The Southern Unknown

The circumference of Zenáthras is wrapped by the Great Equatorial Storm, an almost-impassable barrier of rough waters, constant typhoons, and the most monstrous sea creatures known to mortalkind.  It girds the world and means that everything in one hemisphere exists without the knowledge or interference of the other hemisphere.

Since our journey focuses on the northern hemisphere, that means that everything south of the Great Storm is an utter mystery.  All that is truly known are guesses based on fragmentary records of what existed there before the War of the Traitor-Heroes and the wild, unreliable tales of sailors, many of whom are adamant that they know someone who knows someone that made a voyage south of the equator and returned to tell the tale.

The mightiest nation on Zenáthras was once located south of the equator, on the primary landmass.  It was a cosmopolitan empire that covered nearly a tenth of the world's surface known as Great Fassadum.  But the War of the Traitor-Heroes was centered on the heart of Great Fassadum, the capital city of Dyykada and it is believed that, at the very least, that great nature would have been subjected to a fate similar to that of the portion of the northern hemisphere now known as the Direwild.  Some argue that the lands of the south—being more tamed by the hands of humanoids and more densely populated—would have fared better following the collapse of magic, but others argue that those same properties would have left the survivors too soft to face their challenges and too crowded for resources to be distributed equitably.

What is known is that a tremendous amount of the world's military might had been sent to Great Fassadum to face the might of the Traitor-Heroes and, be it from war or the loss of magic, they never returned north.  The hopeful say that these armies would have contributed to stabilizing the region, ignoring the fact that many of abilities and almost all of their tactics and training assumed the presence of numina and easy access to magic.

While these conjectures are rampant amongst scholars and dockhands alike, the truth remains that there is simply no reliable knowledge about what has happened in the area now simply called the Southern Unknown.