Tarmahc
Tarmahc is an open grave, its mountains drowned, its valleys salted, its people bound to survival by lash, chain, and tide. An archipelago of broken islands where sugar burns, salt festers, and flesh itself is weighed as cargo. The bells that toll in fog are not calls to prayer but echoes of drowned empires, reminders that even the greatest kingdoms can be reduced to ruin and silence.
Tarmahc is no longer a continent but a wound that refuses to close, its mountains shattered into isles, its valleys drowned in salt, its people lashed to survival like cargo to a sinking ship. Once called the Heart of the World, it was the greatest of the Five Continents, where Humans, Ursi, Smallfolk,Giants, Lizard-Kin, Serpentine, and Avian one-and-all were born; And thrived beneath the silver peaks of the Serpent’s Spine Mountains. Its rivers fed empires, its forges lit the night, its fields bought kingdoms. But when Xaethra broke the silence of the gods and lured Vile, the Devil-King of The Hells, to her side, their war for our world tore the sky in two. His final creation, a vast winged-hydra golem called the Tiamat, fell from the heavens after he would attempt a failed mutiny, striking Tarmahc like a divine hammer. The continent buckled, its heart caved in, and half the world died screaming before the echo of the impact even ceased. Mountains became reefs. Cities became graves. The Serpent’s Spine, once the world’s crown, now juts from the surf like a blackened ribcage, its peaks the last dry bones of a dead god.
What remains is an archipelago of salt and servitude, where every sunrise smells of brine, blood, and burning cane. The Lizard-Kin and Serpentine rule the shallows with ropes and chains, turning ruins into plantations and caves into brine-works where flesh is weighed beside sugar and salt. The rich call it industry; The poor call it survival. Aquian divers from Naumos scour the drowned lowlands for relics of the Four Nations, Alandrior, Omendahl, Tulani, and San Reign, while expeditions by The Scholar's Guild comb the reefs for what profit the dead might yield. Slaver-kings drink beneath the tolling of ghost-bells, their laughter echoing through fog thick with the ghosts of a better age. Tarmahc’s people are as hard as the stone they cling to, their faith beaten thin and hammered into endurance. Chains and contracts are law; betrayal means death; and nothing is wasted, not even the dead. Ships heavy with cane and corpses still set sail from the scarred isles, bearing the wealth of a drowned continent to feed the hunger of the living. To live here is to kneel before the tides and pretend it is prayer. To die here is to feed the sea that remembers what it took.Structure
Tarmahc no longer holds structure in the traditional sense. Where once four great nations (Alandrior, Omendahl, Tulani, San Reign) thrived beneath the Serpent’s Spine, today there is only a scattering of island holds, plantation fiefdoms, and serpent-ruled ports. Authority is fractured, slaver-kings in cliffside strongholds, merchant captains in sugar-isles, and cults in the drowned ruins. No central council or crown remains; the only order is what can be enforced by chain, coin, or stubborn survival.
Culture
The culture of Tarmahc is grief carried into pragmatism. The Folk who remain live more in memory than in hope, binding themselves to endurance as a creed. Bells toll in ruined towers not to summon but to remind; meals are shared as acts of defiance against scarcity. Lizard-Kin and Serpentine now dominate, shaping the isles with brine-works and venom-harbors, while Humans, Ursi, Giants, and Smallfolk cling to fragmented traditions. Ancestors are honored not with monuments (those lie beneath the sea) but with whispered names over fires. Hospitality is cautious, betrayal expected, and survival treated as sacrament.
Public Agenda
There is no single agenda across Tarmahc. Each isle, each harbor, each scar-ruin pursues its own ends. For most, it is simple survival, harvesting sugar, guarding fisheries, distilling brine. For others, it is profit: the serpent-slavers who rule trade routes, selling flesh alongside cane and salt. A few sects still dream of restoration, searching the drowned vaults for relics of Alandrior or Omendahl, but such voices are few, and grow fainter with every generation.
Assets
- Scar-isles clinging above the Laughing Sea, fertile in patches but dangerous with quakes.
