Hy Brasil

The last outpost of the Fae on Earth, the island of Hy Brasil is a hidden island roughly a hundred miles from Ireland in the Celtic sea. It's a magically liminal zone that exists at the same time on Earth and in the Fae Realms and acts as something of a passageway between the planes. When the Tuatha de Danaan abandoned Earth to return to Tir na Nog they did so via Hy Brasil, and when the remaining Fae chose to abandon the mortal realms starting in the 16th century, they took the same route. Hy Brasil shows up on very few maps or charts, and has never been photographed by satellite. Sailors report seeing it in the distance, but even with highly accurate GPS navigation it may not be seen on returning to the same place. Fae magic makes it very hard to locate unless you know exactly what you're looking for.

Hy Brasil is an island of rolling hills, rocky beaches and grassy plains, with a large forest occupying much of the center of the island. The forest is inhabited by all the usual kinds of wild fae, but most of the inhabitants of the rest of the island are Fae who have become quite tame and relatively ordered in their lives, due to their proximity to the mortal realms. Distant from the politics of the Seelie Court and Unseelie Court these inhabitants are somewhat rustic in character and mostly relatively unsophisticated, though Hy Brasil is also the common abode of a few of the more powerful Sandestin lords who enjoy their independence from Fae society, including Cat Sith and Cu Sith.

Hy Brasil is the location of a single human settlement, the city of Ys. A small coastal city of elegant white palaces, Ys is said by the Fae to have been found abandoned on the Island when they first got there. If that's true it is older than any Human city -- who its builders are is unknown. During the chaotic years of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Celtic-speakers from Britain, Ireland, and France, fleeing Saxon, Frankish, and Viking incursions, settled in Ys and their descendants live quiet and peaceful lives divorced from the rest of humankind.

The people of Ys live in understated splendour, much of their efforts going into maintaining the ancient houses they inhabit. There are many ancient houses that are uninhabited, and these are said to be haunted by ghoulish creatures that may or may not be the ghostly remnants of the original inhabitants. Occasionally these House Ghosts move into an inhabited palace and drive the human occupiers away. By this process the city becomes slowly less habitable.

There appears to be no central authority in Ys, or at least so the residents claim. Prominent citizens sometimes gather to make decisions, but it's unclear to the outsider where their authority rises. It's never questioned by the inhabitants themselves though. According to travellers, the people of Ys have become strange and slightly inhuman in ideas and attitudes, as if the city they discovered shaped them into something approximating the mysterious builders of that ancient city. The people of Ys almost exclusively follow the worship of a goddess they call Atalan, who's temple and worship they ascribe to the original builders of the city, and who they claim gave her name to the Atlantic ocean. They refuse to share the details of this religion with outsiders, but they claim that Atalan has shared with them the entire future history of the Earth. They say that their own future is very limited, and that one day soon Ys will be claimed by the sea. Some scholars propose that this legend was conflated with memories of the true history of Atlantis to produce the confused reports of Atlantis in Plato's Timaeus and Critias.