunspine approaches the surface strongly, Heartwells flare. Orichalcum veins glow in Axtal’s Heartforge and along the Broken Spine. Rivers run luminous at night in the Viren Basin. The Intihall of Quirashal sits directly above the Vein’s brightest crown, drawing on that power to sustain the Eternal Pyres and the Solar Navel. Even those with no magical training feel it: a sense of bright pressure in the bones, as if decisions made here echo farther than elsewhere.

 

The Serpentborn say that the Sunspine is Quirasha’s inner coil, the path along which her blood still circulates.​

 

Waters: Green Oceans, Desert Threads, and Twin Currents:

 

If stone gives Trikoya its bones, water gives it rhythm.

 

Along the western coast runs the Panthral Current, a cold, steady river within the ocean born from the roaring winds around the southern ice. It hugs the coast, chills the air, and suppresses rain. Where the Broken Spine meets this chilled margin, the result is the Desert Thread: a narrow belt of arid lowland that runs like a pale ribbon between mountain and sea. Here, rain falls rarely, and most moisture comes as fog that rolls in at dawn, caressing the dunes and rocky outcrops before burning off.

 

In contrast, the eastern Emberwake Current travels south along the opposite coast, carrying warmth and humidity. It feeds rich fisheries and helps drive a cycle of storms that sweep inland. Where Emberwake meets outflow from the Verdant Basin and eddies from Jaiphora’s Serpent delta at the northern mouth of the Sunbridge Gulf, the Twin Current Vortex forms: a place where fronts collide, storms spool into being, and ley-lines taste salt.

 

The Verdant Basin itself behaves like an inland sea with trees in it. At its heart lies what the Lyceum blandly calls the Yavari Drainage and what riverfolk call simply the Green Ocean. A labyrinth of wetlands, flooded forests, and braided channels, it changes shape with the seasons. During high-water months, the difference between river and forest floor almost vanishes; roots, trunks, and channel banks all drown together. In drier times, sandbanks and emergent bars surface, becoming temporary fields, council grounds, and hunting platforms.

 

North of the Basin, rivers descend violently from the Cloud Crown in slashing canyons, then slow as they reach the lower slopes and plains. Eastward, other rivers rise from Shieldland springs and mesa flanks, carving gorges on their way to Emberwake shores. In the south, meltwater from glaciers and snowfields forms cold, fast rivers that race across the pampas before curving to the ice-edged seas.

 

In the Desert Thread, rivers are lifelines. They carve their way out of the mountains in narrow gorges, then lose momentum, spread sideways, and create fan-shaped oases where humans can coax life from dust. Without these fans, there would be no cities, no ziggurats, no geoglyphs.

 

The Sunbridge Gulf in the north is not just an arm of the sea; it is a conversation between continents. Mangrove labyrinths fringe its Trikoyan shores. Tides weave between islands and sandbars. Storms born in the Twin Current Vortex roll back and forth, sometimes carrying seeds, driftwood, and occasionally entire canoes from Jaiphora to Trikoya or the reverse. Many stories on both continents begin with a boat where it should not be.

 

For the Serpentborn, rivers are not merely routes. They are participants. Each great stream has a name and a temperament; each confluence is a marriage and sometimes an argument. The Trikoyan phrase for “to forget one’s place” translates literally as “to flow against your river.”​

 

Leyfire, Blood, and the Circle of Breath:

 

Trikoya’s ley system is as distinctive as its topography. The Sunspine Vein provides raw, radiant potential; secondary lines give it flavour.

 

The Green Serpent current runs beneath the Verdant Basin, touching most of the Green Ocean. It hums in root systems, in the rhythms of flood and recession, in the dreams of river dolphins. The Stormrack Line follows the Desert Thread, a hard-edged current of wind and pressure that fosters prophecy and patience in equal measure. The Starfall Arc grazes the Eastern Shield and Feathered Plateaus, making dreams here long and lucid. A subtler line, the Boneflow, loops through the Obsidian Basin and Ember Root, tying death-grounds and underworld beliefs together.

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Trikoyan magic—Hematurgy—grew out of this geomantic context. The Blooded Gods teach that life is a movement of essence through flesh, that every heart is a small, hot knot of leyfire. To cast a spell is to open a vein in that knot, briefly letting power flow differently. The cost is always a little pain, a small wound, a drop of exhaustion or years shaved from a life. The gain might be light, flame, healing, hardened skin, the animation of stone, or a sending riding along ley currents.

