Tlaknami (乙未, Chimi)

South of the world, kissed only by the breath of stars and the glow of drifting ice, lies the vast island known to its people as Tlaknami—"the silent field of breath." Called Chimi by the High Elves using the calendrical glyph (乙未), Tlaknami is one of the most isolated and enigmatic lands in Erthas. Its people, the Gwenk’a, are breath-keepers of snow, stone, and echo.  

Geography

  Tlaknami is a large, glacial island situated entirely south of the 67th parallel. While its southernmost coast is cloaked in boreal forest and mossy groves, the majority of the island is frozen tundra, scoured by wind and rimmed with sea ice. Volcanic ridges rise from beneath its icy mantle, creating black craters, sulfur vents, and deep fjords frozen for much of the year.   The land is part of an ancient subduction arc, rich in obsidian, basalt, and fossil-bearing ash layers. Shaped by extreme seasonal contrast and long isolation, Tlaknami is home to flora and fauna found nowhere else on Erthas.  

People and Language

  The inhabitants of Tlaknami are the Gwenk’a ("those below the light"), a branch of the Maŋgwəta macrofamily. There is only one known language spoken across the island, called Eshkomi. The Gwenk’a are nomadic glacial foragers, ice-path walkers, and memory-song dwellers. They live seasonally in dome shelters dug beneath frost ridges and in ice caves carved by meltwater.  

Lifeways

  The Gwenk’a practice:

• Seal-glider hunting along fissures in coastal ice
• Frost-root gathering from volcanic warm spots
• Snow-echo chanting used to locate kin across long distances
• Burial of ancestral names in carved ice hollows to protect memory from sun-rot
• Seasonal migration from forest edge to glacial plateau and back

  Tools are fashioned from:

• Bone, obsidian, and driftwood hardened in fumaroles
• Skins of echo-hunters sewn with glacial sinew
• Ice-hollow resonance chambers used for ceremony

  Their worldview speaks of breath that drifts beyond fire, ice as the mother of voice, and shadow-light that walks beneath stars but above soil.  

Fauna

  Tlaknami's native life is adapted to near-polar extremes:  

• Pale-scaled gliders that nest beneath ice cliffs
• Nocturnal hunter marsupials with thermal-sensing skull plates
• Plated burrowers that dig melt tunnels into geothermal pockets
• Frost-leafed lichens grazed by ice-crab herbivores
• Coldwater reef serpents that pulse with bioluminescent motion

  Marine mammals are rare but increasing in frequency due to drift from southern Dainan coasts.  

High Elven Contact

  High Elven explorers mapped the land as Chimi and assigned it the calendar glyph 乙未 but made no landing. Their star-charts list it only as "The Shattered Mirror Beneath the Southern Silence."   Fragments of Gwenk’a ice-songs have reached Elven scholars in the form of frost-pitted shell carvings and resonance stones, though no living speaker has ever been encountered by Elven kind.   In Tlaknami, breath becomes stone, and memory walks where even sunlight fears to linger.