Beta Lyrae

formal inspiration bits:

fig. 1:

late bronze age scythian pants later greek/roman pteruges (leather strips "skirt") neolithic cucuteni-trypillia earthenware & statuettes-inspired body paint and chiton patterns punic "sign of tanit" (body paint) iron age weaving worn as krajka/kushak-style belt and edge of headdress premodern (at least medieval, likely of earlier origins) kichka styled as horse ears instead of horns ancient greek chiton & veil celtic "torque" style bracelet achaemenid empire bracelet late antiquity byzantine gold bracelet middle minoan II/III bronze age breast ornament/necklace late geometric/early archaic era bronze horse statues (body paint and fibula) late bronze age etruscan spiral bracelet archaic era (circa 550BC) rhodian siren aryballos :)

fig. 2:

ancient greek "boeotian" shield gorgoneion-inspired apotropaic design bronze age "tower" shield with later roman "scutum"-inspired decorations left cuirass mostly inspired by the 3th century BC italiote Ksour Essef cuirass right cuirass mostly inspired by the bronze age anatomical "Marmesse" cuirasses + archaic period "bell" greek cuirass (with Ksour-Essef cuirass inspired shoulder clasps & hints of later anatomical cuirasses design elements) scythian pants, scythian shoes late greek/roman pteruges neolithic cucuteni-trypillia earthenware & statuettes-inspired body paint hoplitic (ancient greek) greaves iron age weaving as pattern again hellenistic period Tanagra figurines (one) (two)

lore bits:

the veil is not a modesty thing in their culture (as depicted on fig. 1 the "modesty" "standards" are vastly different), it is almost exclusively for the priestesses' use as insulation material to get real high off the smoke of sacred herbs (like one would put a towel over their head when leaning over a bowl of boiling water to clear out the sinuses. but with psychotropics instead) and through which it is said a priestess does her scrying and can see the future or the dead by holding the veil up against smoke, against the sky, against a landscape, etc.

the main animal of spiritual, cultual, cultural, and social/societal importance is the horse. spiritually and cultually, it is seen as a psychopomp: an animal who carries on its back the soul of the dead from this world to the other. it is seen as a comrade, able to carry the wounded out of battle like fellow soldiers can, and as a mother archetype, carrying its rider like a mother carries her child. it is as such a symbol of solidarity but also of strength, of vitality, and from observing the behavior of mares, of fierce protection yet of not tolerating bullshit. this makes, for them, the centaur both a revered neighbor (lol "neigh") (also centaurs exists in this. not the point) and an ideal: animal instinct and human reason, animal strength and power with human conscience/consciousness using and channeling that strength and power. as most members of this society ride horses, the "control of" (partnership with, rather) of an animal that big and powerful is like microdosing on controlling forces beyond one's grasp (the divine). socially and societally, the horse is at the center of their economic surviving system as it aids in travel, in agriculture, in warfare, in games (that serve cohesion of the community), in construction, in entertainment and spiritual life (string instruments using horse hair), etc.

the second main animal of their spiritual life, with lesser social/societal importance, is the snake. it is a chthonian animal associated with death (crawls on and burrows in the ground, realm of the death), but also with rebirth (molting), both very important to the community as many who were not born in it (like the main character of the story) (not pictured there) (oh yeah i haven't mentioned it. those are parts of the supporting cast. WINK) but rather came there, came after a death (social, spiritual, mental and, for some but very few, literal/physical).

Does My World HAVE To Have Plate Tectonics?

Great news: even if you're trying to be realistic, it doesn't. As far as we know, Earth is the only planet with plate tectonics. Mercury, Venus, and Mars do not do that. Pluto and the other dwarf planets also do not. The gas giants, obviously, cannot, because they don't really even have surfaces (although there are indications that their icy moons could have some kind of tectonicky thing going on).

So it's not only realistic, but common to have a world where the surface never moves.

However, that world would look pretty different from Earth, in some pretty interesting ways!

Jupiter's moon Europa has the best evidence so far for tectonic activity beyond Earth.

What Would A World Without Plate Tectonics HAVE?

Let's take Mars for an example, because Mars was, about 3 billion years ago, just about habitable, probably. It also doesn't have plate tectonics and never did (as far as we can tell). Because of this, we see some interesting features on Mars that don't crop up on Earth:

A few GIGANTIC volcanoes. Olympus Mons, on Mars, is the largest volcano we know of. Full stop. It's the size of Arizona and 16 MILES high. For comparison, the peak of Sagarmāthā/Qomolangma/so-called Mt. Everest is only about five and a half miles above sea level. Even if you measure from the bottom of the Challenger Deep (which is nowhere nearby), that only gets you to a little over 12 miles. Which is to say: if you put the base of this one volcano at the lowest point on Earth, its summit would still be four miles above the HIGHEST point on Earth. Olympus Mons (and its slightly less batshit-insane siblings) got so fucking big because Mars has no plate tectonics. The magma source stayed directly underneath them for hundreds of millions of years, just adding more and more and more and more material in exactly the same spot. A world without plate tectonics could be expected to have a few super-large volcanoes.

