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Evergreen Reach

Evergreen Reach is the broad name for the general area that spills out from Monsoon Point between 'Amit and the Ice Wall - although this is a very large area and crosses distinct biomes, there are some clear commonalities as a result of the intense weather patterns to the north: the presence of heavily forested terrain (usually, go figure, plenty of evergreen pine trees), and heavy inclement weather that lashes across the Reach, albeit usually much more intermittently than in Monsoon Point.

The specifics of the Evergreen Reach vary from West to East, though. In the East of the Evergreen Reach, temperatures drop dramatically and the rough hilly terrain present in Monsoon Point in fact heightens significantly, leading to mostly beautiful alpine forest terrain - except that it is beset by vicious snowstorms for most of the year. A notable landmark out here is a point of the land where the hills flatten out into much shorter, rolling little hillocks with curiously far fewer trees. Though seemingly more hospitable, this area, the Frosthollows, is in fact so much sparser because it is full of... well, frosthollows so cold that they don't let trees grow in them.

In the center, the hills flatten out. The central Evergreen Reach is a temperate rainforest - unbelievably lush, unbelievably green, fed both by brunt of the rainstorms coming down from Monsoon Point and the wide, fast-flowing arterial continental river flowing down from Monsoon Point, central Evergreen Reach is... well, it's wet as hell. The riverine environment leads to plenty of mud, fallen logs, ponds, small lakes, and streams, but other than that it's actually quite a pleasant place to be in, if humid.

In the west, the temperate rainforest grows hotter and transforms into a tropical rainforest, the nature of the forest and species of its inhabitants changing with it (though, somehow, there's even a tropical goddamned pine). The tropical rainforest is, while still most CERTAINLY wet, less wet than the temperate rainforest - you can still expect to get soaked, but it isn't very riverine. Instead, the tropical rainforest rolls across gentle hills, fed by the Monsoon Point rainstorms which gather here and bowl against the Cholades, a short mountain range at the edge of the 'Amit which reinforces it with rainshadow. What you have to deal with in the tropical rainforest is more the underbrush, the fact that the canopy is thick enough that the light is dim, and the many forms of wildlife.

The Painted Land

The river born in the slopes of Monsoon Point reaches its southern terminus in the distant Painted Land. What began as clear streams of babbling rainwater has been transformed into a wide, slow thing laden with sediment. Millions of years of river action have carved a canyon through the country's soft rock strata, sharp and jagged at first but growing as broad as the horizon by the time it reaches the sea. The land is called painted because the bands of rock exposed by the river form such a panoply of color: white limestone, black shale, and sandstones in pink, red, yellow, and every color in between.

The highlands beyond the canyon walls (a distinction less marked as one proceeds southward) are relatively arid, with hot summers and cool winters. The soil in these highlands is rocky, but tolerable for thin forests of cork oak and scrubby grasslands home to herds of kudu. Groundwater is exposed to the highlands by limestone sinkholes, or cenotes. The riverine lowlands are much more fertile, irrigated by predictable cycles of flooding. Papyrus reeds and olive trees grow in abundance here, while alligators sun by the riverbanks. The coastal delta experiences a cooler climate, with sea breeze coming off the ocean to regulate temperatures. Here, temperatures are mild to warm year round, with gentle rains falling in the winter. The waters beyond are a vast inland sea of sun-drenched archipelagos, favored by traders for exotic spices but seldom visited due to hazardous shoals and sandbanks.

The sedimentary rock of the Painted Land bears countless karst caves, connected by underground rivers and home to strange species of eyeless fish and cave-adapted lizards.

While borders can be quite fluid in nature, the easternmost extreme of our land is harshly cutoff by a monolithic wall of pure ice, 3000 meters tall. Although a sparse population has carved out a home within the sheer surface, our ability to project power over them has always been extremely limited, even when the ice box made their home a lucrative trade resource. Few expeditions have dared scale the wall, and none have ever found what must lie beyond it, only an everstretching plane of blinding white.

"This first barrier will determine the terrain on the extremes of one of the flanks"

For clarity's sake: Does this mean that, say, this barrier would not be central to the map but might rather carve off one of the corners of the map?