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Blood is not, in Trikoyan thought, a mere fuel. It is the visible part of something subtler: breath. The Circle of Breath—their primary cosmological concept—describes the endless exchange of life-force between gods, mortals, land, and the unseen. Blood’s movement in the body, water’s movement in the world, leyfire’s movement beneath stone: these are all expressions of the same cycle.

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The seven principal gods of Trikoya are embodiments of stages in that cycle:

 

Quirasha, the Great Serpent Mother, rules life, fertility, and serpents. She exudes wisdom and death both, for anything that lives must one day be eaten back into the world.

 

Kotal, the Crimson Sun, presides over sacrifice and strength. His light burns, purifies, and demands. He is Quirasha’s consort, a spear of fire thrown across the sky.

 

Ix’thul, the Molten Heart, is volcano and earth, heat and pressure. His tongue is lava; his gift is transformation through fire.

 

Tez’Kiri, the Whispering Jungle, dreams futures in leaf and root. She sees ahead and entangles those who ignore what they have been shown.

 

Zantra, the Forge-Mother, shapes weapons and warriors. She governs war, yes, but more deeply the act of making: of putting intention into matter.

 

Yochan, Lord of Shadows, watches death and renewal. He is the keeper of the Final Breath, ensuring that when life-force leaves, it goes somewhere meaningful.

 

Chual, the Gentle Serpent, governs rain and mercy. Where others take, Chual restores, though always with an eye on the balance sheet.

 

Their theology insists that the gods consume themselves to nourish one another. Kotal burns and is replenished by Ix’thul’s lava. Quirasha sheds her own skin to line Chual’s clouds. Yochan empties the underworld when it grows too full, sending souls up through Tez’Kiri’s roots to be reborn. Mortals, through hematurgy and sacrifice, do not pay a debt; they join in this divine self-spending.

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Ley-lines and Heartwells mediate this participation. The Sunmirror’s Intilaya Sunwell is the primary focus of Kotal’s presence. The Grove of Ten Thousand Eyes in the Viren Basin is Tez’Kiri’s most concentrated manifestation. The Heartforge of Axtal glows with Ix’thul’s molten favour. The Mirror Caverns in the Obsidian Basin open onto Yochan’s ledgers. The Sky-Anvil atop a Shieldland tepui glitters with Starfall Arc starlight. Rain-shrines to Chual stand in almost every realm, their altars wet with both water and blood.

 

When the Sunspine Vein flares, hematurgic spells bite deeper. When it wanes, magic becomes stubborn. The wise track ley weather as closely as they track the skies.​

 

Realms of Serpentborn: Eighteen Sovereign Coils:

 

Trikoya is not one kingdom but many sovereign coils knotted loosely around shared gods and geography. The Lyceum recognises eighteen major polities during the height of the Serpent Age; smaller tribes and city-states nest within and between these.

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The Empire of Quirashal

 

The Empire of Quirashal crowns the Sunmirror Plateau. Its capital, also named Quirashal—the City of Clouds and Blood—sits on a natural spur that juts out over a canyon like a serpent’s tongue. Terraces climb its flanks in precise concentric bands; canals run along their edges, carrying glacier-fed water and the blood-tinted runoff of sacrifices.

 

Emperor Ixkhan the Red Sun claims direct descent from Quirasha through a line of serpent-bodied heroes and luminous queens. His court is a fusion of theocratic ritual and administrative efficiency. Every citizen owes a “breath tithe”: a yearly participation in public hematurgy, measured not only in blood but in work and art. A craftsman’s offering may be a day spent carving temple stones; a farmer’s, a portion of harvest dedicated to feeding pilgrimage crowds.

 

At the city’s summit rises the Crimson Ziggurat, a stepped pyramid faced in white jade veined with copper. During eclipses, its steps are washed in sacrificial blood that, oddly, never seems to stain the stone permanently. Within its inner sanctum burns a shard of the Eternal Pyre, kept alight since the Age of Golden Blood by a line of Crimson Priests and Serpent Seers, watched always by obsidian-eyed statues that sometimes move.

 

Quirashal’s roads—stone-paved, rope-bridged, and hematurgically warded—bind much of the plateau and parts of the Cloud Crown under its Sun-and-Serpent standard. In theory, the empire rules all lands where its stairways reach. In practice, it negotiates constantly with its neighbours, buying loyalty with access to aethertech, terrace engineering, and the protection of its warrior cults.

