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Floteyn
Water Domain
Bound to Shuun
A domain you map by the day, not by the year.

At a Glance

Etymology
Icelandic flot (float) + eyjar (islands) → compressed and drifted
Position
West Talan, covering the western portion of Midarra and extending into Hafra
Terrain
Overwhelmingly water. One large fixed forested island in the west (Balatur Erui, standing in the mouth of the Midarra where the domain meets the Hafra). Hundreds of smaller islands of varying sizes scattered throughout. The smaller islands drift on deep-water roots; navigation requires local knowledge or magic, and the drifting isles reckon their wandering by the one island that stays.
Character
Floating archipelago, open sea, island chains
Naval PowerIsland ChainsWater Magic
Bound God
Shuun, domain of Water
Peoples
Three dominant ancestries are anchored here, three answers to water that will not hold still: Tripkee (home is made, not found), Athamaru (at ease above the abyss), and Merfolk (they move as water moves). Drowning, the sea's own face, belongs to no people: none of the three can drown, and all three have pulled out those who can.
God's City
Uravel →
The Floating Isles · the water-weave, drifting isles above and dry halls sunk below

Sub-Regions

Balatur Erui · the Gate of Two Waters →
Basque balea (whale) + Icelandic eyri (sandbank, spit), "Whale-Spit / Whale Shoals"
The one fixed island of the drifting domain, standing in the mouth of the Midarra where the sweet inner sea meets the salt Hafra; the Line of the two unmixing waters touches its western shore. Every cargo passing between the seas changes hulls at Gesalkai, the brackish quay, and the skywhales change worlds: in from the salt singing, rising into the sky over the island, letting fall everything the ocean lodged in them. The islanders take nothing from a whale; they inherit what the sky lets go, and govern themselves by the Undertaking, the underwriters' mutual become a republic, redrawing their catchment skies by lot every seventh year at the Seventh Luck. Every subscribed family holds a horn, and the chorus that clears the gate for a rising whale is the people's whale-song sung back. Inland, around the sleeping mountain Lomendi, live the Stillfolk, who want nothing that falls.
PromotedMutual RepublicThe GateSkywhale Crossing
Floating Isles of Shuun · the Sweetwater League →
Collective name; every island carries its own. The League is the pact of the water between.
The hundreds of drifting islands of the open western Midarra, each one sovereign and each one unlike its neighbors: every docking a new taste, a new dialect, a new right way of doing things. The one shared culture lives afloat, on the blended crews of the boats, and the water between is held by the Sweetwater League, the old thin pact whose whole constitution is one sentence: the League ends at the waterline. The List-house at Uravel keeps the living chart of the whole Midarra and the Rounds, the visit-roster that misses no island; the Raft decides, ships lashed into a temporary parliament; and since 2524 MR a drowned temple of the Nine lies sealed in the deep below, while the Raft keeps almost voting on the Standing Watch. Balaena drifts among them and has its own section below.
PromotedAnthology of IslandsSweetwater LeagueNation Afloat
Northwest Outer Islands TBD
Canon-pending name
A small cluster of Floteyn islets where the domain's eastern boundary touches the coast of Myrkono and Lautara, hosting an unnamed shady port town at the resulting tri-domain border. The boundary redraw that makes the tri-point exist, and the town's full canon (name, ruling structure, named institutions), are both pending.
TBDTri-domain border

Balaena · The Island of Wonders

One of the hundreds of drifting islands of Shuun, and the most visited: the layered city where the harbour's tourist front hides the true welcome deep in the courtyard-yards, and the alchemical capital of the sweet sea, whose sedatives and dulling draughts no still-tradition on Talan matches. Up close the city is built on a civic apparatus of weights, pulleys, and ritual-tuned counterbalances that the Baleni treat as ordinary urban engineering. Visitors come for the four phenomena below; the full city, its Measured Service, and its secrets live on Balaena's own page →.

The Bridge That Walks on Water
A wooden footbridge connects Balaena to a fixed pier on a neighbouring stable islet. The bridge sits about five centimetres beneath the water's surface, and visitors appear to walk across the water itself. The civic explanation: the city has settled into the sea slightly as it has grown, and the bridge sits at exactly the line that produces the illusion. Painters love it. The bridge has not needed structural repair in three generations.
The Blowhole Fountain
Twice daily, a central fountain in the city erupts in a coordinated rainbow-mist spectacle, fed through an intricate fountain network running beneath the streets. Sheets of water, rainbows in the mist, public spectacle that draws visitors from across Floteyn. The civic explanation: the city's weight-and-pulley apparatus presses against an underground spring on a regulated schedule.
The Weight-Gate Ritual
Every visitor entering Balaena is weighed at the harbour gate, politely, ceremonially, with a small tally token returned at departure. Citizens regard it as folkloric civic pride. The city's balance, after all, is the city's safety.
The Mirror Mornings
On calm-water dawns the sea stills enough that Balaena's reflection shows the city and its inverse twin in perfect glass. Painters and pilgrims plan trips around the forecast. The image is the city's most-reproduced postcard.

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