Craters everywhere. Earth doesn't have many craters partially because it gets resurfaced, a lot (the other part is because we have a weirdly big moon running interference). Plate tectonics function like a big geological zamboni. Mars - like just about every other solid body in the Solar System - doesn't have a resurfacing program, so when Random Rocks From Space smack into the ground, they leave a mark, and that mark sticks around for, essentially, the rest of time. A lot of rain and/or wind (and therefore a lot of erosion) can smudge out the smaller craters, but in general they will accumulate. Your world might wind up with a whole bunch of near-perfectly-circular lakes as the craters fill with water, while arid regions might end up looking a lot like the Moon. Note, though, that craters aren't a requirement: Venus, as well as Jupiter's moon Io, are remarkably crater-poor. They seem to have both resurfaced themselves by either erupting enough lava to fill in the divots or by being squishy.

A big fuckoff canyon or two. Valles Marineris, on Mars, is roughly as long as the United States is wide (about 3,000 miles / 5,000 kilometers). Much like its neighbor, Olympus Mons, it's completely out of scale with anything we have on Earth, which is especially wacky because Mars itself is only about a third of the size of Earth. We're actually not 100% sure how Valles Marineris formed, but the best guess is it had something to do with the enormous volcanoes forming right next door. Possibly, those enormous volcanoes put so much strain on the planet's crust that something had to give, and a great big crack opened up. Kind of like if you buried a giant water balloon and then started filling it up, the ground around it would eventually split somewhere. Worlds with volcanoes but without plate tectonics might have one or two huge, steep-sided, linear canyons - they wouldn't be serpentine like the ones formed by rivers here on Earth.

Valles Marineris, the planet-spanning chasm, likely did not form by plate tectonics. P.S. You can also see Olympus Mons and friends on the left. Olympus Mons is the lowest and biggest of the three.

What Would A World Without Plate Tectonics NOT Have?

Mountain ranges. Long chains of mountains (like the Appalachians, the Rockies, the Andes, et cetera, et cetera) all form because of plate tectonics. In fact, the vast majority of mountains on Earth are due to plate tectonics. A world without would tend to have clusters of big volcanoes - as mentioned above - or lots of small, isolated, randomly-distributed volcanic mountains.

Island arcs and island chains. What do the Aleutian Islands, the Philippines, and the Antilles have in common? That's right - they wouldn't exist without plate tectonics! Nor, for that matter, would the Hawai'ian islands (you'd just have One Really Big Island). Volcanic island arcs like the three I mentioned above, which form near the edges of oceans, wouldn't form at all without plate tectonics. You'd be more likely to have barrier islands - essentially big piles of sand - like those on the eastern and Gulf coasts of the US.

Most earthquakes and tsunamis. No plate movement means no building up of stresses, which means no sudden release of those stresses. While you'd still get quakes associated with volcanoes (due to magma moving around underground), you wouldn't get San Francisco-style shaking. You also wouldn't get many, if any, tsunamis (which are caused by undersea earthquakes). Even eruption of an undersea volcano would be unlikely to shove enough water aside to produce a significant wave. However, you could certainly get localized tsunamis or "megatsunamis" in fjords and other confined basins due to landslides or glaciers falling into bodies of water (like what happened at Lituya Bay in 1958).

Explosive volcanism. Ever notice how volcanoes in Iceland and Hawai'i make beautiful fountains of lava, but volcanoes in the Cascades, the south of Italy, and Sumatra have a bad habit of exploding violently? That's because those last three are fed by magma that has a lot of gas and water mixed in due to - you guessed it - plate tectonics! Volcanoes on a non-tectonic world would look a lot more Kilauea than Krakatoa. It's kind of like the difference between stabbing a bottle of water and stabbing a bottle of soda; the soda won't always explode, but the water will basically always just splurt.

Much topography in general. Plate tectonics is not only what gives us mountains and valleys, it's what gave us land and sea. A world without it wouldn't have mountain ranges, high plateaus, or extensive canyonlands. It would likely have shallow seas. It would also probably have lots of lakes and swamps, since the groundwater would be generally closer to the surface across the whole planet. Most topography - outside of any huge volcanoes and massive rifts - would be in the form of craters (which can be massive; Hellas Basin, again on Mars, is only a little smaller than Australia). You could potentially even get mountains in the center of these craters: some impacts are so big that they melt the impacted rock, and this molten rock can form a central peak or rings, much like water rippling from a dropped rock. Unlike water, though, planetary surfaces can 'freeze' in this position.

