#authora

Yes! there will be a second part for sorrowful love!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING IT!!! I AM SO GLAD YOU LIKED!! THANK YOU AGAIN!! You just made my day 100 times better!!!

With Love,

1. Truly Devious

2. Puddin

3. Shadowsong

4. Three Dark Crowns Trilogy

5. Artemis

6. Pride & Prejudice (Rockport Publishers Edition)

7. Flame In The Mist & Smoke In The Sun

8. The Cruel Prince

9. Mistborn Series

10. Star Wars: LEIA

11. Darth Vader Omnibus

12. Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy

13.  The Hobbit Facsimile Gift Edition

14. The Hobbit: Graphic Novel

15.  The Hobbit: The Lord Of Rings (4 Books Box Set)

16. Lifelike

17. Illuminae & Gemina

18. Warcross & Wildcard

19. Raven Boys Series

20. Nevernight Series

21. A Place For Us

22. Vicious 

23. Fawkes

    Kelah is a really big continent. Eurasia sized at least. It’s way taller than it is wide, but there are a lot of distinct climates and biomes to behold.

Most of the population lives in the midwestern area which is reminiscent of the midwestern US. Trees, some rolling hills, lakes, spotty forests, but enough space between them for villages and inns, long roads, and big cities like the Reserve and the Capital, as well as the City of the Damned which essentially serves as a prison complex.

The southwest coast of Kelah is just as populated however, as this is where the vast majority of the trading takes place. Imagine a big pirate city with the docks and ropes and clock towers, and you have a pretty good picture of Toeth (tayth).

The biggest obstacle separating the Capital and Toeth is a mountain range called the Spine, which is heavily inspired by the Grand Teton range in the US. They’re tall and sharp and craggy and mystifying, nearly impassable without traveling very far south to go around. There’s a major road that connects the two where a lot of interesting things happen, all of which I’ll get to in the future.

It wouldn’t be a fantasy world without a spooky forest, right? Southeast of the capital is a vast, dense and intimidating forest called Weirwood. Haunted forests are nothing new to this genre so I’m sure you can fill in what it looks like, only add a small very scary and old as hell churchlike building in the middle of the thickest part that the clergy call the Ivory Altar. From here you can do deep underground to the Chapel of Bones where only awful things happen >:) My favorite character also lives in Weirwood, and he happens to be the only one I have a visual representation of as of right now. I can NOT wait to get to characters.

The not haunted forests are usually home to tribes of nomads, the three largest being the Heiei, Railei, and Urlei. Typically neutral but not always friendly to outsiders, the tribes keep to themselves and try to not get involved in the affairs of the Capital because they’re usually stupid. There will be more information on why the tribes exist outside of the Capital, the short version being that they’re rebels and refuse the new edicts of the Capital. This doesn’t mean they’re all bad, just stubborn.

Maloh Gran is the marshland east of the Weirwood. It isn’t inherently evil, but it’s still spooky and nothing good really happens here. There are a few villages here and there, usually full of grouchy residents. Another token fantasy bog area, really. It’s always foggy and it smells bad. There’s a bog witch. The few foxes that aren’t in the capital or the desert live here, so that’s about it’s only significant quality as of right now.

The desert at the equator is called Zazen Gran, and isn’t really like most deserts. There are several oases scattered about and it’s more of a hot tundra than just a bowl of sand. I imagine the dunes that do exist tower over anything on Earth though because a traveling mountain of sand seems really badass. There really isn’t much here, apart from 90% of all living foxes on Kelah live in Zazen Gran.  - I tried to make the foxes on Prisse like elves in other fantasy. Intelligent beyond measure, regal, old fashioned, and pretentious as fuck. Their culture isn’t so much what a typical desert society would be as it would be like Tolkien’s elves, similar aesthetic and values mostly. They thrive in the knowledge of the Author’s manifest that created everything in existence and their lifestyle is built around glorifying and acknowledging that such a thing happened.

The further south you go, the less populated everything becomes until it starts getting really cold. The only other densely populated area on Kelah is the Alaskan-like country called Kough (koff). This is the Scandinavian inspired area (I do realize I’m in the wrong hemisphere but that’s why I like it) so imagine a viking-y setting with similar architecture and aesthetic. The country has 4 provinces, Noth, Fras, Kihg, and Aeger, which all have their own patriarch that’s part of a council of leaders. They usually settle things like land disputes and petty arguments through that council, but sometimes that doesn’t work. What happens then typically? War, of course! They’re always fighting each other and everyone is bitter. It’s just a shitty place to be.