- Sugar plantations, salt mines, and venom-harbors supplying Everwealth and Kathar with commodities.
- Drowned ruins, holding Pre-Schism relics that occasionally resurface.
- Amphibious dominion of Lizard-Kin and Serpentine, who have adapted to the broken geography.
- Veins of Viridite, a gleaming green alloy born when The Fall ruptured Tarmahc’s leylines, channels of magick flowing beneath the ground, in a violent flash death, into the bones of the land. Found nowhere else in the world, its veins glimmer like wet stone under lightning and hum faintly when storms roll across the sea. The few who mine or smuggle it know it is as treacherous as it is precious.
History
Tarmahc was once the living heart of civilization, its rivers and valleys feeding not only the Folk but the sciences, crafts, and magicks that shaped the whole of Gaiatia. The continent’s greatness was not confined to its size, though it was the largest of the Five, but to its unmatched abundance of invention and adaptation. Each of the four nations beneath the Serpent’s Spine made undoubtable contributions, advances that spread across oceans and endure, in fragments, even now.
- Alandrior, seated in the central lowlands, was the forge of the world. Its metallurgists and leatherworkers discovered oil quenching, the tanning of hides, tempering iron and skin into blades and tools of previously unmatched strength, pioneers of engineering to be certain. The great foundries of Alandrior refined iron into steel, their smelters the first learners to bind flux into slag for stronger ingots. It was said even the Dwarfs came to Alandrior to trade secrets, so fine were its alloys and so efficient its bloomery bellows. Much of modern weaponcraft, from the simple ploughshare to the enchanted halberd, can trace its ancestry to Alandrior’s experiments in fire and ore.
- Omendahl, by contrast, was a kingdom of the sea. Its shipwrights refined the keel and rib-truss system, inventing hulls that could withstand both storms and the burden of steel cargoes from inland. Caulking methods using pitch, resin, and treated fibercloth were innovations that spread as far as Kathar and beyond. Their soap-makers, working with fat and ash, developed the first reliable hard soaps, a craft both hygienic and medicinal that revolutionized health in coastal cities. But Omendahl was not only a power of trade and craft, its shamans pioneered rites that bridged spirit and tide, calling storms to drive off invaders or calming waves to ferry fleets. Their magick was elemental, woven from salt, seafoam, and wind, and though much is lost, echoes persist in certain cults to this day.
- Tulani, stretched along the great eastern forests and graslands, married agriculture with artistry. Their cultivation of cereals used intricate truss-supported terraces that held soil even on steep slopes, their irrigation canals lined with stone so finely cut that water still trickles through some ruins centuries later. Tulani's Smallfolk domesticated fruiting vines, producing wines and syrups that became symbols of refinement across the Folklands. Their woodwrights perfected joinery techniques without nails, an art that influenced architecture from every corner of the globe. Magick in Tulani was less about spectacle than harmony, spirit-tenders who communed with trees and streams, ensuring harvests flourished in balance rather than glut.
- San Reign, the western breadbasket, fed not only Tarmahc but much of the known world. Their grain production was monumental, made possible by irrigation trusses, seed-rotation systems, and stone mills worked by Giant labor. Their engineers harnessed wind with primitive towers, grinding flour at a scale other continents envied. From San Reign came the first organized studies of soil, charts of fertility and yield recorded across generations, now lost beneath salt-flats. Spiritually, San Reign’s folk practiced ancestor-shamanism tied to the harvest cycle, seeing each reaping as a covenant with the dead.
Disbandment
Tarmahc is already gone. No central authority exists to dissolve, it dissolved itself in fire, salt, and collapse. What endures is only meagre remnants.
