The Borrowed Land

A thousand years ago humans left Earth and came to a planet via a series of generation ships. It is unknown why they left Earth, but the relatively sparse numbers of generation ships suggest that it was an experiment / colonisation effort. Upon landing, the colonists found that the planet was barren - a globe of rock and dust accompanied by a moon orbiting a single star.

The expedition was conducted without the intention of a return voyage - the generation ships weren't built to carry enough fuel for the return journey. The generation ships were used as habitats for some time, but the lack of fuel led to a lack of energy, leading in turn to hydroponic, heat, light and oxygen provision failures. The colonists were resigned to their fates as a doomed experiment, but, fortunately for them, a deus ex machina in the form of a 40 year old woman appeared.

HER was a colonist on the generation ship colonisation journey who was (maybe is) able to conduct magic. Magic in the context of HER is the memorisation and understanding of specific ways of using a rechargeable sui generis resource that can be applied to various tasks. For example, HER was able to create soil, vegetation and a breathable atmosphere in the first decade of landing. It is unapparent how she was able to do this on such a massive scale, but it has been replicable on a smaller scale, using some of the instructions she left in her Codex Muliercula. As a result of HER's magic, the Borrowed Land is verdant and a pleasant place to live, though the introduction of magic, while saving the colonists, has created a number of different problems for them - not least of which is a vast geneology of different beings that HER created.

All magic (and magical creatures) are in some way connected to HER, either through blood (she is an ancestor to every human magic user) or through being the creator who caused them to exist. HER now resides in her own pocket dimension, called HERE.

Because the magical creatures (and non-magical creatures) extant on the Borrowed Land arose (initially) out of the imagination of HER, they fall fairly neatly into archetypal categories of mythical creatures; beings such as unicorns, fairies, gargoyles exist, though are augmented or adjusted according to what they need to exist (fairies use the clap and fling mechanism to gain height, for example; the bones of reanimated skeletons are infused with properties of magnetism, so that when a femur is knocked off it'll be magnetically pulled back to the pelvis). These specific rules are inherent in every creature, except in cases where the creature is itself a paradox: when paradoxes form, they are resolved in Antimony.

There are three major continents in the Borrowed Land, and a fourth that forms and unforms according to tectonic movements. The three primary continents are named for the primary letters of HER:

Ash - a vast continent that lies across a tectonic fault. It is lush because of the volcanic soil but has continuous tectonic processes.

Eye - a perfectly circular continent formed of a series of concentric rings. At the centre is Iris, an inland tropical sea, surrounding Pupil, an abyss that is rumoured leads to Antimony.

Rare - a small continent that is in large part submerged. It is a small collection of mountains in the sea, with a number of civilisations living deep in the heart of the mountains.

The fourth continent is an archipelago of islands that drift apart or together depending on the movements of plates. When unformed, the archipelago is known as Incoho; when formed, it is known as Cacumen.