Merchants of Knowledge and Magic Locations

The image above shows how the planes of the Pentagonal Dominion connect. Locations listed are places relevant to MoKaM specifically. The Ophidian plane has far more than the four cities listed there. In fact, Maware Uma is a small town compared to the other three. Yet it gets listed because Calinthe’s journey took her there. Cosmo’s locations are planets rather than cities.

Mortals are unable to access Spiritua and the Quarantined Plane. Furthermore, the Terran Dominion is only displayed to show its connection to Aloutia. It is not part of the Pentagonal Dominion at all, and nobody who goes there ever comes back. Thus, a mortal traveling merchant like Calinthe has access to four planes: The Makai, Ophidia, Cosmo, and Aloutia.

The Makai Plane is where Calinthe’s employer, Demon Lord Williford, lives. Her journeys typically start and end here, in his castle on a waterfall. She has a bedroom in his castle which is the closest thing she has to a home now. The Makai is under the control of the Demonic Kingdom.

The Makai is ruled by the 39 Demon Nobles. Among the 39 are Williford, Selfishness, and Vivea. The make up a cohort, a trio of demons under the same superior, who in their case is Prince Valanier. The territory ruled by any given Demon Lord is usually close to the territory of their cohorts. In the map above, Williford’s realm is around his castle, the Sea of Swans Castle, while Lord Selfishness rules from the Cinnamon Grove Palace and Vivea de jure rules from Kalu Alma Emberdyme. De facto, Vivea leaves the ruling of her realm to her Prince, Valanier, who lives there in her stead. Vivea has chosen to live with Williford at the Sea of Swans Castle, where he dotes on her as if she were his granddaughter.

The Ophidian Plane only allows women to travel through freely, and by women, they mean people who they decide are women. Ophidians have a strict, intolerant, downright-bigoted view on who counts as a woman, and if you don’t meet their standards, you aren’t allowed through their portals. A Demon Lord like Selfishness can always create a portal for a man or intersex person to sneak through, of course, so the restrictions aren’t too troublesome for anybody who knows her.

Calinthe’s journeys briefly take her to Maware Uma, the “City of Turning Horses” so-named for the horses in the area which were specifically bred for agility. Slave laws are lax in many of the towns across the Hirano Plains, but that doesn’t mean they are ignored. No man in Maware Uma would dare disobey his master, though doing so might only earn him a few lashed on his backside, rather then the sort of torture he’d earn in Ophiuchus or Othershore.

Serpentine and Othershore are sister-cities, being on opposite sides of the river. Long ago, the only city was Serpentine, and nobody went to ‘the other shore’ because it was believed to be haunted or cursed. Higanbana flowers grew in profusion on that side and their poisonous bulbs kept away vermin. Eventually brave settlers founded a city there anyway, though the rotten, poisoned feeling never disappeared.

Serpentine is famous for its mines which produce two materials: Green serpentine, used to make jewelry; and white serpentine, used to make gunpowder. The city is ruled by House Shinozaki, currently headed by Hiyori Shinozaki, Governor of the Serpentine Region. She owns the mines and sells all her supply of white serpentine to House Higangaoka, the rulers of Othershore. The Serpentine Mines are infamous for being the place where all unsellable, unwanted slaves are sent to toil until they fall down dead. A man only needs to mine for a week before he’s found enough white serpentine that his owners have made a profit off him. Upon being sent to the mines, a man can expect to live for about half a year more. There are rumors that Governor Shinozaki feeds all her dead slaves to her tiger, but this is not true—men die every day, and the tiger only eats every four-five days.

While Hiyori Shinozaki may be the governor of the region containing both cities, she’s nowhere near as wealthy or influential as the ruler of Othershore, Mayume Higangaoka. All guns and gunpowder in Ophidia are made by House Higangaoka in their secret factory. Hiyori and Mayume are best friends, lovers, and business partners.

Calinthe’s journey takes her to Vega, a city on the tip of Starsine. The map above displays the two halves of Starsine. The ‘planet’ is a 3D structure shaped like a curled hand. Wherever you go on Starsine, gravity pulls you toward your relative ‘ground.’ As you walk around one of the tips, you will always feel ‘right-side up.’

Vega is a ‘tall’ city designed for the Derion, a species of people who can fly and whose hands can detach and fly around. The city is shaped like a ring encircling the Derion Arm of Starsine, with Shander’s Lake in the center comprising the tip of the arm. While Derion make up most of the population of Vega, they are a land-dwelling species who stay in the city ring. Their protectors are the massive plesiosaur-like species, the Sin-Derion, who live in the lake.

Sin-Derion require a salt water environment. When the world was created and the ocean was initially fresh water, the Time Goddess tentatively placed a few of the species—then called ‘water longmen’—in Shander’s Lake. This specific lake was the only body of water large and saline enough at the beginning of this timeline to support the water longmen. She knew that in most futures, the ocean would become salty over time, and eventually the water longmen could go through a portal and migrate to the oceans. She packed Shander’s Lake with enough fish so that—as long as they were not overeaten—they would last the water longmen for about five centuries. Unfortunately, the timeline of the Merchants series is not one where the ocean became salty. When Demon Lord Deep Sea was created and took over the ocean, he kept his waters fresh. Deep Sea chips away at land, absorbs salt, and coalesces it into chunks which he sells to the merchants of salt.

