Esstin Tropical Island

Place

Place Name:

Esstin Tropical Island

Biome:

Tropical Island

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Kiust Kin'toni Clan

Geography

Esstin is divided in two by a range of small but tall mountains. On one side — the larger side — the island is covered in greenery as far as the eye can see. Even the mountains are covered in it. But on the other side of the mountains, Esstin is a desert. The rain coming in from the sea is blocked by the mountains, and all that water soaks one half of the island and leaves the other desolate. There isn’t really a convenient way to get between the jungle and desert halves of Esstin, unless you have a boat. The Kiust clan does not have boats and therefore remains completely oblivious to the water and greenery that’s so close at hand.

There are several sturdy bridges connecting the desert half of the island to the mainland, which is also a desert. These bridges were made long ago by ancient peoples and they have not yet collapsed, despite their great age. These bridges, however, are not long: the distance between Esstin and the mainland isn’t that great and the water between them isn’t that deep. They’re so close together that the desert out on the mainland has also received the name Esstin, and is considered to be a part of its territory. (This is why Esstin is usually referred to as the Esstin Desert,.

And not as the Esstin Tropical Island. It is, nevertheless, a tropical island — if you get past the mountains.) The main geographical features of the desert on the mainland are the zu’aan villages in it, and the wells scattered about here and there. These are about the only important things you have to know about the mainland desert, whether you’re a zu’aan or a kin’toni. The main geographical features of the desert on the island of Esstin are the mountains to the west that prevent most of the sea’s storms and rain from getting over here, and the big oasis.

The oasis is where the Kiust Kin'toni Clan has built their huts. This oasis is the only source of fresh water for miles, since the channel separating the island from the mainland is salty, and the wells in the mainland desert are concentrated mostly on the eastern and southern borders. It’s this oasis that puts the Kiust clan into a position remotely resembling power. They control the only source of potable water for miles. You’d have to take a few days’ hike to find the next oasis or well. That is… you’d have to take a few days’ hike if you didn’t know there’s water on the other side of the mountains.

If you did know, you could find water after a ten minutes’ swim. The tropical side of Esstin has natural fountains and springs literally everywhere. You can’t walk for two minutes without seeing another one, unless you’re blind. It does however have some rotting buildings that are a little easier to miss. These are the remnants of a small village that could have had maybe twenty inhabitants at most. These inhabitants are long gone, it seems, but they’ve left behind a graveyard with fifteen gravestones. The words and names on the gravestones are indecipherable, but each stone seems to have been individually carved, by hand.

The most interesting geographical features on this side of the island, other than the fountains and the village, would be the vegetation.

Plants

Since there’s not many plants on the desert side of Esstin, and since there’s not been a whole lot of exploration done on the jungle side of Esstin, the knowledge people have of the plants in Esstin is correspondingly limited. So other than maybe the information about aatra trees in the following paragraphs, it’s not likely that anyone you meet will know these things that you’re now reading. All the plants that grow in Esstin are extremely green, though, for whatever reason. You’d think that desert plants would be a sickly, dehydrated green — well, I suppose they are, but there aren’t any desert plants in Esstin. There are coastal plants, though.

And these plants are extremely green. It gives the desert a surprisingly lively air when you spot a aatra tree off in the distance, leaves dancing in the air like they’re made of emeralds. Aatra trees grow everywhere on the beaches of Esstin, being one of the few plants that are able to drink up the readily available saltwater without harming themselves. Even the desert side of Esstin and the desert mainland have lots of aatra trees. They’re especially prevalent by the oasis on Esstin, though. The kin’tonis enjoy the shade they provide, and often build their huts around the aatra trees, using the trunk as the main support.

Some zu’aan have come to the saltwater channel between the island and the mainland of Esstin, and begun farming aatra. They’re quite useful, you see: they produce an excellent wood, they produce coconuts, they produce aatra leaves — every part of a aatra tree you can use for something. Even the bark has niche uses in building houses and other buildings. All in all, it’s a good business. aatra trees also grow on the jungle side of the island of Esstin. But they’re by no means the only trees. You have the burn’ron trees, which grow both blue leaves and fruits similar to coconut.

The latter explode with seeds and juice when they hit the ground. You have the gerwhip trees, which grow upside down from the mountain cliffs, suspended by their extremely strong roots. And you have the sorok trees, which grapple onto maybe five other trees and use them as supports to grow even higher into the air. The Yer’sho vines that wrap up practically every single tree in the jungle are worthy of note, too. Yer’sho vines are full of freshwater which they steal from trees that drink and purify saltwater — but they’re happy to steal freshwater from freshwater trees as well.

If you slash open one of these vines, water gushes out. See, there’s hundreds of small flowers that are happy to grow their roots into the Yer’sho vine and steal the water that flows through them. They grow on the vine, and drink up the water inside the vine — the same water that was stolen from other trees. One of these days someone needs to ask the vegetation of Esstin why they steal so much water from each other, when there’s freshwater fountains and waterfalls and rivers flowing probably less than fifteen feet away. Is the water that saturates the ground too difficult for them to tap into?

Are they too lazy to get up and get water for themselves, or something?

Animals

Once again, the animal life in Esstin is a lot more varied and vibrant on the jungle side of the island. The kin’toni and zu’aan keep the basic, ordinary desert livestock, the animals that won’t murder their owners and don’t need much water — but things are a lot more wild, savage, and interesting in the jungle. Let’s start with one of the less savage animals. Haar'aak are short, pale, round, tubby little creatures, much like la'aars. Their claws are decent at digging, being thick and sturdy — these claws are also useful for splitting open nuts and spearing fruits, which make up almost all of their diet.

However, this diet makes them extremely tasty for other predators, so haar'aak hide for as much of the day as they can get away with without starving. Their method of hiding? Well, they take the la'aar simile and make it stronger: they cover themselves with leaves, dig themselves a hole in the ground, sit in the hole, push the dirt over their heads, snuggle in the leaves they collected, and then think la'aar-y thoughts. If you like hunting haar'aak, it’s a lot like picking la'aars, except the la'aars squeal when you pull them up out of the ground. haar'aak don’t taste like la'aars, either, although la'aars might not be the worst of choices for a complementary vegetable when serving a meal of roast haar'aak.

Da'taia are sometimes seen flying above the desert half of Esstin — they certainly don’t encourage exploration in the mountains. Da'taia are enormous, first of all — big enough to swoop and drag off a young calf with little effort. They have four feathery wings, four leathery arms with four joints each, four spiny tails, and four different methods of killing things: they can choke their prey to death with either their arms or their tails, they can drop their prey from above the clouds and let gravity do the work for them, they can claw, bite, and slash at their prey and let it die from wounds and bloodloss, or they can spit acid.

Yeah, nobody’s in a hurry to venture into lands with those things flying about. Da'taia are typically a vibrant green colour, the better to blend in with the trees in which they nest and swoop from. They’re quite similar to eagles in many different ways — they hunt, they scavenge, they fish, they let out eerie cries that will be remembered for decades. They have hooked beaks and tufted heads and nimble talons. They make huge nests. Baby da'taia can be mistaken for fully-grown bright green birds pretty easily, since they tuck their four wings and extra pair of limbs together so that it looks like they have two wings and two legs.

Their tails they keep together so that they look like a singular fan tail. As soon as a baby da'taia takes to the air, however, it becomes readily apparent that it’s not completely bird. It becomes even more apparent when it starts growing to a size many times the size of the largest of eagles. And of course, it becomes even more apparent when it gains the ability to spit acid.

Place

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Esstin Tropical Island

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This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.