Tyrnarra›Talan›Myrkono
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Myrkono
Darkness Domain
Bound to Araphel
Darkness here is not malevolent. It is the absence of light, the space between stars, the quiet.
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At a Glance

Etymology
Icelandic myrkur (darkness) → myrk + Basque sakona (deep) → kono: fused and drifted
Position
West Talan, bordering Floteyn to the south
Terrain
Mountain range spine through the middle, mixed steppe and scrub, deep dark ancient forest (Black Forest character, old, dense, alive). Three heavily forested islands offshore to the west (collectively: the Myrkons), the heart of the Three Pines island polity.
Character
Dark forest, mountain spine, the star-plain
Shadow MagicDeep ForestMisunderstood Culture
Bound God
Araphel, domain of Darkness
Peoples
Three dominant ancestries are anchored here, three answers to the same dark: Fetchling (the self is made, not given; Ilun Tasun), Goloma (the hidden many; Izarelai), and Surki (not their shell, and never alone; Itzasoa). Myrria, the City of Second Chances, takes all comers, and the three peoples each find their place in its one culture (see the Myrria page, Peoples of the City).
God's City
Myrria →
City of Second Chances
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The Chains of the Bound

Myrkono is the cosmological heart of the post-binding world. All seven Wardstones (the relics that anchor the chains holding the Corrupted God beneath the earth) rest inside this domain, distributed across four of its sub-regions: two in Izarelai, two in Itzasoa, two in Ilun Tasun, and the seventh (the Divine Wardstone) in Myrria itself. The concentration is not accidental: the adventurer fellowship that bound the Corrupted God was from Myrria, and the binding was anchored under Araphel's watch.

The ongoing struggle to keep the Wardstones safe, and to hunt down the Nine Generals of Corruption who emerge from their sealed dungeons across Talan, is the present condition of the domain. Read more in The Binding →

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Sub-Regions

Ilun Tasun · the Kept Lamp →
Basque ilun (dark) + tasun (-ness) = "the darkness itself"
The Fetchling heartland basin that cradles Myrria, and the apothecary-garden of Talan: its green hills grow the life-herb the continent's healing potions are pressed from, and its people heal and rest the road-weary traveller and ask nothing.
PromotedApothecary-GardenCradles Myrria
Izarelai · the Star Plain →
Basque izar (star) + zelai (open plain) = "the star plain"
The open dark grass-sea of the south, a sea of tall grass under the biggest night on Talan, with the great lake Izaru at its heart. Its people are the Goloma, the hidden many, who read the one fixed thing (the stars) over a world that drifts and hides; the lake-city Izarbil is observatory, larder, and market at once, and they sell sight where the rest of Talan is blind. Holds the Lakeside Wardstone (in Izarbil) and the Plain Wardstone (open grass), kept by a watch the open ground never shows.
PromotedThe Star PlainSells Sight
Itzasoa · the Woven Wood →
Echoes Basque itsasoa (sea/ocean), the outsider's name
The coastal shadow-forest, heartland of the Surki (the Woven). They grow the dark-yew ilunagin hard as metal, weave the we the same slow way, and govern by the load-sharing Weave. Capital Ehunbaso, grown from living wood. Beneath the deep forest sinks the Hollow of Ten Thousand Threads, the Vermin Queen's hive-dungeon and the corruption the Surki exist to fight.
PromotedThe Woven WoodCorruption Threat
Three Pines · the Forest That Sails →
Modern English: the sailors' plain translation of the three islands' Basque names
The island polity of Myrkono: three great pine-islands (Lerluz, Lerzar, Lergatz, the old Myrkons) around the still inner sound Geldur, plus the tar-holm Bikholm off Ilun Tasun and Grannholm in Haizetsua's lee. On the Myrkons a felled tree is seen off like a soul on the Lantern Stairs, and its second life is a ship: the shadow-grown silent pine isiler builds the finest saltkeels on the Hafra, launched black with Bikholm tar from the yard-city Ontzola, where a yard answers for its hull as long as it swims. Above the yards stands the Unlit, the dark fleet and quiet state, the most well-known unknown government on Talan: everyone knows it exists, and past that, nothing.
PromotedPremier Hafra ShipwrightThe Unlit
Bikitsa · Twin-Shadow →
Basque biki (twin) + itzal (shadow) → "twin-shadow"
The shadow half of Tvisol, the Kingdom of the Two Suns, the cross-domain kingdom shared with Brauogi's Twin Suns: one people in two halves under the seasonal second sun Dausol. Where Brauogi names what the two suns bring, Bikitsa names what they cast: during Guestide everyone here throws two shadows, and the second is read as your dead walking with you. The half where things are finished: the lake-cooled cellars that age the funeral wine Erfivin, and the oven-town Gaulabe where the Waking Bread bakes over the Guest-Fire.
PromotedCross-Domain KingdomGuestide
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Holding the Chains · Goloma & Surki

Beside the Fetchling of the dark heartland, two peoples hold Myrkono that the rest of Talan does not picture when it thinks of the Darkness domain. Each keeps a watch over the chains of the bound: the Goloma on the open grass, the Surki in the deep wood where the corruption breeds.

The Goloma
The hidden many of Izarelai
The open grass is theirs: a flock of many eyes in the tall grass and the dark, the people the rest of Talan thinks of as a folk of the Hunt and never looks for here. They are the "clans" the Wardstone record credits with the open-steppe watch, though no one counts them until they rise. Theirs is the silent guard, not the open war: nothing approaches the open-grass chains of the bound unseen, and a corruption-cult or relic-raider that strays toward the stones is watched from the first step and met by a watch that surfaces out of nowhere. They keep it under Araphel, for whom the dark and the cover ask nothing of the unseen.
GolomaThe hidden manyWardstone wardens
The Surki
The Woven of Itzasoa
The Woven of the deep forest, who grow the dark-yew ilunagin and braid the we the same slow way. Myrkono is the one domain that takes them in: Araphel's darkness asks nothing of the compound-eyed and chitinous, and Myrria's second-chances doctrine extends them the welcome other cities refuse. And it is in their own Itzasoa wood that the Vermin Queen's Hollow breeds, which makes the Surki the corruption's most ardent enemies on Talan: the swarm they are forever mistaken for festers at their door, and no people fights the hive harder than the one the world keeps confusing with it. The war on the Hollow belongs to their mountain Temple-watch, the sworn order that stands outside the slow Weave because a chain of the bound cannot wait a season to be braided.
The WovenHollow at their door

The two peoples keep two watches, not one: the Goloma hold the open grass from within its cover, the silent guard of Izarelai's Wardstones, while the Surki wage open war on the Hollow that breeds in their own Itzasoa wood. They keep no shared culture and little shared language. What they share is the enemy, and the certainty that the chains of the bound must hold. Read more in The Binding →

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TYRNARRA · TALAN · MYRKONO