Arakol

By the time the people of Encara were able to activate the Worldgates and flee the hungering multitude, many parts of Encara had already been utterly devastated. This necessitated a flood of migration toward the more defensible cities, such that the surviving population of that world was largely concentrated around no more than a dozen or so opened worldgates.

The relationship between the gate in one world and the gate in another is not well understood, but there is no direct geographic correlation as was once speculated in the early days of research. One suggested theory, in those days, was that the worldgates somehow transcended space, time, and planar boundaries, and that there were a finite number of these artifacts which each represented a higher dimensional object able to be expressed across the multiverse from a single point. In layman's terms - a single needle and thread, drawn through countless layers of fabric, such that while each layer of fabric sees the point at which the thread passes through it, none comprehend that there is in fact only the one thread.

This has in some cases proved seemingly true, and in some cases not, which left scholars somewhat baffled until it was discovered that a single worldgate could be used to access multiple other gates in the same target world. This is where the unified gate theory arose - that there were not, as earlier theorized, a finite number of gates manifested across multiple dimensions (or at least, not as originally counted). Rather, there was and had only ever been a single worldgate from the start. The needle-and-thread had not been driven straight through a hundred layers of fabric so much as been woven into a complex tapestry, all made from that single cosmic thread. Evidence for this theory came from observations of magical resonance - when any gate was activated, other gates exhibited faint sympathetic vibrations, detectable only with incredibly fine instrumentation. Like plucking a lyre string approximately the length of the cosmos.

It is due to this nature of the artifact that the diaspora emerged almost exclusively on the continent of Arakol. Having established one reference point to work from, the other gates were opened with reference to the first, and in some cases the openings of the gates overlapped, so that the dozen or so worldgates opened from Encara emerged through only four gates on Thaedros. Whatever entity or ancient civilization that constructed the artifacts (or, rather, the artifact, singular) appears to have accounted for such a use, so that individuals who were thousands of leagues apart on Encara were able to emerge shoulder-to-shoulder on Thaedros.

Arakol is not fundamentally safer or friendlier than any other part of Thaedros, but by virtue of being the primary target of the Encaran diaspora it has become the most 'tamed', if such a word can be applied to even this center of civilization. There are two regions of Arakol that some refer to as nations, although even the leaders of Yldan and Enethir are at times hesitant to use such a word for what are, even more than a century later, largely collectives of communities which rely on one another, at times only grudgingly, for survival in a world where 'tame' only means that there are now at least several dozen locales within which a body is far less likely to be maimed or eaten by the local flora and fauna than was once true.

That said, most of the settlements across Arakol are either officially or unofficially associated with either Yldan or Enethir, with only a few exceptions to the far south of the continent, and along the eastern and western coasts.