29 August 2026
The world of Unyha is a living landscape shaped by centuries of activity and in-world history. Between seasons the terrain endures while civilizations do not: ruins accumulate, roads outlast the people who built them, and forests reclaim what was once cleared. What follows is a traveller's tour of where Spiritfolk go, and why.
Three great cities anchor the settled world — the seats of the Circle's order, each grown up around one of the ancient points where Unyha calls her Spiritfolk:
Brimmar — a coastal trade hub in the north, Circle-administered, docks active, its graveyard occasionally restless. Brimmar is where things arrive: ships, strangers, salvaged goods, bad news. Organized rather than safe.
Rikhan — the vast central city and the heart of the Circle's power, ringed by prosperous farmland. Its size makes it politically complex and usefully anonymous, and beneath its ordered streets the dungeons run full of the city's outcasts.
Darak — a desert city on a lakeshore, set against tall cliffs. Darak feels older than the coastal towns; its Circle presence is embedded and patient, and its crypts run deep into the cliff face, home to the dead and the things that tend them.
Away from the great cities, smaller places live closer to the water and to danger. Breen is a tight-knit fishing village on a cove, working and suspicious of outsiders, its dead buried far outside town for reasons no one quite explains. Around Brimmar, the Circle's writ frays: Old Brimmar is inhabited by people who chose not to leave, and hidden landings like Barrow Beach and Whisper Bay handle the arrivals that don't want to be seen — smuggled goods, quiet meetings, and the pirates who work the coast.
Tann is a mining town on a ridge — industry over geography, a place that exists because of what lies in the ground beneath it. The Tann Mines hold precious ore, worked by people who know the deep shifts. Somewhere in the complex the Black Trench drops further than the mine was ever meant to go, unmarked on official maps; and above, the Tann Sanctuary stands haunted, a place of claimed sanctity now claimed by something else.
Beyond the towns lie the landmarks that predate whatever currently governs them:
The Elder Forest — the largest forest in the world, old enough to have its own presence. What lives inside is not bound by the rules of things outside it, and whether it is safe depends on whether it considers you worthy.
Farae Ruins — overgrown ruins that predate the area's current powers; abandoned rather than destroyed, and reliable neutral ground for anything ancient or forgotten.
Black Serpent Ridge — a great black ridge that local legend calls the petrified body of a serpent of impossible size. Whether it is truly a fossil, some stranger work of stone, or simply a shape that invited a story, no one can say — and if there is any truth to the tale, the creature would belong to an age so distant that no common memory could reach it.
Kall's Ruins — lakeside ruins named for someone once significant enough to be remembered by them, and now all that is left of whatever Kall built.
Blackthistle — a large castle on a hill, built to last and to be seen. Old power sits here, whether Circle seat, House stronghold, or neither.
Unyha's map is really a memory. Every ruin was once someone's ambition, every haunted site once an ending badly handled, every road a decision that outlived its makers. To travel the world is to read it — and to add, if your deeds are large enough, a landmark of your own.