cartographer back up

   It is not a well guarded secret that those maps dating back to the age of the adventurers; when gods and demon lords walked our lands; are themselves made not for us but for them. They were made in poor detail, vague and often false in shape, lacking many locations, and cryptic in their phrasing on how to find any given oasis or temple of divine power or else of lairs of threatening things. For our ancestors these maps were mere decorations to be strewn on the walls of temples and the mystic houses of restoration called "inns". In those days one did not leave the town or city they were born in unless they were a mercenary joining an adventurer, a missionary out to establish a new temple, on a pilgramage, a trader, or one of the city guards. Mapping our world or rather worlds as the case seems to be, was not something an ordinary citizen did. Maps were regarded as treasures to be hoarded by adventurers; maps to dungeons, maps to castles, maps on how to navigate a forest, cave system, or other labyrinth. Only traders had even rudimentary maps, and could sell copies of them to adventurers.

    Of course such matters in this day and age are purely academic, yet still a point of contention as we know so little about our world and its many mysteries that defy the reasonings of science and even the understandings of magic. I was both lucky and unlucky enough to be born in a world known to outsiders as the Multi-Environmental Island region. Our region or world as the mystery still stands is primarily ocean, dotted with numerous very small islands, rocks jutting from the sea, and many larger islands. Our islands are distinct from other regions we've found through the portals as each island, or small chain of islands regardless of relation to one another sports several small self contained climates, regardless of the greater atmosphere. Typically the majority of each island is covered in grassy fields and forests; I was so fortunate to be born in such a region, many islands have near their outer edges a dry area matching the climate of the desert world, as well as a much hotter area matching the jungle world. While some islands have a few different regions from one another such as a volcanic area, a corrupted by dark energy area, secret lagoon for the merfolk, mountain area, or else some small forest between the hot and cold; every island has in its norther regions a very cold area full of ice and snow. One of the first things that puzzled explorers who came through the portals from a large world of cities and one climate was how our climates were so self contained; the fact an island north of another despite the cold region of one would still have its tropical region at its own southern end just a few miles north of the other's cold region.

  By the sciences of that other world the climates should be more even, which makes sense given our own discoveries of weather patterns; that the temporate climate that fills the majority of each island is the natural one and that distortions of reality, like invisible domes, exist around these other spots controlling the climate. Our world was like a sample of other worlds put together in island chains.

  Among the many mysteries I would explore besides this was the nature of portals and pocket spaces. On some islands a cave was just a cave, map over it and through it, and the map matched up. Such caves had other entrances and were a part of the island. Some islands however had cave entrances that were not natural, instead they were portals to a vast undergrouund world whose location in relation to everything else remains a mystery. Explorers have found such caves were refered to as dungeons by the adventurers of old, and some could even be connected and come out on completly different worlds. Thankfully most such caves are clearly marked as such by an above ground marker like a demon's temple. Likewise we have found small towns, long abandoned centuries ago with houses sturdy as stone. The locals would tell us these were their villages during rhe era of Adventurers, but the door ways did not lead inside the stone houses, instead they lead to furnished tunnels too large to be inside, where sometimes even one house on the inside was larger than the entire village. Most were heated by eternal fires that kept them warm, but whose interior windows, basements, and chimneys were found to lead not to the outside but into the same vast underground world network as the dungeons. Fear of monsters crawling in through the windows lead to every such village being abandoned with fences and walls built up around them. Many people migrated to new villages. Strangely the records indicate the adventurers liked this and prefered "to scale" villages. The mystery as to how these were constructed, why, and how come people were forced to live in them for so long is one of the great mysteries of time as so little of history was recorded until after the era of adventurers.

   However I am no historian, although it does play into my profession as a cartographer. In my profession it is common to come across such anomalies and mark them on maps and learn the local stories about them. Areas marked off limites, properly mapping trails, rivers, lakes, and mountains for traders and travelers alike.