Tiriana: The March of the Dormant Ones
This personal project explores the world of Tiriana, an original fantasy setting developed over many years through worldbuilding and fiction. The map depicts the path of the Great Incarnates—colossal spiritual entities that crossed the World Gate at the Hill of Martyrdom and walked in straight lines across Tiriana a thousand years ago, forever reshaping both the landscape and the mythology of the world.
Today, these immense beings are known as the Dormant Ones. Revered, feared, and studied by different cultures, they remain motionless across the continent, awaiting the prophesied end of the world.
The piece was conceived as an in-world artifact, simulating historical printing and reproduction techniques as if it had been produced within Tiriana itself. Rather than striving for modern cartographic precision, the project explores how mythology, memory, and material culture influence the way fictional societies represent their own world, blurring the boundaries between map, historical document, and sacred record.
Tiriana is an original fantasy setting inspired by Brazilian landscapes, folklore, religious traditions, and Indigenous cosmologies. Conceived as a mythical world that existed before our own, the setting explores themes of memory, catastrophe, migration, and enchantment through a distinctly Brazilian lens. At its heart lies a world in decline: ancient civilizations have risen and fallen through the power of itavera—a luminous mineral tied to forgotten magical knowledge—while rising seas and long-foretold disasters threaten what remains of the continent. Rather than reproducing familiar European fantasy tropes, Tiriana seeks to evoke a mythic Brazil, at once familiar and wondrous, standing perpetually on the threshold between history and enchantment.