Alicornutopia

You could send sill through some sort of vowel shift? If you make it sile or something, then it won’t sound as odd and it will still share derivation.

I was also going to suggest “cell” when I realized it was one option for a vowel-shifted “sill”, because it is an existing English word which (unlike world-shard) works fairly well.

I kinda like the spelling "cill".

I dislike Vale because it is a word in Portuguese. Cell sounds like the best option presented.

I didn't want to go with "cell" because it's an existing English word which would work as a translation but has existing English connotations that I think are not appropriate to the nature of the phenomenon, and it has some of the vale/bay problem of potentially confusing the reader if I just straightforwardly use it the way the characters would use it without offering any explanation.

Rederivations of "cell" are a promising avenue, along with vowel shifts of "sill". Let's see...

• kell
• kelf
• celm
• sile
• holm

Thoughts on those? Alternate suggestions? I find myself increasingly drawn to "sile".

Apparently a "holm" is:
- an islet, especially in a river or near a mainland.
- a piece of flat ground by a river which is submerged in times of flood.

I think it kind of works, since groups of them work as islands, but it might be better to call contiguous groups of them "holms" or something, instead. "Celm" and "kelf" seem a little bit weird, in my opinion, but "sile" or "kell" (probably "sile", and it's also kinda like "tile", which could be interesting?) are probably better.

"Groups of them work as islands"...?

Well, this is talking about the names of the little (huge) biome tile things (chunks, I think you were using as a temporary word), isn't it? I thought they connected together, but some of them had walls between them. Or do all of them have walls between them and all of the others, but a lot of the walls are really thin, not just some?

Because if you have multiple chunks near each other without really thick walls, I'd assume people semi-frequently travel between them, but then the walls sort of act as a divider between the groups of chunks, so the groups of chunks are sort of islands, and the walls are sort of the water between them?

Or am I misunderstanding?

Aha.

Every chunk/sile is a single Voronoi cell, surrounded by barriers on all sides. The barriers are generally passable to portals, and in civilized areas any barrier between two inhabited siles that isn't one hundred percent covered with rock on one side or some similar inconvenience is going to have at least one portal in it, probably more. So siles are definitely individually separate from one another, but also definitely connected to one another.

Where you really have difficulty getting from one group of siles to another is where you have more than one filled sile in an area, but that's pretty rare.

(Trying out "sile" to see if it sounds right when I use it, what do you guys think?)

I like Sile, sounds... Natural and not too weird (sorry for brevity)

Oh, okay, right. I was thinking of the siles more like biomes that were attached, but frequently had those walls between them and the neighbouring siles, so you ended up with groups of them that didn't have barriers (acting like islands), and some that were separated and alone, and the siles were different sizes, and so on.

I think you said the siles vary in size? Is there any sort of requirement on what a sile has to contain (like, do they all contain a body of water or something), or is it just that each sile is completely surrounded by barriers? And are the barriers straight lines, like walls, so the siles end up looking very geometric, or are they curved, and do the barriers just go straight up/down for infinity? (I think you said there were ceilings to some, and you could go through those but they were dangerous...? Are there more siles on top, but they have weird properties like being a space-sile, or is it just outside the sile but still surrounded by barriers, or what?)

I think I've forgotten a lot of what's been discussed here, so sorry if I'm re-treading territory. I'm not sure how good "sile" sounds – perhaps a little weird – but that's probably because you only just started using it.