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The Cloud Stair Principalities

 

North of Quirashal, the mountains are too fractured and steep for a single empire to clasp. Here lie the Cloud Stair Principalities: valley kingdoms perched along precipitous basins and passes.

 

Each principality centres on a highland bowl combining a terraced town, sacred springs, and a patchwork of fields. Clifftop fortresses watch the entrances to these bowls; stair-roads—stone steps cut into mountain faces—connect them to each other and to lower lands. Mists roll in daily, swallowing part of the world and revealing it again.

 

Politically, the Principalities are fiercely independent. Some pay tribute to Quirashal; others oscillate between alliance and rebellion. A few look outward instead, trading with the Desert Thread kingdoms or raiding down into the Verdant Basin for captives and wealth.

 

Their serpent-gods tend to be localised aspects of Quirasha and Ix’thul: “one who coils around this particular peak,” “one whose breath is this particular hot spring.” Their priests read avalanche lines and rockfall scars as seriously as they do eclipses.

 

For Myth Keepers, the Cloud Stair is a perfect tangle of shifting alliances, vertiginous travel, and small kingdoms whose decisions can nonetheless sway entire regions—because they control the passes.

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The Viren Basin

 

The Low Jungles of Viren carpet much of the northern Verdant Basin. Here, the canopy is so dense in places that little direct light reaches the forest floor; elsewhere, gaps allow lances of sun to paint everything in saturated greens and golds.

 

The Viren Basin is not a single kingdom but a confederation of clan-nations bound together through the person of High Shamaness Tez’Kiri of the Living Canopy. Her title is not merely honorific; she is said—perhaps metaphorically, perhaps not—to dream with the jungle itself.

 

Cities here are grown as much as built. Massive trees host platforms, houses, and communal spaces. Vines, coaxed by druidic magic, form bridges. On the ground, root-bound plazas hold ceremonial fires that may burn for generations. The forest itself acts as both wall and ally. Sentient plantlife—creepers that tighten on command, flowers that release narcotic or illuminating pollen—respond to the songs and gestures of Viren’s shamans.

 

The Grove of Ten Thousand Eyes lies at the confederacy’s heart. Here, certain trees bear fruit that, when ripe, glow with a soft inner light shaped vaguely like an eye. Those who eat them see future possibilities: not certainties, but paths. Tez’Kiri’s Seers gather these visions, braid them into prophecy-songs, and advise the clans.

 

The people of Viren are masters of Hematurgy’s gentler forms. They bleed for fertility, for guidance, for healing, less often for death. Yet they are no strangers to war. When threatened, the jungle itself rises: strangler vines whip through the underbrush; roots trip invaders; whole groves vanish in a night, relocated by magic to deny enemies a target.

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The Viren-River Canopy Courts

 

Deeper within the Verdant Basin, where rivers slosh among buttress roots and the distinction between ground and channel is constantly negotiable, dwell the Canopy Courts of Yavari.

 

Here, entire districts are built entirely above the flood line. Houses cling to branches; broad platforms serve as council halls; rope walkways and woven bridges connect neighbourhoods. Below, others live in stilt-villages that rise and fall with the waters, their posts darkened by many generations of floods.

 

The Canopy Courts are not a single polity, but for Lyceum purposes they are treated as one realm because they share a pattern of governance: confederated clans tied to particular species and waterways, meeting in shared courts that hang where branches cross.

 

Hematurgy here relies on minimal blood but extensive breath and song. To cast is to sing in rhythms that pull on the Green Serpent line. Some spells are literally danced along branches; others use the vibration of wood as a medium. The Canopy Courts recognise Quirasha as “She-Who-Sheds-Rivers,” but their closest divine relationship is with Tez’Kiri. They regard Quirashal’s blood-practices with wary respect and sometimes quiet horror.

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The River-Ocean Confederacy of Serpent Mouth

 

Farther east, where the Green Ocean’s waters finally commit to southeast and meet the Emberwake Sea, lies the Serpent Mouth: a broad delta of islands, sandbars, and shifting channels. Here lives the River-Ocean Confederacy, a network of coastal and riverine towns whose loyalty flows along water.

 

Their capital is less a single city and more a ritual function: whenever the high chiefs meet at the River Crown—a mound complex built on the one island that never floods completely—that place is, for those days, the capital. Between such councils, each member town largely governs itself.

