Earth-1494

Earth-1494 is one of the Twilit Worlds, where it is known as Mistsea. It is not a solid planet at all, but rather a vast group of islands floating on and in a translucent "mist", which is composed only partially of water. The islands always stay the same way up (though why this is so is not fully understood), but move laterally in the complex currents of the mist, and so do not remain in the same spatial relationship to each other. While none of the islands itself is large enough to display tectonic activity or vulcanism, but great natural disasters occasionally occur in the form of collision of two islands. Fortunately, because the movement depends on the surrounding currents nearby islands tend to be moving similarly, so these collisions are rare and usually of low relative velocity.

It is clear that Mistsea orbits a sun - or that a sun orbits it - from the light patterns, but the refraction of light in the mist combined with the discontiguous land mass softens the distinction of day and night.

That some geological features appear to continue from one island to another suggests that the islands once formed part of a greater land mass. More interestingly, if ancient records are to be believed, when the magical races first reached Mistsea there were ruins of structures obviously made by sentient beings that appeared on two islands. This lends credence to the theory that the islands were once a more conventional planet that suffered some unknown catastrophe. This may also explain why so many islands are barren rocks or have only minimal soil on them: the theory is these were once in the interior of the planet.

Because of the everchanging positions of the islands, combined with the fact that most races do not have convenient access to flight, most travel between islands is done through worldwalking. Because correspondence points are small and relatively defensible, this generally means that the islands too are highly defensible: in consequence, it is very common in practice for each island to correspond to a sovereign state, whatever the legal position. In fact, small "private islands" owned (legitimately or de facto) by wealthy and powerful individuals are not uncommon; nor are "pirate" or "bandit" islands.

Observatories
One unusual feature of Mistsea are the many "observatories" to be found on various islands. They track the relative movement of the islands, and serve two main purposes. Firstly, they predict collisions and near-collisions between islands, enabling people to prepare for disaster or, sometimes to allow direct physical interaction of the people of different islands without the use of fairy paths. More interestingly, they serve an astrological basis: the sort of information that people of other worlds search the skies for really is available in the movement of the islands. (It is a moot point whether astrology works universally, but the fluid nature of Mistsea allows it to be more easily usable.) Almost all major realms have at least one observatory on Mistsea, as all want as much astrological intelligence as possible, but the sages have the most, and in practice the observatories have become a rare project of international cooperation, because the collated data from all observatories allows for better readings than a handful of observatories can manage. This collation of data is done by the sages, as only they are sufficiently universally trusted. Even so, there is much fact-checking of intelligence received from them.