The water longmen were concerned that they would be trapped in their lake forever, and they would eventually run out of fish unless they initiated strict breeding programs and kept their population low. While this is something they currently do, they were allowed to increase their population above what they initially expected thanks to the Vegan Derion. Per their culture and religion, these Derion do not believe in committing violence. Spilling blood is particularly heinous. Some will even go so far as to proscribe self-defense. After the Ophidian Revolution, many Derion men found themselves enslaved as they refused to fight back against merchants of flesh. The one exception their religion allowed involved the non-bloody killing of animals to feed carnivores. Thus, the Derion and water longmen came to an agreement: the Derion will hunt animals for the water longmen, and the water longmen will protect the Derion who intended to build a settlement around the lake. The water longmen, with their ability to blast death beams from their mouths, were good at killing, but could not leave their lake to bring food back. The water longmen took the name ‘Sin-Derion’, meaning a Derion who was permitted to sin. The Derion settlement eventually grew into the massive, tall city of Vega.

Just as Starsine is a star-shaped planet, so too is Munil a crescent moon-shaped planet. The ‘inside’ of the moon as displayed in the map is empty space. The Undermoon Islands are floating in midair, for instance, and the two near-stars orbit Munil as two miniature suns.

Calinthe’s journey takes her to Life Tree City, a massive city built into and atop life trees, which can grow thousands of feet tall. For Calinthe, Life Tree City is nothing impressive— it’s the city she grew up in. The Mind church was her home for fifteen years: from the time her parents decided it was better to let the volkhvs raise her than to take her into the Hollow Void, until she was a teenager and left with a master merchant of knowledge to become an apprentice.

The government of Life Tree City provides ‘landing leaves’ for all Odonata so they have somewhere to sit, rest, and restock before they head up into the Hollow Void once more.

Life Tree City is a place of high diversity. No single species comprises the majority, although there are more Life elementals than anything else. Some species of Life elementals have chosen Life Tree City to be their ‘homeland’, including the Isopterans, Thysanopterans, Mecopterans, and Plecopterans. All species with ‘—ptrans’ at the end of their name are winged, so Life Tree City was initially built for winged people. Only after social reforms and a few wars which left disabled wingless veterans did they implement the nets. The nets are made from the hair of Trichopterans and glued to the trees with Collembola mucus.

Life Tree City’s diversity of species comes from the Time Goddess putting many Life elemental species nearby at the beginning of time. Since the trees make for excellent homes for flying people, they made an obvious choice when their neighbors were the brutal, warmongering, wingless Mujin. Any attempt of a Mujin army to infiltrate Life Tree City resulted in failure. Often their armies were stuck on the jungle floor while the winged species dropped flechettes from a safe distance. The Mujin attempted to use fire to burn some trees down while they hid, safe from flechettes. Some trees were destroyed in this manner, though in every instance, the Life Tree inhabitants were able to make the Mujin retreat before the fire spread too far.

The last plane on the ‘chain’ of Calinthe’s travels before she heads back to the Makai is Aloutia. As a whole, the Holy Aloutian Empire is known to be an egalitarian society welcoming of all people regardless of their species or gender. However, Aloutia is a large country comprised of 154 vassal nations, of which some are less tolerant of outsiders than others.

MoKaM opens with Calinthe in Minirya, a city in the far north, where the temperature is always cold. Minirya is on Wolf Island, but is also a port town in Kraken-populated waters. As such, the population of the city is roughly half Wolf and half Kraken. Krakens are a transforming species—on land, they are a small bipedal humanoid with tentacles and soft, squishy skin that does not easily take damage.

Later, Calinthe’s journey takes her to Demaca, a city in The Corridor, a passage of water between Tsagwa and Slevango continents. Demaca is populated by Daga, a species of large sapient turtle-people with golden shells that have been enchanted with Water elementrons that allow them to float. Daga shed their shells a few times over the course of their lives, and then leave their shells behind when the rest of their body is sawdusted. The shells throughout the city are used to make islands.

Ruomi is at the north pole. Since the map is a 2D representation of a 3D sphere, it was difficult to portray that, but imagine it being at the very top of a globe. If you picture the map above as a globe, you can also imagine how close Wolf Island actually is to Ruomi—barely a short swim away if you hitch a ride on a Kraken.

Ruomi is one of the 154 vassal nations, and one of the few remaining monarchies at that. As a vassal, the King of Ruomi is subordinate to the Emperor of Aloutia. Moreover, since the king is chosen from amongst high-ranking Ruomalaiset in the military, the king is also subordinate to Aloutia’s four generals.

Since Ruomi is at the north pole, it’s perpetually cold. Water shoots up from the ground and, over time, freezes into the massive upside-down icicles as seen in the picture above. They call these structures “ice reeds” and in fact Ruomi means “land of reeds” in their language. The Ruomi language resembles Finnish (Suomi), though they’re not identical. For one, the Ruomalaiset people had no concept of gender until they arrived in the Pentagonal Dominion and met other species. As such, their language was devoid of gendered words until about 1400 years ago.

Issues of sex and gender pervade current Ruomi society. They are an asexual species, reproducing by themselves. The Ophidians arbitrarily decided that the Ruomalaiset were a “slave sex” so that they felt validated in enslaving them to use their bellies for food preservation. In response to this, the free Ruomalaiset in Aloutia took a bold stance against the Ophidians and went hyper-masculine. They embraced masculine stereotypes and culture as a way to distance themselves from the Ophidians and to show the Aloutians that they were ready and willing to fight Ophidians at a moment’s notice. The hyper-masculinization of Ruomi has, unfortunately, led to discrimination and bullying to people who do not wish to partake in that culture. Some people like Päivi would rather be considered feminine, or at least not-masculine. This is a problem in the military, where some soldiers harass those who they consider ‘too feminine’ or accuse them of being traitors and/or Ophidian spies.