#riela

January - Finished editing Draft 15 of TBW, and workshopped it with my critique group. In January in specific, it was mostly writing the last chapter. Here's some content from then: Nathaniel and Riela in the hospital after all the shit went down.

For those of you who are newer, TBW is something I've been working on for ages with my co-writer. (If the number of drafts isn't any clue.) But we're 10+ years now. Anticipate seeing more of it as we're probably going to try to do revisions again this coming year.

February - Did some revisions on Heist. Honestly, it was nothing major because I spent that month packing (for a move that never ended up happening -_-) Here's a conversation I was tweaking at the time, having already rewritten the first few chapters of Heist in 2023. (Also this says Draft 3, but it was really more like Draft 2.5. This content is now in Chapter 5.)

Heist is a staple you've all seen me talk about I'm sure! It's set in the same universe as TBW, but with different MCs. I started it in 2022, started Draft 3 in late 2023, and as you'll see, started Draft 4 in late 2024. Still, I'm loving how it's all coming together!

March - Revising stuff in the first 5 chapters of Heist Draft 3. Some content from that time for you: Lelia and Ronan talking!

April - I'd made it through 15 Chapters of Heist Draft 3. However, midway through the month, I had some Life Happen, and stepped away from Heist for Reasons. I'll share some snippets from those works too. Here's a new Em and Vinny conversation that I wrote during that time.

April Part 2 - Due to Grief reasons, I ended up rereading most of CTQ, which is my GriefWIP™, and expanded on one of the scenes for a flashfic contest at that time, now in second person!

April Part 3 - I also ended up working on Aftermath, another Grief WIP. Which did not actually start as a WIP about grief... but I suppose when the premise is surviving after overthrowing an evil dictator, I can see how it went that way.

May - I started working more on Heist again, and got through 22 whole chapters! Some content for the time: the Jam Session!

June - I got Heist up to 34 chapters! Have some theology! It was very hard to find a snippet that was new content compared to the previous draft but also was not a blatant spoiler.

July - I got Heist up to 35 chapters, but then got stuck. Yes, this snippet says it's from Chapter 36 and that's because later I went back and added a chapter (and also had to restructure this whole area of the WIP.) New content: Lelia and Marcella conversation!

July Part 2 - I started working on my Dragon Age fanfic. The premise being that all the origin characters survive and join the party (though not as Grey Wardens.)

August - Heist revisions looked a lot like I didn't know how to number chapters at the time. Chapter 34, Chapter 35, Chapter 36, Chapter 35, Chapter 35, Chapter 36, Chapter 37..... Anyway, this is when I went back and added a chapter that fixed the problem I'd been having. So here, have Lelia and Ronan talking!

August Part 2 - While all that was going on, I also put another 10k into my WardenWIP.

August Part 3 - I also wrote a crossover fic with @rarmaster. This was an "ending" of sorts for two characters from our respective Kingdom Hearts fanfics.

Premise: The Riku Replica survived Chain of Memories by going to another universe. Years later, he and Namine talk about how they made it.

August Part 4 - Lastly, I wrote a thinly veiled Dragon Age fanfic, modeled after the Urn of Sacred Ashes trailer.

September - I got Heist up to 44 chapters and wrote one of my favorite sequences ever!

September Part 2 - I also wrote another 20k of WardenWIP.

October - Finished Draft 3 of Heist! Then I kind of just rested. (As was my right.)

November - I worked on worldbuilding documents, both my encyclopedia and my history doc.

Working on the Magic Encyclopedia was something that's a long-time coming. There's a very in-depth magic system for the world of Tyrysius, and half of drafting up an encyclopedia for how magic works is so that way we can minimize contradictions! I expect to go back to it in 2025 and continue fleshing it out.

November Part 2 - Working on the History document was good for nailing down what has transpired since the cataclysm 1200 years ago, what nations have risen and fallen, what technology has done, and plenty else. I anticipate working on this more in 2025 as well.

November Part 3 - I also spent a lot of time working how Draft 4 of Heist was going to come together because I already had ideas for revisions and the motivation to do them.

No fancy snippet but:

“Shierdi has rejected my last offer for it. So you’re going to steal it. Shierdi isn’t looking for you because you haven’t done anything for me.” “Yeah but you’ve been trying to get my attention for a year.” “She doesn’t know that. She works through mortal staff a lot and has been wrapping me up in red tape. But, one of the benefits of being known as the drunken god is that none of the other gods think you can make up a plan.” “Yeah but there are other gods of alcohol.” “Everyone knows Adelus can’t plan! Even still, Shierdi thinks I’m more of a drunk than he is.”

December - Dove into Heist Draft 4! Have a snippet of a new conversation between Vinny and Em, that recycles dialogue from a scene with Lelia and Em that got cut.

