Drakkareth
House: Kael
Founding-era name (historical): Surtr
Terrain: Ignis (active volcanism, planet-wide)
Summary
Drakkareth is the homeworld of House Kael, a planet of active volcanism from pole to pole. The colonists who came down onto it named it Surtr, after the fire giant of the old Sol-system pantheons they had carried across the dark. The name was apt enough that it lasted for generations. It gave way only when the recovery of the ancient record produced the world's original name, the one the earlier civilisation had used. Drakkareth is the best English rendering of that word. Surtr survives today only in the historical record.
The world
The air is bad and the ground is never to be trusted. Drakkareth resurfaces itself continuously, lava fields rolling over old terrain and cooling into new. That same process had been at work for two hundred thousand years before the colonists arrived, which is why so little physical evidence of the ancient war survives there. The planet scoured its own ruins. The Kael have never lived on Drakkareth so much as inside their defences against it. They live in pressurised structures built into the ancient facilities they managed to repair, aboard the landing ships that first brought them down and never left, and in newer printed habitats shielded against the ash and the gas. Every generation of Kael has grown up knowing that the world outside the seal does not forgive a mistake.