   Everything in this universe happens on Prisse (pree-sah), a planet similar enough to Earth to be plausible and different enough to be interesting. It's slightly larger than earth and the solar cycle is something I’m working on. The years are long enough to split into two, and are referred to as summer and winter respectively. The tilt of the axis makes the difference in seasons far greater as well. Days are also much longer; one day on Prisse is roughly 1 and a half days on Earth. This is important and kinda strange still and I’ll go over it when I talk about the Races.

   Prisse has 6 continents, although only two of them are above sea level. Technically it can be three but only the highest point of the Fault is above the water. The two landmasses are in opposite hemispheres in both regards and one is way bigger than the other.

   The larger of the two is called Kelah (kay-lah) and is where most if not all of the races that live on Prisse thrive. It's much taller than it is wide and actually stretches from the northern to the southern hemisphere of Prisse. Geographically it’s really similar to most of Europe and Asia because it’s such a big chunk of land but there are a few catches I’ll go over in detail later.

   Tidih (tee-dee) is the smaller of the two and holy moly it's way smaller than Kelah. Imagine if Yellowstone park were an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with less wildlife and no green. It's pretty much barren except for a few critters (not anthros) who can survive the extreme climate, mostly weird crustaceans and insect-like things. The exception is a race of dragons called Kosfa which are really badass and I can't wait to talk about them.

   Prisse has two moons called Fis and Yhat. Fis is the larger of the two and has a very slow cycle. It’s a bit closer to Prisse than our moon would be to us (it’s way less dense as to not mess with the tide so much, I just like to imagine it’s really big and awesome to see at night.) and has the same phases to cycle through. Yhat is only visible every third cycle that Fis goes through and is much farther away. Shamans and Seers are really the only things affected by Yhat’s presence, other than that it just looks pretty. This would be a good time to point out that the cycle of the moon is what’s used as a primary calendar on Kelah; one lunar month is new moon to new moon and this is used in recording dates etc.

I figured I’d give some background on when and how this all started.

    When I was in middle school, probably 6th grade, I was really into Brian Jacques’ Redwall books. A buddy of mine and I read all of the ones the school library had a few times through each, I’m sure. It seemed cool and new that the characters were all animals instead of people because people in fantasy are boring and unoriginal. Right guys?

I clung to this for so long and was obsessed with how badass the thought of a badger with a greatsword or a fox with a giant battleaxe were and thought “Why don’t I make my own cool stories about magic swordfighting dogs!?”

I started coming up with a universe pretty much that day and all of my energy went into it for a really long time. I made maps, character bios, lore and history, the whole nine. I even gave my characters real-life birthdays and celebrated them with myself. I probably shouldn’t have disclosed that.

I had pages and pages of stuff from this weird place I made in my head and I decided it was time to share it with someone so I started writing my first narrative with everything in place. Here’s the twist! Instead of doing it in a notebook because A: my handwriting is atrocious and B: that would take too long and I’d have to do it during class where someone could see, I used our family computer which was a fairly new machine at that point. I got pretty far into it and was really proud of what was there.

One Saturday as I booted it up to continue, the tower made a sound I hadn’t heard before. Kind of like when you put bolts in a blender. Long story short, the hard drive had completely failed. I took the unit into our IT guy at my dad’s business and even he couldn’t get anything off of it as one of the discs had actually cracked and fractured inside the tray when it spun up. I don’t think I’ve ever cried over a piece of technology like I did that hard drive. Everything I had was gone because I was lazy. All of my music and movies and games and everything I had written. The only thing that survived were two shorthand character bios I had emailed myself to show a friend.

I abandoned the project almost completely apart from using a character’s name as a moniker online. I held on to Asaro either out of longing for what I had again or pride for what I had done but he stayed with me until I was about a senior in highschool. Someone asked me where I got my Steam name so I told them a bit about the story and they seemed really interested, which was foreign to me. We ended up talking about MY universe and characters that I created in MY HEAD for a few hours at least and they thought it was really cool. This excited me to tears.

I started gathering everything in my head again and weaving it into almost every thought I had so that I would never lose it again. Here came a new struggle; I can’t fucking draw to save my fucking life. I am very fucking bitter about this if you can’t tell by the tone of my letters. I didn’t have a way to show anyone what I was seeing in my head. I needed a new medium (ha) for my stuff so I turned to video games. RPGs became my preferred poison because I could take myself through them as my characters, making choices and doing things they would do. This is in fact the most fun way to play video games.