“It is said that in the beginning, there was but the Howling Dark, a roiling black without end, where formless minds screamed in silent madness. Our worlds, three, bow’d in perpetuity to its pull. To Pyre, we pray, may its great eye remain closed, may its wrath never fall upon our precious works.”

– The Ruined Sage

In stark contrast to Shael’s sprawling landmasses, Nuath’s continents rise jagged from teeming seas, each overrun with primordial forces and voracious life. Temperate continents like Matzlan and Ulai host towering forests where Pyre’s light is reduced to a moonlike flicker. Rings of fire break from land and ocean, beset by swarms of extremophile plants and animals. Seasonal ice caps dominate the arctic in winter, only to be consumed by frost-resistant kudzu in the spring and summer.

Wind scoured ranges loom across the planet’s verified landscapes, casting long rain shadows and feeding winding rivers. Shum’s interior would be a sprawling desert, were it not for the works of elder civilizations, whose spells and technologies draw moisture from the planet’s mantle, seeding the interior with clouds and precipitation. On the great continent of Ald, a rash of volcanic hotspots conspire with air currents to melt constantly growing glaciers, maintaining fertile river systems deep into the continent’s basins. Under the polar ice caps languish the remnants of ancient nations, buried and nameless, evidence of a warmer, wetter past .

Dim and distant, Xur orbits Pyre as the moon of the great gas giant Thrym. Shattered, Xur is like no other world: inscrutable, unfathomable, and utterly alien. Its crust sundered and cracked by apocalypses long forgotten, its butchered continents held aloft by forces unknown, its iridescent oceans flickering with enigmatic promise, Xur once offered magic and God-like tools to those who could survive it. No complete map of the ancient moon seems to have survived the Elder’s War, though records speak extensively of locations bearing strange and ominous names like the “Innermost Sea” and the “Smoke-Dunes of Sehk.”