December Part 2 - Also I started writing another crossover scene. The premise of this one is that Xion decides the Riku Replica is her little brother. It was rar's idea.

“Sister?”  She giggled. “Yeah.”  He blinked and mouthed the word again, as if tasting it on his tongue. His eyes lit up and he smiled. “Sure,” he laughed. “Why not? Why can’t my family get ridiculously bigger?” “That’s the spirit!” she said. “Want to go get ice cream?”  

That has not really gone anywhere yet, but I needed to get the initial dialogue out of my head.

🍺KNEE

The Boss was here. He visited once or twice a year, but Mama’s birthday was always one of them. The first years Riela had worked at the Tom, she hadn’t recognized him, which was the point. Then one day, Riela asked Mama point-blank if that was him and Mama confirmed it. The next time he’d visited, Riela’d been formally introduced. He was nice and unassuming. He also had a bit of an ego, if Riela allowed herself to think as much of a god. He walked in the front doors, dressed in a loose white shirt tucked into black pants with black boots that came up to his knees. He had messy brown curls and his beard looked intentionally scruffy. He already had a frothing mug in his hand.

🎶FAITH

“But think of what it could…” “Get out,” Mama hissed. “I told you five years ago that if you continued this walk of life, you weren’t welcome here. I let you play tonight as a gesture of good faith, which you have spurned. Leave.” He gave her a flippant salute and gathered his things.

🌊INCLUDE

In the end, she needn’t have worried. He’d gone to the docks to potentially warn George, but had found an unconscious Rinnie and a stoically protective Taryn instead. Selsing pointedly did not ask questions about the Edans’ presence. Probably because the body of the tugboat captain was found shortly thereafter, and he had half a dozen warrants out for his arrest. It got written off as gang warfare. Evidence of Nidtrin presence was tossed into the ocean. Riela’d been hopeful for a second that the cleric would be included in that, but she was not so lucky. She wasn’t sure how the Guards were going to reconcile “Nidtrin cleric” with “gang war,” but it probably involved the cleric disappearing and she hoped it was in the dead way.

💥RUIN

Those particular entrenched in the faith of the cat lords recognize that they are not native to this planet, but they can still conquer it. The cats are actually closer to being right.

There was a Creator who made the planet and gave it someone to look after it. She was the first high goddess. She had other gods and goddesses in her pantheon.

This went on for centuries, if not millennia. However, when the planet started failing, she opened her gates to allow others to come and breathe new life into the world.

These are those "high gods" who "created" people. Except really they were just shepherds basically. Of both people and lower gods. None of them have the power to create from nothing.

After the Schism War and the end of the Age of Intervention, it wasn't so much that the high gods left, it was that gods were literally attacking one another and absorbing each other's power.

It gets way more complicated than that and most people alive today have no idea what all happened. They're just stuck on the very simplistic idea of creators who left.

But let's get more into the weeds. How long have people existed on Tyrysius? Did they just appear at some point? How did they appear? Who, if any, were first? What does this have to do with the gods?

Riela’s formal education had been cut prematurely short for a plethora of reasons and she hadn’t ever gone back. However, she’d become a voracious reader since. She knew that the gods had placed each race of people onto Tyrysius and had encouraged them to thrive.

Prevalent beliefs include people were created by the gods, or arrived on a fertile planet with the gods' help. Everyone would have gotten there around the same time, and if anything, the elves were first.

However, ruins outside Timernis revealed bodies dating back before any previously recorded history (that they know of). That's now a subject of significant debate in academic circles.

Nathaniel's doctoral thesis is about this topic. And, like many doctorate students, you get him talking about it, and he won't shut up. He wants to explain his findings.

“It’s about how the sitah might have been the original inhabitants of Tyrysius,” Adler said. He got several raised eyebrows and he repeated what he’d told Riela the other night, which felt like such a long time ago now. He mentioned the sitah bones dating back before the Age of Intervention and what that may suggest since there were multiple sets of sitah bones and a suspicious lack of anything else. He got a lot of intrigued looks.

It's making archaeologists question their dating practices. Are they wrong? Or are they right? Everyone is up in arms about who may have been the original people.

“See,” Adler explained. “The generally accepted doctrine is that everyone came to the planet at the same time. The larger sitah were there as protectors of the smaller races. Elves were the bridge across generations. Gnomes were known for their technology and dwarves their architecture. Halflings were the connection to nature. Humans were a balance between them all. No one asked for the orcs, but they showed up too. And then the cat-species had their own separate deals under their own pantheon.”

What they haven't quite pegged out the specifics of yet, is that civilizations have rose and fell many times on Tyrysius. The world also looked a lot different before the Cataclysm.