 

Life centres on canoes and tidal rhythms. Fishing, trade, and ritual pilgrimages structure daily life. The Confederacy’s Hematurgy balances Kotal and Chual: sacrifices are often made as offerings to the sea, asking for safe passage and abundant catch, but healers also pour lifeblood into the waters to soothe storm-spirits born at the Twin Current Vortex.

 

Because they sit between inland and ocean, the River-Ocean Confederacy is a critical hinge in Trikoyan geopolitics. Quirashal, Viren, the Eastern Shield kingdoms, and even far-off Zesadaran traders all court their favour.

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The Citadel-Realm of Axtal

 

At a central peak of the Broken Spine, where orichalcum veins burn nearest the surface, stands Axtal: an isolated fortress-city carved into and atop a volcano. Its walls are obsidian-black and streaked with veins of glowing metal. In some conditions, the entire mountain seems to pulse faintly red, as if it were a heart.

 

Matriarch Zantara the Fire-Hearted rules Axtal as both queen and high priestess of Ix’thul. Her people channel the earth’s molten blood through a carefully maintained network of channels and dikes into the Heartforge: a complex where weapons and tools are quenched in living flame.

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Axtal is both feared and revered. Its warrior-priests wield hematurgic weapons that literally drink the blood of wielders and foes alike, growing more keen as they do. These are the Obsidian Blades, bound to Zantra, who see themselves as both artisans and executioners. Axtal’s artisans produce the finest Sunforges—temples that collect solar energy and convert it into liquid light used in healing, war, and construction.

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Yet Axtal walks a narrow ridge. Push Ix’thul too hard and the Broken Spine cracks, wiping out terraces and towns far beyond Axtal’s narrow domain. Many stories in other lands feature hot-headed young Axtalians going forth into the world to spend their fire there instead of at home.

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The Obsidian Basin

 

On the eastern flank of the Broken Spine, where several valleys join into a deep, shadowed bowl that sees little direct sun, lies the Obsidian Basin: a realm more vertical than horizontal, riddled with caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers.

 

Here rules Lord Yochan, Keeper of the Final Breath—part monarch, part accountant of souls. The Obsidian Basin’s surface settlements cling to cliff ledges and canyon mouths. Most of the realm, however, lies below the surface: catacombs, subterranean cities, and the Mirror Caverns.

 

In those Caverns, still lakes hold reflections not of the living, but of the dead. Hematurgists trained as Death Singers can step to the water’s edge, cut themselves, and sing names into the darkness. If the dead named are willing, their faces appear briefly on the water, offering counsel or complaint.

 

Culture here is necromantic yet not nihilistic. The dead are believed to continue serving the gods through eternal labour: carrying messages along Boneflow, guarding thresholds in the underworld, repairing cracks in the unseen root-structures of reality. Funerals are therefore both mourning and proud enlistment ceremonies.

 

The Obsidian Basin acts as Trikoya’s memory and conscience. Its emissaries attend courts across the continent, quietly reminding rulers that their choices will be discussed with them again—after death, with more time.

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The Huayra Thread Kingdoms

 

Along the Desert Thread lie a series of oasis kingdoms collectively known as the Huayra Thread. Each controls one or more river fans where mountain runoff allows crops to grow. Their cities are marvels of planning: adobe and stone buildings aligned to stars and solstice sun, canals slicing fields into geometries only fully appreciable from above.

 

These kingdoms compete and cooperate. Some swear loose allegiance to Quirashal in exchange for terrace engineers and hematurgic warding; others look only outward, projecting power via trade fleets along the coast. All of them engage in the shared maintenance of the great geoglyphs that stretch across the stony plains between oases.

 

These lines and figures—serpents, birds, constellations—are aligned with Quirasha’s imagined body, with Kotal’s path, and with the Stormrack Line. Rituals of Hematurgy here involve walking these lines while shedding blood, “inking the desert” so that sky-gods can read.

 

Life on the Thread is precarious. A river that shifts course or dwindles spells political crisis. Yet the people are stubborn and inventive. They excel at aethertech: Blood Crystals that store energy in drought years, Serpent Engines that power lifts and mills using molten orichalcum brought from Axtal, ritual kites that test the moods of winds.

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The Jade Crescent City-States

 

At Trikoya’s northwestern horn, around the curving coast of the Sunbridge Gulf, lies the Jade Crescent: a scattering of port city-states where Trikoyan serpent cults and Jaiphoran calendar cults mingle.