Demography and Population
There remains of the once millions who roamed the former landscape, an estimated 200,000 scattered across isles and ports. Dominant of the races here are Lizard-Kin and Serpentine, with smaller enclaves of Humans, Smallfolk, Ursi, and Giants who returned to claim what little they could of their old world after the ash and rain had stopped falling. Densities are low, settlements precarious, migrations constant after quakes or floods which frequently still batter the area. In the centuries since the Fall, Tarmahc has also become home to the largest Aquian population above sea-level in the world. Drawn from their nation of Naumos beneath the Laughing Sea, Aquian migrants settle here in large numbers, finding in the archipelago’s broken isles both opportunity and peril. They bring with them their crafts, intricate glass trinkets, fine jewelry spun from shell and pearl, and their indispensable skill as ruin-scouts, able to slip below tides in search of treasure or relics no surface-dweller could reach.
Territories
The Serpent’s Spine once cut the continent in two; now it is a drowned ridge, its peaks forming the scar-isles. Old territories survive only as names: “The Bell Isles” for Omendahl’s ruins, “Saltgrave” where San Reign once stood, “Tulani Shoals” where forests are now reefs.
Military
No standing armies remain. Defense is conducted by slaver-crews, serpent-riders, and Giant dock wardens or whoever owns the island in-question. Smallfolk form tight militias, Ursi defend hot-spring refuges, and Lizard-Kin warbands dominate shallows and coasts. The sea itself is the greatest weapon, swallowing any who misstep.
Technological Level
Pre-Schism, Tarmahc rivaled Dwarfish Kathar in steel, sky-craft, and agriculture. Today, only fragments endure, salt-distilleries, plantation mills, and crude salvage forges. Relic-hunters occasionally recover Pre-Schism artifacts, but most are lost beneath the sea or buried in molten ruin.
Religion
Endurance itself has become religion. The people honor ancestors not as gods, but as examples of survival. Xaethra’s name is cursed; Vile’s name is spit as betrayal. Cults persist in drowned vaults, some whispering still to the Wanting Maw, others to Vile’s supposed lingering hunger; Those who are found to do-so are drawn and quartered, even under the banner of The Knights of All-Faith should one of their Xaethra worshippers make the journey here. But most folk here treat any faith as a luxury Tarmahc cannot afford.
Foreign Relations
- Everwealth: Exploits Tarmahc’s sugar and salt; views it as supplier, not partner.
- Kathar: Trades through slavers, prizes Tarmahc’s venom and cane.
- Kibonoji & Arcryo: Minimal direct contact, though raiders and relic-hunters cross the sea to the islands every day from these lands alongside every other.
- Malabash: Like the rest of the world, the continent of Malabash sees no contact with the rest of the world; The land wracked constantly with towering waves caused by colorful magickal thunderstorms from ash-black clouds constantly swirling in a raging cyclone overhead. None enter, none leave, only fools dare to try.
- Naumos: Relations with the undersea realm of Naumos are unsteady but constant, bound by necessity. Aquian divers make their livelihoods salvaging drowned ruins under the eye of the Scholar’s Guild or selling glasswork and jewels in coastal markets. Though welcome for their lungs and craft, they are never fully trusted, their sea-songs treated as both blessing and omen. Trade flows both ways, Tarmahc sends coin and cane, Naumos sends swimmers who risk the depths where even the Serpentine fear to go.
Laws
Law varies isle by isle, but most follow three rules:
- Chains and contracts are sovereign.
- Betrayal means death.
- Nothing wasted, not even the dead.
Agriculture & Industry
- Sugar cane plantations.
- Salt distilleries and brine-works.
- Venom extraction and trade.
- Limited vineyards in surviving fertile ridges.
- Reliance on Everwealthy imports for staples like grain.
- Viridite is too volatile for true industry. Forged poorly, it recoils its own resonance into the wielder, shattering bone as readily as stone. Forged well, it carries power like no other, blades that shatter armor plating, hammers that split the earth with a single blow. Most smiths will not touch it. Those who do either become legends, or corpses broken beneath their craft.
