Etymological Journey

Question: What are the orgins of the names of the various Titanrealms?

I'm not sure if you're asking about the Titanrealms in the original line or ours, but that's okay. I'll do both!

Original Scion Titans:

Akhetaten: This realm's name means "horizon of Aten" and was the name of the real-life historical Egyptian city ruled over by Akhenaten, who established Aten's cult as a major force in Egyptian religion. The horizon was generally thought of as the "home" of the sun, since it was out of it that it rose in the morning and into it that it returned each night.

Crom Cruach: Crom Cruach is an ancient Celtic harvest god who has been largely forgotten; the only surviving record of him details that he required blood sacrifices, which the locals gave him, in order to make sure that the crops didn't wither. He is not, however, a place, so we've always been a little bit baffled by the choice to use him as the realm itself instead of one of its Avatars.

The Drowned Road: You got me. I have no idea and have never seen an equivalent phrase in any vodun literature I've ever read. Maybe it sounded poetic, and since the Loa are in the original book the modern American pantheon they felt like having an English name? I've always vaguely assumed it might have something to do with the Middle Passage, but that's just a guess on my part.

Ehekatoyaatl: Like the original name of the Aztec pantheon and at least half the terms associated with them in the Scion books, this is a made-up word. It's a concatenation of Nahuatl terms that loosely translates to "river of wind", presumably referring to the realm of air. It doesn't really exist anywhere in Aztec mythology.

Hundun: Hundun (literally "disorderly" in modern Chinese usage) is the primordial chaos that existed before the universe was wrestled into order by the efforts of the creator gods of China. He also appears personified in at least one myth, but is generally more of an abstract concept like the Greek Khaos than an actual person most of the time.

Muspelheim: This one's easy, at least! Muspelheim means "home of fire", and is one of the Nine Realms of Norse cosmology, the one specifically said to be inhabited by endless flame and the fire giants who live in it.

Soku-no-Kumi: Frankly, I have no idea what's going on with this stupid name. "Kumi" means "land" or "country" in Japanese, so the phrase obviously means "land of [something]", but I couldn't tell you what that something is. The word "soku" means "right away" or "immediate" as far as I know, which doesn't shed much light on it, and John and his undergraduate Japanese courses are equally baffled. The internet seems to think it's the underworld ruled over by Mikaboshi... but since Mikaboshi has nothing to do with underworlds and nobody on the internet has any sourcing for this bullhockey, this looks like another ruinously out of place misfire in the general mess of the Japanese Titanrealm's already weighty problems.

Terra: "Terra" means literally "earth", and furthermore is the Roman name of Gaia, the pantheon's great earth mother and original progenitor Titan. It doesn't make a lot of sense that Terra lives in the realm of Terra (or Gaia in the realm of Gaia), but that's what the original line chose, nonetheless. A Titan inside the same Titan. Titanception.

Vritra: Vritra is actually a fairly important dude in Hindu mythology, a powerful asura who once held all the waters of the world captive until Indra liberated them from him, and who could only be killed in a complicated and specific situation. Because he was also a brahmin, the act of killing him caused Indra to be afflicted with the colorful curse of vulvas/eyes all over his body in punishment for his sins, and also led to him stepping down as king of the Deva. Like Crom Cruach above, we're really not sure why he's being referred to as a place instead of a person.

Zrvan: In a heretic branch of Zoroastrianism, Zrvan is the primordial god of infinite time and space, the original creator of all things in the universe through his two sons, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. The word literally means "time" or "age".

Homebrew Pantheon Titans:

Emamu: "Emamu" is an Akkadian word meaning "wild beasts", referring to the realm's focus on monsters and animals. It's also spelled "umamu" sometimes, thanks to the occasional difficulties in phonetically translating cuneiform.

Keku: Literally the word "darkness" in ancient Egyptian. Another form of the word, used as a name instead of a general concept, is seen in the name of the Titan Avatar Kuk.

Ourea: The ourea were some of the first creations of Gaia in Greek mythology, described as the hills upon which all life was placed to flourish. The word means "mountains", which is what Greece is largely composed of.

Pakiy: "Pakiy" is the noun form of the Quechua verb meaning "to smash" or "to destroy".

Sedeq: This is the Canaanite form of the Arab word "sediq", both of which mean "justice" or "righteousness". The word appears in both Canaanite and Hebrew literature, and in modern Judaism has morphed into the term tzadik.

Stvaranje: "Stvaranje" (or ства́рање in Cyrillic, if you prefer) is a Croatian word descending from the proto-Slavic meaning "creation", and is applied to the home of the creator Titans and their many works.

Tamoanchan: We're not actually sure exactly what this name means; it's an old Mayan phrase adopted by the Aztecs to describe the ancestral creation theatre of their gods, and scholars have suggested several variations on "our home" or "misty sky". Whatever it means, it's the domain of Itzpapalotl, where she aided in the creation of mankind and now oversees the souls of dead infants and the tzitzimime alike.

Xibalba: Usually translated from K'iche as "place of terror", Xibalba is the monstrous underworld of the Popol Vuh, into which the Hero Twins must descend to battle, trick and eventually triumph over the insatiable and evil Lords of Death.

Whedh: "Whedh" is an Arabic word meaning "singular" or "alone", referring to the Titanrealm's quest to unite all things into itself as a single entity.

As you can see, our homebrewed pantheons unfortunately often have to rely on descriptive phrases rather than place-names; with the exceptions of Ourea, Tamoanchan and Xibalba, most of the cultures we've done writeups for don't have any particularly convenient place to point to as a Titanrealm, so we couldn't just yank one from already existing cosmology. When we're confronted by a Titanrealm without a clear place analogue, we usually default to a descriptive phrase for the concept it represents.