Tycho Crater, on our Moon, has a prominent central peak.

Okay, But Would A Planet Without Plate Tectonics Even Work?

There would be some knock-on effects for sure. For one thing, the wind situation would be crazy: with no major topography to slow them down, winds all over the planet could rev up to ludicrous speed the way they do in the Southern Ocean on Earth. There might be planet-wide dust storms at the changing of the seasons, like on Mars. Rivers would probably be shorter and more meandering. Deserts and forests might come in neat bands based on latitude. Land and water might be more evenly distributed, and landmasses might be significantly larger, leading to more extreme summer/winter temperature disparity in their interiors (or significantly smaller, with milder coastal climates abounding). Weather patterns might be significantly more predictable.

It's also possible that a planet without plate tectonics couldn't support life long-term. Plate tectonics on Earth isn't just a big zamboni: it's also a massive long-term carbon sink and a recycling mechanism. Mars's lack of plate tectonics may be a large contributor to why it's now cold, dry, and utterly barren when it used to be much more Earth-like: with no recycling mechanism, water and carbon dioxide that got trapped in crustal rocks during chemical erosion had no way to get back out, contributing to the thinning of the atmosphere and a resulting loss of insulation from the cold vacuum of space. Venus's lack of plate tectonics, on the other hand, may be why it now has a crushingly thick, blisteringly hot atmosphere: without plate tectonics to produce topography, chemical erosion slows or stops and there's no mechanism to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it up in rocks. (Mercury is so close to the Sun that it never really had a chance to get habitable, plate tectonics or no.)

A caveat to the caveat, though: our sample size for "rocky planets whose geology we know anything about" is four. If we count large moons and dwarf planets, we can expand that to about a dozen. This may not be a statistically significant sample, considering that there are over six thousand known planets outside our Solar System, about 240 of which are small and rocky in the way Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are small and rocky. The actual percentage of small, rocky planets is likely significantly higher; they're just the hardest kind to detect.

A thousand exoplanets have been discovered since the making of this NASA infographic in 2022.

Bottom line: you can do whatever you want forever.

But, I hope this jaunt through planetary geology gave you some insight, some inspiration, or at least some entertainment.

1. Thousands of years ago, powerful families try to take control of the intergalactic space consortium. For the sake of peace, it is determined that five Reigners shall be chosen from five families. They will be elected every ten years years.

2. To ensure fairness, the Bannus is created. It will put the candidates through various scenarios and elect the five people it considers suitable as Reigners.

3. Martellian, one of the Reigners, takes a young Orm Pender under his wing.

4. Orm betrays Martellian and wrenches control over the Bannus, cheating the system. He, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's brother, and two more of their circle, install themselves as permanent Reigners.

5. Martellian is exiled to Earth, where he proceeds to raise heirs to fight for him against the Reigners, since he is banned from doing so himself. As Merlin, he creates Arthur. As Wolf, he creates Fitela.

6. Orm, now Reigner One, puts Martellian in a stass tomb, along with Arthur and Fitela. The reprogrammed Bannus is put in the same place to reinforce the imprisonment.

7. The five Reigners manage to keep young(ish) and in power for more than a thousand years.

8. The Reigners use descendants of Martellian as Servants to do their killing for them. In modern time, the Servant is Mordion, who is raised under horrid conditions to become their loyal assassin.

9. Under the firm name Rayner Hexwood, the Reigners use Earth for its valuable flint. The people of Earth have no idea just how valuable the flint is.

10. Mordion keeps a telepathic connection with Martellian, Arthur, Fitela, and eventually Vierran of Guaranty (who is younger than him and thus shows up late). None of them know the others by name, only by epiteths. Mordion and Vierran also meet in person. Vierran doesn't recognize Mordion, but is drawn to his role as the Servant.

11. The House of Guaranty are in opposition to the Reigners, but unable to do anything about it.

12. Harrison Scudamore, a clerk who has scammed his way into Rayner Hexwood, finds the Bannus. He manages to start its field of power, in the hope of creating a virtual reality role playing game

13. The Bannus field starts drawing people in. It also starts mingling with the field of Hexwood, which, being a wood, is connected to the Great Forest that once was, and has magic of its own.

14. The Bannus wakes the three people in the stass tombs: Martellian, Arthur, and Fitela. Since the world they know is Arthuriana, that's the illusion they create inside the wood. Martellian is reshaped by the Bannus into a small child. Arthur becomes the outlaw Artegal.