 

Cities like Xal-Chan and Viruquay cluster on headlands that overlook both gulf and open sea. Their pyramids are narrower and sharper than their desert cousins; their staircases bear both Trik’aan serpent glyphs and Ven date-knots. Markets are crowded with cacao, feathers, jaguar pelts, orichalcum ingots, and artefacts brought from Jaiphora by bold captains.

 

Politically, the Crescent is volatile. City-states form leagues, betray them, and reform them in new constellations. Priests of Quirasha share altars—sometimes uneasily—with Ven priests of sun and maize. Children grow up speaking multiple tongues and reading multiple calendars.

 

The Sun-Road—a maritime and coastal caravan route—binds the Jade Crescent to the inland realms. Through it, innovations, weapons, stories, and diseases travel. From a Myth Keeper’s perspective, this region is Trikoya’s best entry point for characters from other continents.

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The Sunfen Lords of the Glass Delta

 

On the southeastern margin, where Shieldland rivers spread into wetlands before meeting Emberwake, lies the Glass Delta: a region of shallow lagoons, reedbeds, and mirror-bright channels. The Sunfen Lords rule here from stilt-palaces that seem to float between sky and water.

 

Their power rests on control of fish stocks, reed harvests, and salt-making. They worship Chual and Kotal in equal measure: rain and sun, gentle and harsh. Their Hematurgy is heavily invested in weather-working and healing; they maintain a network of Children of Chual—wandering monastics—who travel the delta and beyond, offering aid and quietly gathering news.

 

The Sunfen Lords’ political system is unusual. Leadership passes not strictly by blood but through a ritual called the Weighing, in which candidates’ hearts—both literal and metaphorical—are tested in ceremonies at reflected-sun shrines. Those who emerge with scars and visions but no visible fear are deemed fit.

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The Emerald Shield Kingdoms

 

Deeper in the Eastern Shield, away from coasts, lie hilltop and mesa-top kingdoms collectively called the Emerald Shield. They are so named because many of their settlements seem to sit on stone shields of greenish rock that have resisted erosion better than their surroundings.

 

These kingdoms are stubborn and inward-looking. They mine hard stone and meteoric iron, carve it into altars and weapons, and jealously guard certain sky-pillars whose summits host rare medicinal plants and star-spirits. The Sky-Anvil, a tepui whose crown holds a lake of startling clarity, is shared sacred ground. When the Starfall Arc flares, streaks of light seem to fall directly into this lake; Emerald Shield star-priests claim to read entire future dynasties in the ripples.

 

They are wary of Quirashal’s pretensions and of lowland floods alike. Their warriors fight on narrow ledges and in steep valleys, using the terrain as force multiplier. For players, these realms offer mountain fortresses with a different flavour from the Sunmirror’s terraces: more stone, less sun, more stars.

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The Feathered Skyplateau Realms

 

On the highest, most isolated plateaus and tepui summits, the Feathered Realms cling to the sky. They are small, often consisting of a handful of settlements, but their influence in matters of prophecy is disproportionate.

 

Feathered cloaks, headdresses, and standards are common, utilising plumage from birds that live only at such heights. The air is thin; Hematurgy here costs more breath than blood. Their priests are also astronomers, mapping not just the visible constellations but the subtle patterns of meteors, aurora flickers, and occasional comet apparitions.

 

These realms see themselves as archivists of cycles longer than any one empire. When they descend to attend councils—on the Sunmirror, in Quirashal, in Emerald Shield halls—their words carry the weight of centuries.

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The Red Mesa Alliance

 

Between the Broken Spine and the central Verdant Basin, especially in the mid-latitudes, lie regions of eroded plateaus and canyons: the Red Mesas. Here, rivers have cut deep into uplifted sediments, exposing bands of red, ochre, and cream stone.

 

The Red Mesa Alliance is a league of cliff-dwelling and canyon-floor communities. They build multi-storey homes into cliff faces, accessible only by ladders and narrow paths; they cultivate fields on canyon bottoms where silt and occasional floods provide fertility.

 

Their Serpentborn deities emphasise earth and cliff rather than river or sun. Ix’thul is honoured as “Stone that Remembers Fire”; Tez’Kiri as “Root in the Rock.” Hematurgy here often involves etching blood into stone, creating long-lasting wards.

