Sun, 27 Aug 2006 00:30:01 GMT

I've more or less finished the story, although it only came in at 35,000 words. It's posted in its entirety on Deviantart, starting here. You can also just pick up here at chapter 15 if you wish, but the earlier chapters went through a bunch of tweaking.

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:49:49 GMT

Uuuuugh.

Okay, my brain is officially nuked. I need to take a break from this story--it is moving too quickly and I am getting confused about what is happening and when. Plus I am getting nowhere near enough sleep and it is starting to show in my snarkiness.

But at least I hit about 23,000 words before I crashed. ;p

I want to work more on The Gears of Issanti, which is my real baby, and I want to start the story with Queylin at some point.

In the meantime, watch this space if you want to see how everything is coming along:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/faelin/51693.html

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 04:13:36 GMT

Preface:
An Excerpt from A Treatise on the Universal Spine
As told to Faeilynne Kair-thorn, fiendling scholar

A world in and of itself may seem intangibly huge. It has been discovered by astronomers among my people that the world we inhabit is in orbit about the sun, along with several other worlds (whether or not they're habitable is another story altogether). There are infinite other worlds around infinite other suns, and there is no doubt at all that others are populated. Physically, the worlds and stars are placed as we see them--extremely far away.

However, most of my people are also aware of a place called the Blood Plains. According to old lore, this is a place for the cruel dead to be repaid, as well as a stomping ground of demonkind. It was originally believed that the Plains could only be reached through death, but there is a way for the living to enter: A strange, magical portal my companions discovered on a continent far from our own. I've been through it.

This made me wonder just where the Plains were. Obviously not on the surface of the planet, and yet they were connected. The answer is quite odd... the place is attached to my world, but not on the same layer of existence. It seems that our other notion of afterlife--the Void--is the ethereal counterpart to the nothingness of space between the planets and stars. We were wrong on both counts, as the dead do not go to either place.

What was not known about the Plains is that there is a city at the centre of the place. The city is hundreds of miles across, and perfectly circular. Indeed, the Plains themselves exist in the shape of a circle... one that fits perfectly inside the equator of my world. There is such a place for every world that is a part of the Universal Spine, a celestial stair that runs through the centre of each city and ties the planar cities together.

As one may recall, it was popular belief that the only way to the Void was falling through one of the holes in the Blood Plains. The Plains are pockmarked with such tears. As mentioned above, the Void is ethereal space. It envelops the ethereal counterpart of every world that is a part of the Spine. Each disk has a city, and each disk has its own place upon the Spine. They are arranged according to the disposition of each disk and world; the higher up they are, the more they seem to tend towards good.

There are seventy-three worlds attached to the Spine. Thirty-six are good, thirty-six evil. At the centre is a world with no tendencies, which is likely to be either fascinating or utterly boring. Mine, the Erthe, is the third down from the centre... sadly, this means there is more evil than good in my homeworld.

And what of the extremes? Is there a being of infinite good reigning at the top, and the embodiment of evil at the bottom? Truth be told, the most interesting conjecture that I've heard concerns not deities, but two once-mortal women.

Demonea and Tylinde were mortal sorceresses obsessed with the interactions of their worlds. Both had a fascination for the way people worked, and both wanted to savour every moment of their emotions.

Both scryed, watching all they could. The experience proved to be two-faced, and each of them got something completely different.

Tylinde sat before her viewing-portal, absorbed in a continual blur of overjoyed reunions, loving embraces, and friendly laughter. She became so ensconced in her watching that she became powerless to do anything else. Still she sits there, above the highest world on the Spine, melting away in passive happiness.

Demonea, on the other hand, received all the pains and sorrows. Every harsh word and abandoned love became hers to watch. The arch that was her scrying-portal duplicated itself over and over, surrounding her with thousands of images. She sits in the middle of it all, feeling for each tortured soul, perhaps even comforting it.

If this is the case, perhaps the hierarchy of the disks is based not on good and evil, but on pain and happiness...

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I wrote this a long, long time ago, and am just using it as an introduction to the setting. Faeilynne is a character from two earlier books that I never finished... though I love the character dearly.

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 00:10:33 GMT

This is a NaNoWriMo journal, and is friends-only. If you wish to read the novel-in-progress, friend it and it will friend you back.

Demonea's Arches