Parnassus
As little as 6.91 light-years from Ajjamah is a pair of binary stars, Prometheus (a red dwarf) and Epimetheus (a G-class yellow sun). Orbiting closest to them at 1.02AU but zooming along with a year of a little under 332 Earth days long, is a large, light planet—Parnassus—orbited by the three moons of Thalia, Aglaea, and Euphrosyne. The names are important—although the native inhabitants cannot even say them, they reflect the most common pre-modern myths about the cosmos. It has a fairly standard composition for Earthlike worlds, although curiously there's a much higher percentage of manganese than on most worlds (comprising 0.4% of the planet's makeup compared to Earth's 0.1%).
With the spinning suns each emitting their own particular brand of light and the large, close moons causing tidal floods reaching tens of kilometres inland, it's a wonder that life evolved here at all. And yet it did; Parnassus is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the known cosmos. The majority of multicellular life was wiped out as recently as 34 million years ago, with relatively few survivors. Chief among these was a lineage of lineage of serpentine creatures with bony opposable digits around their mouth and tail, used for locomotion, combat, and for ease of grasping food, living high in the mountainous interior. Millions of years later, this clade gave birth to a species of river-dwelling swimming snakes, barely changed from their ancestral look but highly intelligent. Nadders are a social species, hermaphroditic and easygoing, at home in the water and on land alike (the dams that brought their ancestors together are still the primary source of inspiration for their architecture). Their Epicurean mindset combined with their ingenuity has allowed them to reach a position of great importance in the Nebula—they are the youngest of the Patrons, guides for the rest of the new sapients in the Crayfish Nebula, watching their growth from afar.
Parnassus has long since sent forth his children into the larger cosmos, and the pristine ecosystems of over 700,000 years prior have been damaged, nearly destroyed, repaired, and let to rest. Not visible here are the settlements on the moons, the best stepping-stones the Nadders could have asked for in space travel, lights from the bases creating a microcosm of stars for the observer on the homeworld. Nor can one see the great equatorial skyscraper-like structures of the bromeliad towers, plants of bone with leaves that shift from black to gold to match the spinning suns, or the Sea of Miracles—great snowless icebergs covering the South Pole—or the Long Dance, a set of ancient geoglyphs carved into the bare rock of the Chorian highlands. Least of all can one see the signs of the current Nadder civilizations themselves—half-submerged Atlantises on the coasts, skyscraper arcologies in spun glass and living wood, networks of flying machines like meteors in the night, ancient ruins preserved under shimmering force-fields, the six space elevators that made travel into the cosmos so much easier, fireworks and festivities and artificially-generated cloud formations turning the skies into a mural as big as the world.
Imagine them all, if you choose. A world from the void is but a speck in the light. On the surface, it sings much more loudly.
A boxer (tripus pyctes) on the grasslands of the Southern Hemisphere.
Picture by the inestimable Hope C. Dixon (click here for more of her work).
The Sea of Miracles at the South Pole is one of many natural wonders which the Nadders have learned to appreciate over their history. Icecaps on Parnassus are small, and there's little snow in the region; although there is a touch of the white sheen which we expect from Earth, most of the mass of frozen water is instead a deep, rich blue. A frozen ocean almost indistinguishable from the oxygen-rich waters beneath…with, during the night, the celestial lights dancing in pink and gold across the heavens.
Geography
Parnassus is divided into three large continents, two in the Southern Hemisphere and one in the Northern. All were part of a supercontinent not too long ago, and this is still clearly visible on a map; the separation between the three continents is minimal.
The smallest is Naxos, a roughly circular land southwest of the others. The land is low, and covered with regions of grasslike plants with the occasional towering tree dominating the landscape for miles around; Naxos is a new land, going its own way.
Just east of Naxos, and connected to it in colder periods, is Delphi, named after the ancestral homeland of the nadders in mythology. Two great highlands—Pytho in the west and Giona in the south—are held to be sacred in local tradition; legend says that all nadders emerged from the slopes of Pytho. (While this is incorrect on the basis that they evolved on costal wetlands, there are a great many related species living on the slopes of both mountains, and treesnakes are not precisely common on the other continents.)
The third continent is Macedonia, stretching across much of the Northern Hemisphere and home to Parnassus' only continental glacier in the polar highlands of Ultima Thrace. Most of the northwest of the continent is covered in dense, coral-like trees, wrapped with climbing vines and colonized by individual, fast-growing leaves of dandelion grass. To the south lies a massive dry forest, switching from xeric to tropical with barely a hint of change.
Of equal importance when speaking of the continents is the Hellespontic Ocean, a long, winding channel of seawater that girdles the northern tropics of the planet. This has been the lifeblood, in more ways than one, of nadder commerce and colonization over the millennia; excellent swimmers themselves, many have made the crossing without boats at all.