An introduction to West Faraday, as it stands.
Welcome to the continent of West Faraday! I'm not quite sure how you, hypothetical visitor, have arrived here, given that the Morganic tends to sink all ships that try to cross her and Synapse on the opposite coast will devour you in a far simpler manner, but regardless, welcome. I tend to like this description of this fair continent by Malachir Tyndell, Lapidarist of the Trilliantine Pavillion, of the dead empire the Gloaming Protectorate:
Eyelet caravans cloaked in protective mirrors leave the line of cities strung along the coast and journey ever inwards towards the heart of the empire, followed by the light of dusk. Each carries with them the endless vitalities of life, dredged up from the sea - sheaves of wheat to bake loaves of fine bread, spun wool and threaded silk, metal to line the joins between panes of stained glass in the Chatoyant's endless mirage-palace. The caravans, dripping seawater, are welcomed into Morrow's Bay1 with parades, banners, songs, feasts and riches, all of which were dredged up from the same sea the year before. The cities like tributaries feed into the Bay, and the Bay holds firm against the encroaching shore2 to protect those cities in turn. Without the blessing of the Chatoyant the roads are devoured by the twin devils of possibility and chance, which the Chatoyant traps in hir mirrors to grant safe passage to the people of hir empire.
I have traveled these roads many times in my long life, to add each journey to the canon of true things and ensure their protection. I have seen much as a result: towns on the edge of dark forests that keep death at bay with handheld stones that trap light, trees that stretch up past the line of the sky and catch in their limbs birds with hundreds of wings each, statues standing solemnly in ruins that have otherwise been worn away to nothing, towns ringed by storm sirens that will rise and walk across the landscape at the first sign of a rising wind. To travel across the Protectorate is to see in clear letters what a world defined and deliniated by possibility and chance contains within it's bounds.3
Everything they're talking about is long gone, of course. But the impression remains. West Faraday is a place that functions primarily on impossibilities. To pull sheaves of wheat directly out of the sea must be a mistranslation - but next time you're talking to someone from Primary, ask them what things they've seen dredged to the surface.
In the present day, out of that dredged-up past, West Faraday has five major cities: Primary, Meridian, Oiler's Pass, Arkosy, and Lariat. It's bordered on the western coast by the Morganic Sea and on the eastern coast by the Synapse, an expanse of the Mar so dense that it has proven impossible to pass through. People here are used to the dread of a coming apocalypse, and each city prepares for it in it's own way, as each person prepares the same.
While the intent of the histories catalogued here is to unerstand the past of West Faraday, the cities that are now long gone, it's near impossible to do so without coming into contact with the cities and histories that are here now. For every record of the Protectorate, the Bay, Shreveport, Triad, and Decade, there will be those from Arkosy, Lariat, Meridian, Primary, and Oiler's Pass, and even the myth-city of Marquis. Though I am from the city of Arkosy originally, my travels have taken me to each of these cities in turn, I have done my best to understand and document their histories as accurately as I document the past.