“The belief that we all got here at relatively the same time is the most prevalent one, but the finding of these bones in an archeological dig in Eastern Schmiedland several hundred miles north of Berthingtonn with no other sets of bones comparable implies that maybe the belief is wrong. What if the sitah have been around longer than anyone else? What if, perhaps, the sitah were here first, and the others came later?”

Religious doctrine allows (and honestly encourages) the argument between different theories because it distracts from the truth the Temples aren't even sure of anymore.

“The first belief,” Rinnie continued. “Is that the High Gods all got together and created us for a certain purpose, or that each of the High Gods designed a type of person in their image. The exceptions being the dwarves, who maintain they originated from the Stone. These first Stone-born were the original Ancestors who birthed the dwarven race.”

History became very fractured (intentionally) after the Age of Intervention. It became even more fractured after the Cataclysm (unintentionally.)

“The other exception is the varying cat races, who believe that their separate pantheon of Cat Lords created the tigrins, tirins, and pumins each to their own purpose. This theory does not, however, explain where the orcs came from, unless a particularly powerful demon or less than well-intentioned god made them and is not owning up to it. As we haven’t seen any orcs since the Cataclysm really, we can’t exactly ask any current opinions.”

This begs the question: what if no one originated on the planet at all? And does not answer: how did people come to Tyrysius? Where is the proof for any of this?

“The second basic belief is that all of the races were traveling without a home anymore and came upon Tyrysius which was empty of sentient life but otherwise habitable. This one explains where the orcs came from better, but there are no life-ships to back this up—though I know that at one point we colonized the moon. This one also doesn’t really explain our relationship to dragons, but that’s splitting hairs.”

So, why argue about it at all? Well, some of it has to do with ownership and who might have more rights to the planet. It's easiest to think that the older, more steadfast, peoples were around first.

“Ownership,” Adler said, answering the same way he’d answered to Riela when she’d asked. “The elves and dwarves both want to believe they’re the first even within generally accepted doctrine. The humans know they can’t claim that they were here first, so they’re certainly not going to complain when something suggests they were placed on the planet around the same time as others.”

Many people think it's terrifying that the sitah, a bigger race, might own it. Especially because the larger people could feasibly take over if they wanted to.

“What would happen if the sitah suddenly got ideas about being the first on the planet?” Killian suggested in the hypothetical. “Not that there are really any full-sitah left. But Timernis exists with a very large partial-sitah population. We’re bigger, stronger, and tougher to kill. What if they decided they owned the place and tried to conquer it? Of course, this doesn’t take into account that they’re outnumbered and the bigger you are, the more you are at risk if the world goes famine again.”

What if religious doctrine is only trying to keep the planet's population from fighting amongst themselves? (More than they already are.) What if it's something else entirely?

“No one really wants the sitah to start acting like they own the planet,” Kanjo said, leaning back in his seat. “They also don’t want other people fighting against the Timernans in a knee-jerk plan to preemptively eliminate the supposed sitah problem.”  

Yet, regardless of religious fears, scientists and historians plunge forward for the sake of knowledge. There are sitah bones dating back 17,000 years while the oldest elf bones only date back 12,000.

“Well,” he said. “Why sitah and no one else? But also because the aura dating of those skeletons found in Lorbush have undoubtable anatomically unique features that place them as sitah. And the aura dating goes back twelve-thousand years. And the ones found in Macrait are close to seventeen-thousand.”

Seventeen thousand years goes back before the Age of Intervention is believed to have started. Current theories put that at about 8000 years ago. This is also how old the oldest elf bones date back to.

“Yeah but that’s back before the Age of Intervention even started, right?” Mica asked. “Theoretically,” Adler said. “We estimate that the Age of Intervention lasted about five thousand years and like Rinnie said, there are little-to-no records before then.”

The oldest dwarf bones date back 7300 years. But, older architecture is larger, as if built for bigger people by bigger people. So what is anyone to think?

“Regardless of how long the Age of Intervention lasted, the oldest elf bones we have dates back to roughly eight-thousand years and the oldest dwarf seven-thousand-three-hundred. Both well within the range of when the Age of Intervention spanned. That doesn’t even get into the fact that there is architecture in the older cities like the lower levels of Berthingtonn and other places in Schmiedland that were obviously built by for larger-framed people.”

While there were once extensive historical records, the Thadan-Yurel War and the subsequent Cataclysm destroyed or destroyed access to a large percentage of them. Now there are holes.

Records from 1000+ years ago are hard to come by and what's available is fractured. Additionally, getting records from more than 3000 years ago is nearly impossible.

Academics try to patch those holes, but it's not easy. And, as is the case with any historical writings, they're written by the winners. Someone is always trying to hide something.

Anyone can find the existing historical records in libraries, museums, temples, etc. However, they'll run into the problem that the records only go back so far.

This era is the common era. Before that was the Age of Intervention which lasted about 5000 years. Before the AOI, there's conflicting thoughts as to what it was.

