Flora et Fauna: Climate zones of Evandar region

Dear Reader,

Maps are hard. Please accept this common map of Terra with an astrolabe. I've been struggling to draw a good map of Evandar. Just general map of Evandar, not including the other lands around it or the major landmass it is on. I now understand why cartographers are historically of a cranky sort. It is not because it is maddening to define a space. It is because the Cursed One is in the details mocking you with each smeared line. (Yes, I believe I will be using that particular sentence in a reference to cartography or manuscript copying in a future book. Scribes were just as cranky, after all.)

Imagine if you a land that stretches from a place with high peaked snow clad mountains year round to a balmy region like the Mediterranean. At the north is a range of mountains that has the classic Alpine climate. Moving south, the mountain range diminishes into hills of a more temperate climate. There is an occasional high hill but the land becomes progressively more flat until it reaches the sea. On the Eastern side of Evandar, the hills continue until they meld with the mountains. The eastern arm of the large mountain range known as the Dragon's Spine are older than those at the northwestern end (known as the Dragon's Teeth). The Dragon's Spine marches down to the sea where they turn into crumbling cliffs due to the influence of weather and water. On the western side, an unnamed spur of the Dragon's Teeth dips into the hilly region but this spur is older than the Dragon's Teeth proper and is more like the southernmost portion of the Dragon's Spine, sans the weathering by way of the sea.

The differences between the Dragon's Teeth and the spur that extends into the western part of Evandar is like the differences in size between the Catskill mountains and the Himalayas range. The Dragon's Spine ranges from likened to the Rocky mountains at the northern end down to the size of the Appalachian mountains at the southern end. Evandar sits in a zone where a plate is being forced under another. Earthquakes are rare because this zone has not shifted in a long time, but they do happen from time to time. There are a whole body of stories about these terrible events. Most of them focus upon a bound individual being tortured beneath the stones themselves. Some of this is folk memory of the last Great War, some of this is a desperate attempt to understand the unpredictable nature of earthquakes.

Moving from the east to the west, the lands become progressively flatter and more arid. Lush temperate tropical forest gives way to grassland that ends on the edge of a desert. The northern end of the grasslands meets the desert before it reaches the cold arctic climate. The southern end of the grasslands leads into a marshland that surrounds a region of an active but very damaged volcano. Geysers are here but not very active during the period of the majority of the novels. The cataclysmic blast of the volcano nearly a full epoch before humans was what caused the 100 Years of Winter that the dragons and other elder species speak of.

The mountains of Evandar and Ranyth cause some odd weather patterns. On the western side of the range, heavy snow is infrequent. At times, however, an odd storm will come out of the east over the mountains. These eastern wind born storms are known to be especially bitter and come during winter. The air literally smells differently to the people of Evandar when it blows out of the east. This is because these storms carry more humidity and therefore more snow with their bitter cold.  The anomalous weather pattern is due to great winter storms moving up from the ocean across the ithmus and then the Shadowed sea into Ranyth where the mountains act to force the storm to curl on itself and move over to the west. Something like a Nor'Easter but worse.