An island east of the main Free Isles, cut off from the archipelago by the channel called The Spout. It belongs to the Upoceax cluster and trades into it, but it is not one of the four families' islands and never has been. Xabraedia is held by a fifth power, the Velathi, who answer to the Blood Pact only when it suits them, and it has one feature no other land in the cluster shares: most of its interior is no longer, strictly, land. It is becoming something.
Geography
Xabraedia is a single island, roughly oval, its long axis running north to south. The Velathi hold a habitable rim and concede the middle. The west coast carries Hik, the only city; the north is forested; the south and the deep interior have been given over to a purple wilderness that was not there when the first settlers arrived and is closer to the rim every year. At the island's center sits the basin of Starfall, and everything strange about Xabraedia radiates from it the way damp spreads from a single leak. The Spout isolates the island just enough that what happens here stays a Xabraedian problem, which suits the four families on the far shore and suits the Velathi even more.
The interior
The defining fact of the island is that its interior is alive in a way terrain is not supposed to be. The center holds Starfall, a pool of glowing starblood left when a coalition of titans disintegrated a sky-worm out of the separate planar stack of Glyssen. The titans unmade the worm's body and missed what was underneath it. What they missed is reassembling, slowly, out of local matter and local minds, and the Velathi call it Issoroth when they have to call it anything. The Veluminante Forest that fills the interior is not infested by it. The forest is its body, grown cell by cell, advancing west and south a little further each decade.
Settlements and features
Hik, on the west coast, is the only city and the Velathi seat—a dense crescent harbor where teflin exiles built a kingdom in the shadow of alien light, and where the ruling family is, by degrees, becoming the forest's nervous system. The Veluminante Forest covers the interior, spreading from Starfall like a slow infection; outsiders who enter without a Velathi guide tend not to return as themselves. Morglewood, in the north, looks like an ordinary forest and is in fact a dam: a maintained barrier holding the line that Hik depends on, bailed back season after season by crews who are not tending trees so much as fighting a tide. Starfall, at the dead center, is the wound all of this grows from. Each is detailed in its own entry; together they describe a single island that is losing an argument with what lives at its heart.
The standing question
The four families of the main Free Isles treat Xabraedia as a supplier and a worry in equal measure. They buy the luminescent fungi, the Starfall-touched minerals, the specimens that exist nowhere else, and they pay premiums for them, and they do not visit. What they want to know, and cannot get a straight answer to, is what happens when the Veluminante reaches the water—whether the influence stops at the tideline or crosses The Spout toward islands that have no Velathi and no Morglewood. The Velathi say the spread is slowing and equilibrium is near. The maps say the opposite, and the Velathi keep better maps than anyone. Their reassurance is terror management dressed as diplomacy, and because they sit outside the Blood Pact, there is no arena, no council, and no mechanism by which the other families can compel the truth out of a power that is quietly, patiently losing the only fight that matters to all of them.