 

Politically, the Alliance serves as a buffer between Axtal, Quirashal, Viren, and the Deserts. They host neutral meeting grounds where disputes can be hashed out—sometimes literally, in ritual combat on narrow canyon ledges.

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The Pampas Wind-Clans

 

South of the Basin and Shieldlands, the land opens into the pampas. Here, the Wind-Clans move with herds and seasons, their lives defined by horizon lines and the moods of the sky.

 

Their camps are designed for quick assembly and dismantling. Tents and portable lodges form circles or spirals, echoing Quirasha’s coil even on flat land. Fire-pits hold coals that can be carried forward, preserving the flame of a particular lineage for generations.

 

Their gods look similar but feel different: Quirasha here is less jungle-serpent and more long, low grass-snake; Kotal is a fierce, clear disk on cloudless days; Chual is the rare, blessed storm that breaks a drought. Hematurgy focuses on weather-working, tracking, and the deep magic of animals’ breath. Death is seen as returning one’s wind to the plains.

 

The Wind-Clans’ sovereignty is flexible. They control movement and access more than fixed territory. When external powers try to draw lines across the pampas, wind and hoof and stubborn hearts erase them.

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The Ember Root Hearthholds (Ice Coast Clans)

 

Along the southern fjords and ice-rimmed coasts, small communities cluster around points where warm water or geothermal features soften the harshness. These are the Hearthholds: villages built near hot springs, thermal vents, or sheltered bays. Collectively, they form the realm aligned with the Ember Root Heartwell.

 

Sea-hunting is essential here. Boats of hide, wood, and bone travel lanes among icebergs and islands. Whales, seals, fish, and sea-birds provide most of the diet. Inland forays into the Broken Fangs supplement with herbs, roots, and stone.

 

Ember Root’s presence manifests in unexpected ways: patches of grass that stay green in winter; stones warm to the touch even under snow; periodic “fire-fogs” where steam and cold air mix. The Hearthholds’ cosmology balances three forces—Sea, Ice, and Fire—and seeks to keep all three from swallowing the others.

 

Politically, these clans are loosely organised, gathering in seasonal moots when conditions permit. Their Hematurgy is conservative, used sparingly for survival: to thaw frozen limbs, to strengthen ice under a crossing, to soothe an injured sea-spirit.

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The Sunbridge Mangrove Realms

 

Where the Verdant Basin meets the Sunbridge Gulf in the north-east, mangrove forests create a labyrinth between land and sea. Here, the Mangrove Realms stake their claims on hummocks and root-islands.

 

Stilt-houses, raised walkways, and boat docks cluster above brackish channels. Trade with the Jade Crescent, Viren, and River-Ocean Confederacy passes through these watery street-grids. The Mangrove Realms specialise in salt-making, shellwork, and fishing, but their true wealth lies in navigation: knowing which channels are safe at which tides.

 

Spiritually, they are devoted to Chual and Tez’Kiri. Rain and root, mercy and entanglement. Their Hematurgy often involves mixing fresh and salt water with blood, binding sea and river in single charms.

 

They are small in territory but large in influence—a necessary gate between many more expansive realms.

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The Twin Current Isles

 

Offshore at the mouth of the Sunbridge Gulf, around the Twin Current Vortex where Emberwake, Panthral eddies, and river outflow mingle, lies a scatter of islets and reefs. On the largest, people have carved precarious footholds. These are the Twin Current Isles.

 

Their inhabitants are consummate sailors. Boats are built to handle shifting, confused seas; harbours are clever illusions of rock and tide. The Isles command the best understanding of the Vortex’s moods, and thus the safest routes across the Gulf.

 

Religiously, they are devoted to Kotal’s reflected face on water and to a local aspect of Quirasha—She-Who-Coils-in-the-Deep. Hematurgy is wind- and wave-focused. A botched ritual here can mean an entire village vanishing beneath a freak wave.

 

Politically, the Isles are fractious but united in one thing: their refusal to be owned by any mainland power. Attempts to conquer them have foundered on shipwrecks, mutinies, and eerie fogs.

​

The Aether Guild Enclaves of Quirashal’s Shadow

 

Not all realms are defined by geography. Across Trikoya, but most strongly in and around Quirashal, exist enclaves effectively governed by guilds rather than clans or crowns.