Common questions include: Did the world even exist? Did people? What kind of people? Who were the first people? Was magic different? There's not much literature one way or another.

It's clear if you look closely that someone is trying to hide major parts of Tyrysian history. The question is, who? No one has answered this question yet.

Everyone is taught history in school, though it varies by area. Different countries place emphasis on different things and bias is highly prevalent.

For example, Berthingtonn considers the war won 300 years ago a fight for their independence. Schmiedland considers the same war a mixed bag because they gained land, but not all of Berthingtonn.

There are museums and exhibits in all of the big cities and some smaller ones. Several gods have temples that are museums because they are gods of history and knowledge.

Some museums are free to attend, others require a small fee. The biggest cost is usually getting to one unless you are already in a bigger city.

For Berthingtonn in specific, the Inner City has way more museums than say, South Town. South Town has a couple of exhibits but nothing large.

And while people who live in South Town can go to the Inner City, and many schools do fieldtrips as part of the regular education. There's commonly deals between museums and schools.

There's lots of ancient ruins, some are still being discovered! Ancient Esternia is pretty much just archeological digs. Though there is an important library there that will become relevant.

Berthingtonn has tunnels that go well below sea level and people can only reasonably get so deep in that mountain before it becomes impossible to traverse.

The oldest city still standing is in fact, Berthingtonn, which had its Wall and Shield completed in the Age of Intervention several thousand years ago.

Berthingtonn's shield was meant to stop all major natural disasters as well as oncoming invasions. However, it was not prepared for some extra-terrestrial object to come plummeting down.

Said extra-terrestrial object damaged Berthingtonn's shield, took out part of their legendary wall, and created the Crater Sea all in one go. (Also it killed a dragon and caused a worldwide ice age.)

This is what's now known as The Cataclysm. Tyrysius still hasn't recovered from it. Since that point, magic has been less prevalent, weather less predictable, and lifespans shorter.

Berthingtonn has existed seemingly as long as time itself. (That isn't quite true but the only people who remember otherwise are not your average mortals and most are deities of some form.)

Current society dates back about a thousand years. Most current traditions and beliefs came about post-Cataclysm, which was about 1200 years ago.

Note: Tyrysius is always at war.

The Grainbelt War in the early 3000s was massive and horrific, the worst years being 05-06. That was only 9 years ago.

Essentially, Schmiedland and Perinathia are always going at it over the Grainbelt.

There was the Berthan-Eswaili Conflict in the 2950s. South Efrium Civil War in the 2930s. That resulted in South Efrium ceasing to exist and becoming Eswaisil.

Since then, Eswaisil wants to conquer Berthingtonn but has thus far been unable to.

The Yurel-Edansa War in the early 2700s, which is largely still relevant because Edan elves live that long. They're frequently going at it over ideology.

The big Berthington-Schmiedland War also happened around that time.

Schmiedland and Perinathia are constantly fighting over the Grain Belt, the border constantly shifting. They recently signed a new peace treaty. We'll see how long that lasts.

Edansa and the Yurels fight frequently. An old blood war over ideology. Currently, however, the Yurels are experiencing a Civil War. So there's no warring between them and Edansa presently.

Over the years, the Great Efrium Empire (with Berthingtonn as it's center) split into North and South Efrium. South Efrium eventually became Eswaisil - whose border with Perinathia is stagnant.

North Efrium then lost a lot of ground to Schmiedland and now Berthingtonn is a large city-state with an Inner Town and surrounding towns outside the Wall.

Eswaisil tried really hard to go after Berthingtonn a few decades ago, but it's been a cold war since. That tension is only going to get thicker as the years go on.

For reference, Heist is set 5 years before TBW. So the end of the Grainbelt war is fresher, and Eswaisil isn't about ready to declare war on Berthingtonn... Yet.

Holidays include:

Berthingtonn has Independence Week which is largely for Berthans but really anyone can celebrate.

Similarly, Schmiedland has Schmiedland Day.

The Yurels do a lot of ancestral worship so those are more private and reserved events.

Religiously speaking, most deities will allow for non-worshippers to join in celebrations because it nets them worship. However, only known followers and clergy can participate in the more sacred parts.

When you have gods that walk around on the planet, the line between history, legend, and myth, gets really fuzzy. Sometimes, the more people try to define it, the fuzzier it gets.

The language of Bûrdæn started declining at the end of the Age of Intervention. In part because other languages were more widespread, in part because of the stigma against it.

It's impossible to learn it now because any books written in it are long forgotten or already destroyed. However, there are more and more people around who seem to know it lately.

The term "frozen wastes" is an expletive interjection at the beginning of a sentence, usually said in surprise. It stems from the fact that much of the world is in fact a frozen waste as a result of the Cataclysm.