Trade & Transport
In Tarmahc, trade is neither grand nor stable, it is survival masquerading as economy. The scar-isles rely on a patchwork of sugar caravels, salt barges, and raiding skiffs strung between plantation docks and Serpentine-ruled harbors. Rope-bridges lash broken cliffs into networks of brine-works and distilleries, while the largest islands boast crude causeways built from shattered trusses of the old Serpent’s Spine. Once-mighty shipyards now little more than skeleton ports where vessels are cobbled from driftwood and scavenged iron. Overland roads are gone, drowned with the valleys. Navigation depends on sea-lanes and tide-marks, often dangerous, with straits patrolled by slavers and pirates. Trade is less about agreement than endurance: cargoes move only if the crew can fight off rivals long enough to dock. Yet in the shadows of this chaos, new enterprise thrives. The Scholars’ Guild contracts Aqiuan divers, paying them in surface coin to plunge beneath slowly receding waters where ruins re-emerge stone by stone. Shiploads of “salvage-rights” are escorted under armed watch, the Guild keeping jealous eyes on anything that might surface from Alandrior’s drowned foundries or Tulani’s sunken vineyards. Yet for every sanctioned expedition there are ten unsanctioned ones, bandit-slave-gangs and pirate fleets that prowl the straits, plundering sugar, flesh, and relics alike. In these waters, a ship is as likely to return laden with cane as it is to vanish, wrecked or boarded, its crew sold in chains. Trade in Tarmahc is half lifeline, half grave-robbery. Viridite circulates only in whispers. Its color alone betrays it, gleaming jade-bright but glossy as though slick with seawater, impossible to disguise. Smuggled shards fetch fortunes in black markets, while the Scholar’s Guild hoards any fragments their divers bring up from the drowned ley-pockets. The Arcane Coalition bans its possession outright in most cases, claiming it is “dangerous magickal phenomenon.”
Education
Education is survival. Smallfolk count tides and bells; Giants teach stone-binding; Lizard-Kin and Serpentine drill in saltwater craft and venom-working. Book-learning survives only in fragments, often smuggled or salvaged from drowned ruins.
Infrastructure
- Rope bridges between cliffs.
- Cave-brine works.
- Plantation mills.
- Tower-lights in old ruins, many half-collapsed.[/li
- Drowned aqueducts and roads, useless save as foundations.
Mythology & Lore
Tarmahc’s myths are now elegies. The Serpent’s Spine is said to weep salt through the waves, mourning the kingdoms buried below. Bells toll on fog nights, not by hand but by ghosts of Omendahl. Some claim Alandrior’s crown still lies whole beneath the tide, waiting for a worthy hand.
DISBANDED/DISSOLVED
"From Hearth to Husk." (Once the heart of the world, now remembered as its ruin.)
Dissolution Date
1804 LA, the end of The Fall, and the start of the Schism. When Xaethra left a golem vessel she had possessed falling into Tarmahc from miles-on-high, after her general Vile conducted a failed ritual to consume her; All-but erasing the entire continent.
Alternative Names
'The Tarmahc Islands', 'Where it all Ended'.
Demonym
'Tarmahci'.
Gazetteer
- The Bell Isles: Ruins of Omendahl, where bells toll from drowned towers.
- Saltgrave: Former San Reign, buried in salt flats and collapse.
- Tulani Shoals: Forests turned to reefs, now a labyrinth of coral and bone.
- The Serpent’s Spine Scar: Jagged isles formed from the drowned mountain ridge.
- Alandrior’s Deep: Vast chasm where the lowlands slid into the sea, said to be haunted by leviathans.
Currency
Before the Fall, Tarmahc’s economies thrived on minted coinage that reflected the grandeur of its four nations. Alandrior’s Marks (iron discs, stamped with furnace sigils) served as the backbone of industrial trade. Omendahl preferred Shellcrowns (silvered coins etched with wave-crests), widely circulated along the coast. Tulani used Vine-Chits, thin copper ingots braided together in sets, easy to split or combine for vineyards and market stalls. San Reign struck the Loaves, heavy golden coins impressed with sheaves of wheat, symbolic of their role as the breadbasket. After the Fall, all such coinage lost stability or were reduced to burned museum pieces displayed as 'the last of their kind' in most cases. In the shattered archipelago, barter and survival-value currencies dominate. Salt bricks, cane-sugar measures, and even shackles of iron serve as coin in the isles. Serpentine slavers trade in Flesh-Weight, the value of a captive measured against cane or steel. The few minted Loaves or Shellcrowns that wash up in ruin-markets fetch prices more for nostalgia than worth. Tarmahc’s “currency” today is misery: sugar, salt, and skin.