 

The Crimson Priests oversee sacrificial rites and ritual law. The Obsidian Blades, sworn to Zantra and Axtal, provide an elite warrior-monastic presence wherever their chapters house themselves. The Serpent Seers—geomancers and augurs—map both ley-lines and political currents. The Breathkeepers practice the most austere forms of hematurgic healing, literally trading years of their own life for miraculous restorations. The Children of Chual wander, refusing permanent anchoring, but wherever they dwell temporarily, Chual’s gentle sovereignty touches.

 

In some cities, these guilds hold quarter-level power. In Quirashal, they collectively form a “realm within the realm,” able in extremis to depose an emperor they deem unbalanced. In frontier regions, an enclave might anchor a new settlement’s entire legitimacy.

 

The Lyceum treats these guild-networked enclaves as a notional “eighteenth realm”—Quirashal’s Shadow—because their rules, loyalties, and magic cut across all others.​

 

Hematurgy, Aethertech, and the Arts of Sacrifice:

 

To outsiders, Trikoyan magic appears dramatic and unsettling. Spells are rarely cast with free-floating incantations alone. A cut, a prick, a shared breath is almost always involved.

 

Hematurgy is both an art and a discipline. Apprentices first learn to measure their own vitality: how much blood they can lose without impairment, how much exhaustion they can bear. They practice with symbolic offerings—ink, water, breath—before graduating to actual flesh.

 

In Quirashal and Axtal, Hematurgy often feeds Aethertech. Blood Crystals—translucent, pulsating nodules grown around seeded orichalcum shards—store magical energy harvested from mass rituals. When placed in specially carved sockets, they power Serpent Engines: massive constructs whose internal channels mirror veins and arteries, allowing molten metal or liquid light to circulate without cooling. Some Engines turn millstones the size of small houses; others lift stone blocks along cliff faces; a few, in legends and some terrifying ruins, move themselves, coiling across the land like metallic dragons.

 

Sunforges sit atop ridges and temple roofs: arrays of polished stone and metal that focus sunlight into a concentrated beam. Hematurgists feed these beams with blood, turning raw light into liquid luminescence. This liquid is stored in sealed jars and used for everything from emergency crop-feeding to battlefield healing to the animating of guardian statues.

 

Art mirrors these principles. Trikoyan murals often use pigments made from ash, dried sacrificial blood, and plant dyes. In some sanctuaries, these murals move when certain hymns are sung, their serpent-gods coiling and uncoiling along walls, their sun-disks turning slowly across painted skies. Weavings embed powdered orichalcum into threads, making garments that glimmer faintly in darkness and respond to ritual words by stiffening into armour or loosening into cloth.

 

Philosophically, Hematurgy has sharpened Trikoyan moral concepts. Every working has a cost. The question is not “Can we?” but “Should we spend this here?” A village might refuse to revive a revered elder because doing so would mean ten youths aging prematurely. A general may abstain from using a devastating blood-curse because it would require the lives of half his army. The strongest mages are those who understand restraint.​

 

History of Trikoya: Ages of Scales and Suns:

 

Trikoyan histories are rarely linear scrolls. They prefer spirals, each loop representing a cycle in which themes recur in evolved forms.

 

The Dawn of Serpents, before 45,000 BGF, is half myth. Stories say Trikoya was formed when the Great Serpent—perhaps Quirasha herself, perhaps an older, nameless being—shed her first skin. The shed skin became mountains and rivers; her new skin shone with the first true awareness. Early tribes built circular altars and mounds to echo that coil. Hematurgy in this era was tentative: small, personal cuts, offerings of animals and crafted items rather than humans.

 

The Age of Golden Blood, from roughly 44,000 to 36,000 BGF, began with the discovery of orichalcum under the Broken Spine and the recognition of its resonance with the Sunspine Vein. Quirashal’s predecessors—highland city-states on the proto-Sunmirror—learned to smelt this metal under volcanic guidance. Its molten state gleamed like blood in firelight; priests declared it the “golden blood” of the Serpent Mother and the Sun.

 

Techniques evolved. Sky-bridges of crystal and orichalcum lattice linked mountaintop cities. Blood Crystals were first grown, though crudely. Hematurgy began to be codified, with the first Serpent Seer colleges forming to record which sacrifices moved which forces safely. Quirashal proper—then a variant named Qir-Tawha—rose as an empire capable of coordinating terrace-building, famine relief, and war on a vast scale.

 

The Age of Twin Suns, roughly 35,000–30,000 BGF, opened when an astronomical anomaly produced the appearance of two suns in the sky for several days. The Lyceum favours an explanation involving a bright comet or an ill-understood celestial reflection; Trikoyan theology says Kotal and Quirasha briefly showed their hidden faces at once.