15. Outside the wood, the Bannus field spreads further, but with a setting more familiar to the people there, i.e. modern Earth. Fitela seems to make it out of the forest, since he becomes part of the modern-Earth world as Martin, a greengrocer's son.

16. W. Madden, one of the Rayner Hexwood maintenance staff, sends a letter to his superiors, which eventually reaches Controller Borasus of Albion.

17. Controller Borasus calls Earth, which unbeknownst to him permits the Bannus field to spread across communication lines through the galaxy. He also calls Earth Headquarters, run by Sir John Bedford, who is alarmed to hear the news.

18. Controller Borasus goes down to Earth to find out what is wrong, and is pulled into the Arthuriana setting as Sir Bors.

19. The Reigners are contacted. Reigner Two sets out to find out what is happening. Along with Mordion and John Bedford, he heads to Hexwood, where all three are pulled into the Arthuriana setting as well: Reigner Two as King Ambitas, John Bedford as Sir Bedefer, and Mordion as a hermit.

20 . The scenes within Hexwood do not happen chronologically; something may be very early for one of the people involved and very late for another. Events that take mere moments appear to take years. (Typical fantasy wood!)

20. Since Reigner two isn't heard from, Reigner Four is sent out. He becomes Sir Fors in the king's court.

21. Reigner Five is sent out. He keeps his own memories even as he is sent into Arthuriana, but is immediately tricked by the Bannus into exploding himself. Refusing to accept that he is dead, he settles in Mordion's abandoned hermit hut.

22. Reigners One and Three decide to go to Earth themselves. Reigner Three has sussed out that Vierran is romantically interested in Mordion, and brings her along as a maid/bargaining chip.

23. Reigner Three enters Arthuriana as the king's fiancée, Morgan le Trey. Reigner One is transformed into a dragon. Vierran gets a dual role, as a lady in the king's court, and as Ann Stavely, a modern-day grocer's daughter living right outside of Hexwood.

24. At some point, Vierran's actual parents, who have been plotting the Reigners' downfall and hence arrested by them, are pulled into the field as Ann's greengrocer parents. Fitela becomes her brother Martin.

25. (Third chapter only!) "Ann", sick in bed, see strange things happening around Hexwood. She is not seeing them in order, but neither she nor we know that at this point.

26. Ann, feeling better, enters into the forest, where she wakes Mordion from a stass tomb. He has memories of being stuck in the tomb for millennia, but those are really Martellian's memories. From their mixed blood, Mordion appears to create the child Hume, though this is really Martellian de-aged.

27. Mordion the hermit raises Hume with the help of Ann and a robot called Yam, in random chronological order. Hume wants to be a knight and fight dragons. Ann intermittently returns to her parents and their seemingly ordinary life.

28. Running out of food in the castle, the knights ransack the nearby (modern day) town. This starts a revolt, led by the outlaw Artegal (Arthur), and consisting of people both from Earth and from the rest of the galaxy, including Vierran's/Ann's parents.

29. In a motel room, Vierran listens to a recorded message of herself and realizes she has lived the same scenes multiple times. She remembers her time as Ann and figures out that the Bannus field is much wider than the wood.

30. Vierran goes to find Mordion, but encounters Reigner Five instead. He chases her, but breaks his neck, drowns in the river, and is forced to admit that he was dead all along.

31. Still with her own memories, Vierran returns to her role as a court lady. Her cousin Siri is also there, as Lady Sylvia.

32. Mordion arrives at the castle, pretending to be a magician controlling a mechanical man (Yam). Hume becomes a squire.

33. The knights set out to punish the outlaws. They encounter a dragon (Reigner One), and Sir Fors/Reigner Four is eaten.

34. Reigner Three turns Mordion into a dragon. With the aid of the Bannus, he starts facing his own awful memories.

35. Returning to human form, Mordion enters the outlaw camp with Martin and Sir John Bedford. The outlaws are very suspicious until Artegal/Arthur recognizes Mordion as one of the voices in his head.

36. Hume volunteers to fight a dragon, believing it to be Mordion. He is horrified to find Reigner One instead, who has recently killed Sir Harrisoun (Harrison Scudamore). Hume calls Mordion for help, and with joined effort they defeat the dragon.

37. Reigners Three and Two try to poison each other and are turning into dragons. Mordion kills them both.

38. Mordion realizes that Yam is actually the Bannus and demands that he puts a stop to this.

39.  After Yam/The Bannus has had a moment of gloating over the dying Reigner One, Hume pulls out his sword from the dragon's body, killing him.

39. Everyone starts sorting out who they are to each other. Yam declares the five new Reigners: Mordion, Vierran/Ann, Martellian/Hume, Arthur/Artegal and Fitela/Martin. They reluctantly agree to rule the galaxy, not sure that the Bannus can be trusted.