Major Exports
What Tarmahc produces now is sorrow turned commodity. Sugar and salt are its twin exports, plantation yields bought with the lives of debt-slaves and captives. Vineyards on the higher isles bottle cheap wines that fuel foreign taverns. Whale-oil rendered from coastal hunts still finds its way to Everwealthy lamps, though far less than in ages past. But its most infamous trade is not crop or beast, but flesh. Serpentine slavers make a fortune trafficking laborers across the seas, cloaking their business as “indenture” while selling men, women, and beast-folk alike. Alongside this cruelty, another, subtler industry grows: salvage. As the seas recede, broken ridges rise, baring fragments of drowned Tarmahc. Aqiuan divers, contracted and overseen by the Scholar’s Guild, scour the depths for relics, forged steel, sealed texts, rune-marked stones. These “archaeological exports” are sold as artifacts, trophies, or fuel for rival magick. In this way, Tarmahc’s greatest modern export may be its own corpse, sold piece by piece to the world beyond. And sometimes the sea gives back ruins older than The Lost Ages themselves, black vaults and reef-choked shrines whose names have long been forgotten. To disturb them is to court curses, but desperate men and ambitious scholars dive anyway, prying open doors that perhaps should have stayed drowned.
Major Imports
The isles cannot feed themselves. Grain, hardy vegetables, and livestock come in bulk from Everwealth to the east and Arcryo the frozen north, carried at great cost across the Laughing Sea. Iron and forge-grade steel are imported constantly, for what little local ore remains lies drowned in brine or fractured by eruptions. Medicines, glass, and clean textiles fetch enormous prices, especially in plague seasons when brine-rot festers. Among luxuries, Everwealthy wines, Kibonojians silks, and Katharan narcotics are in demand by the surviving aristocrats and slaver-lords. Even sugar-masters trade their own cane away to import such trappings, proof that vanity outlives even ruin. The bitter irony is that some goods once perfected in Tarmahc, Alandrior's steel, Omendahl soap, Tulani vintages, now must be brought back at a premium from foreign shores, their local industries long dead beneath the waves.
Legislative Body
Tarmahc no longer has a unified legislature. Before the Fall, each nation maintained codified law: Alandrior through forge charters, Omendahl through maritime councils, Tulani through agricultural covenants, San Reign through ancestor-rites written on tablets of grain-yield. Together, these laws formed a mosaic of custom across the continent. Now, in the isles, law is written only by whoever rules a harbor or plantation stronghold. The Serpentine warbands carve their decrees into stone docks, the Lizard-Kin barter law in brine-ledgers, and plantation lords write edicts in sugar accounts. The only constant law is survival: betrayal is punished brutally, contracts enforced in blood.
Judicial Body
Interpretation of law fell to each culture in the old days: Omendahl’s shamans judged disputes by tide-omens; Alandrior’s smith-lords held forge-courts where oaths were bound by metal; Tulani arbormasters ruled in groves by the testimony of witnesses; San Reign’s ancestor-keepers decided guilt through ritual harvests. Today, the concept of justice is nearly extinct. Trials are rare and often symbolic. Disputes are “settled” by ritual duels, by forced oaths sworn over salt or sugar, or by shamans interpreting whether a storm or calm tide marks innocence. More often than not, the sword or the whip is the only judge.
Executive Body
Once, Tarmahc’s executive powers were embodied by kings, high shamans, and harvest lords who enforced their laws with militias, mercenary companies, or temple guards. These were organized, at least in part, by tradition and mandate. Now, enforcement belongs to those who can physically compel obedience: serpent-slavers who scour the straits, plantation masters who drive Ursi or Human debt-slaves with lash and brand, and Lizard-Kin raiding parties who enforce brine-dues. No centralized authority remains. On each isle, law is whatever the strong can make others obey, and obedience lasts only so long as salt and blood flow.
Location
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