 

For centuries after, a golden age unfolded. Astronomy, architecture, and Hematurgy reached new heights. Living statues—golems infused with blood, orichalcum, and leylight—guarded palaces. Aethertech intensified: Sunforges became more precise, Serpent Engines larger, the Crimson Priests more ambitious.

 

Hubris inevitably followed. Experiments at Heartwells like Ember Root and Intilaya strained the Sunspine Vein. The Boneflow line throbbed angrily beneath the Obsidian Basin. Smaller realms suffered when distant empires miscalculated. The gods, in myth, argued among themselves about how much mortal daring to allow.

 

The Age of Falling Feathers, from 29,000 BGF into the era of the Great Freeze, saw that argument resolved badly. The fall of the Second Moon and the global cooling that followed hit Trikoya hard. Rains shifted; pampas expanded; the Green Ocean shrank and surged unpredictably. Wildcats of history—plagues, crop failures, volcanic winters—roamed free.

 

In this turmoil, some Blooded Gods withdrew, their major manifestations retreating into the underworld or higher spheres. Quirashal shrank but did not fall, its altitude and terraces granting relative resilience. Viren adapted quickly, letting the jungle reconfigure around new water regimes. Some Desert Thread kingdoms disappeared entirely, their glyphs left scoured by sand.

 

By the time the world stabilised into the current post-Freeze cycles, Trikoya was a patchwork of surviving realms, resurgent tribes, and old ruins humming with dormant Hematurgy. The Compact Ages and Great Councils that followed on other continents found echoes here, but the Serpentborn, bound by their own cycles, often met external emissaries with polite bafflement. What need had they for foreign law when their own gods had already written cost and consequence into blood?​

 

Trikoya at the Table:

 

For a Myth Keeper, Trikoya is a continent of vertical journeys and moral calculus.

 

You can send your players up: climbing from mangrove channels through Viren’s breathing jungle, into the Cloud Stair Principalities, and on to the high plazas of Quirashal, each ascent demanding new forms of diplomacy and adaptation. You can send them down: from the gleaming terraces of Axtal into its magma-lit underbelly, then further into the Mirror Caverns of the Obsidian Basin, where their own faces may appear in water before they are dead.

 

You can send them sideways along currents: drifting through the Green Ocean from canopy town to canopy court, paddling into the Serpent Mouth to negotiate with River-Ocean Confederates, crossing the Sunbridge Gulf under the uncertain blessing of Twin Current storms. Or you can set them walking the Desert Thread, following geoglyph lines to forgotten shrines where murals still move when the right songs are sung.

 

Everywhere, Hematurgy forces choices. Do they spill blood for a quick gain, knowing that in Trikoya, such acts are never merely “expend a hit die”? Do they accept help from Breathkeepers, shortening someone else’s life to lengthen their own? Do they let Crimson Priests mark their hearts with protective sigils that will also report their moods to Quirashal?

 

The continent also offers a spectrum of cultural tones:

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• In Quirashal and Axtal, high ritual, monumental architecture, and a sense of terrifying competence. The empires here build and sacrifice on scales that can awe or appall.
   

• In Viren, the Canopy Courts, and Mangrove Realms, animistic intimacy. Spirits are neighbours; trees argue; snakes carry messages.
   

• In the Huayra Thread and Jade Crescent, precise engineering and cosmopolitan intrigue. Mathematics, stars, and trade.
   

• In the Eastern Shield and Feathered Realms, long-view mysticism. Stars fall into lakes and change prophecies.
   

• In the Pampas and Ember Root Hearthholds, survival sagas. Wind, ice, and fire as co-protagonists.
   

Trikoya never quite sits still. Rivers migrate; terraces collapse and are rebuilt; gods shed old aspects for new. Use that change. Let a campaign that begins in a stable age slowly reveal that the Orichalc Serpent—the mythic, planet-tunnelling dragon of orichalcum and stone—is stirring. Let tremors, glowing springs, and auroral snakes of light in the night sky mark its movements.

​

Remember that in the Serpent Kingdom, nothing is free. Every bargain is part of the Circle of Breath. Every land has a memory of blood. And if your players listen closely, they may find that Trikoya is not just a place for adventures, but a teacher—patient, dangerous, and endlessly coiled, asking again and again: “What are you willing to spend for what you desire?”