Lore · A place and a god
Ceta'Canaashen
One of the Six, and also the ground underfoot. The Ceta live on it, and so do the Surok, the Primok, the Ganorok, the Ursi and the Cani. Two of the other living gods ride its back.
Grants order and alignment. It reads you.
The pilgrimage, south to north
The return leg is the same road walked backward, and nothing happens on it. That is the point of a pilgrimage.
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The south pole
Artificially temperate. A god decided it should be comfortable here, so it is.
Every pilgrimage starts at the warm end. Ceta'Canaashen has not been taking visitors for very long, but long enough that a custom has formed around it: a foreigner is expected to walk from the south pole to the north and back, meeting the landmarks and the living gods on the way.
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The City of Ceta'Canaashen
The god's maw, splayed open, is the city. You do not enter it so much as get let in.
It thrives. It appears to be built of evershifting technicolor abalone, and the appearance does not settle down when you look at it longer.
There is weather here that is not weather. The psychic pressure of the gods and everyone living under them makes it hard to question anything too hard — handed a problem, a person here tends to simply try to help solve it. Whether that is peace or something closer to sedation is left to the visitor.
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The Swiftway
An enchanted forest path from the city to the equator. It is the only reason the walk is possible on foot.
It is a road because someone walked it. Agonar, an ancient Ganorok lord, grew too large to enter the city. He asked the Ceta for the secrets of living death they had cultivated, and then he walked — from the god's head to the equator, once.
The line he trod is the Swiftway. Everyone since has used it.
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The Plains of Agonar
Where the Swiftway ends. A nomadic-warrior hub, and an island of peace on a savage planet.
Agonar's titanic corpse lies at the south end of the plains. Alaaga is enthroned at the north end, running a war.
What she is fighting are hordes of Surok and Primok pouring out of the planet's dark side, channelling chaos. The channelling has a cost nobody there is tracking: it thins the barrier between dimensions, and this is the era when the first Orcs and Grekin begin slipping through it — individually, a few strays folded into the horde. Nothing arrives in force on the planet where the god of order lives.
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The northern thicket
Trael's hemisphere. A massive faewild, and the reason some travelers stop noticing the predators.
Her children the eternals live here and make mischief in it. An eternal wears the face of a child of any species, or it is pure flame; those are one being, and crossing the child burns the face off.
The atmosphere is thickly hallucinogenic and gets thicker toward the dark side. The mischief and the air together are enough that some pilgrims find the thicket the worst part of the journey, on a planet where the rest of it is trying to eat them.
Two of its peoples
The Ceta
Space whales, and sapient — they hold conversations. They are also far too large to travel with anyone, for the straightforward reason that they are the ships.
Equipment mounted on a Ceta doesn't stay bolted on. It gets absorbed, and integrated, and after a while it is simply part of the whale.
The Cani
Sapient dogs. They are companions and neighbours here, not soldiers.
Trael the Greatmother — the great golden wolf, one of the Six — is an overgrown golden Cani. The relation is not symbolic.