Khavaran

The land that holds Dar Ilm al-Zakir; the nation itself, its government, and its people are in that document. For the world map and scale, see Geography.

Name. Khavaran (KHAH-vah-rahn), from the old Persian khāvar, "the east," where the sun rises. Like most old names in the setting, it's Persian, not the Scholar Nation's Arabic.

Extent. The Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, and the lands running southeast into mainland Southeast Asia — the largest single territory on the map by a wide margin. On the Draft 4 map its outline also takes in the Indonesian islands, where its reach runs by sea lanes and tribute (see Varsabad).

Held together by networks, not garrisons. Coherence is maintained through the Majlis structure and trade networks rather than military occupation of every corner, and there is a fair amount of ungoverned land between the major cities. The frontier stretches no Majlis reaches are Gnoll territory (see Dar Ilm al-Zakir document).

Neighbors. The Levant to the west belongs to the Rephaim, and the Red Sea separates the peninsula from Theria. The Himalayas along its northeastern edge are Himmelreich, the fifth of the Dwarven Kingdoms, and beyond them lie the snows of the north.

The Kuwaffri Trench (Red Sea-Analog)

Where the Red Sea would sit — between Dar Ilm al-Zakir and Theria's Giant (Morocco/Israel) and Confederacy (Egyptian coast) shores — the seabed hides a genuine drowned rift, deep enough that the bottom holds an air-filled cavern nobody has ever found. This is the Kuwaffri homeland (see Kuwaffri document for the full race write-up). Distance was never the reason nobody's found them; depth is. The Red Sea reads as the strongest fit for this precisely because it's a real-world tectonic rift valley — an honest geological reason for a trench to exist here rather than an ordinary continental shelf — and because it sits close to three civilizations' home waters without belonging to any of them, which keeps a hidden people plausible without needing true open-ocean isolation. The Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea were both considered and set aside: the Gulf is realistically too shallow for "swim down, not out," and the Arabian Sea remains a fine deep-ocean fallback if ever needed elsewhere.

Open: exact size and depth of the trench and the home cavern; whether any surface nation has ever picked up rumor of something living down there.