Title TK - Background, OOC and Comments thread

[Malevolence]

Can the newspaper industry spell? Yes, the "TK" insertion for "to come" is intentionall so it's easier to find in a "find and replace" search in a word processor. Anyway, on to business.

I'm in the process of writing a novel, in which I'm up to chapter nine, and I've hit a wall as to where to go from here. I think in it's current state it's stuck in the middle of dialogue, but for now, I'll post the background info here, and I guess post it in as many posts as necessary, hopefully separating it by chapter.

A General Note: If you see anything wrong with any of my writing, please comment here the OOC Comments Thread. Be these problems plot-wise, character-wise, clarity-wise, or grammar/spelling-wise, PLEASE for the love of all that is holy (or unholy depending on your beliefs) tell me! I hate it when people are afraid to be critical. I'm posting this stuff so you read it and give me feedback. That being said, enjoy!

For further reading, if I've intrigued you with what follows below:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

So, without further ado:

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A Prologue, and a Bit of Recent History

In the beginning, a place where most tales tend to start, the world of Tolwyn did not exist. All that could be said “existed,” by common definition, was Nothing. There was a grand Nothing stretching as far as the eye could see – if an eye had been around to see it. At some point, spirits, one of which knew itself to bear the name Gaea, slowly faded from nonexistence into reality, and began to think. Their first communal conclusion was that this grand Nothing was simply too empty. So, apart from the other spirits, in her own little corner of the Nothing, Gaea created.

At first, her creation, a ball of rock, water, and atmosphere she called “Tolwyn,” was devoid of life. The seas boiled and the land erupted, and the sky was black with soot. After her long rest, Gaea decided the world needed life, and spirits to govern over it.

Gaea sent the spark of life down from the clouds all over Tolwyn. The seas ceased their boiling, and the land’s fissures closed and sealed themselves with molten rock. Gaea created lesser spirits – The Gods – to watch over the planet and govern its cycles. Chu’ul, the Lord Of Earth, allowed crystals to form and the land to become fertile. Sakesh, the Lord of Fire, caused the heat of the planet to spin within itself, and release its fire from specific points on the world’s surface. Glissh, Lord of Water, caused the tides to move and currents to flow, spreading the waters of Tolwyn over its surface. And T’rae, Lord of Air, caused the wind to blow and spread the air of Tolwyn over the surface of the world.
Gaea was pleased with what her Elemental Lords had done. But other things needed to move. So Gaea sent her spark to other parts of Tolwyn. The seas boiled again, but this time with life. Fish began to swim, whales breathed their first breath of air, and crustaceans crawled the sandy bottom. Bats hung from their cave perches, birds began to nest, and the land mammals began to gather together into herds. Trees sprung from the earth, and grass began to flow across the soil-covered patches Chu’ul had made fertile with his power. Glissh’s waters rained down from T’rae’s air, and, with the heat and light provided by Sakesh, allowed the trees, shrubs, grass, and other plants to spread and populate the surface.

Gaea saw this, and was pleased. But all this instinctive and unfeeling life made her think once again. She thought there needed to be something more. So, using all her strength, she breathed life into the realms of the Lords of the Elements. From these domains, Dragons burst from the ground. Majestic and scaled, these Dragons were different from those of modern day. The wingspan of one could cover a human city, and many could dam rivers with their girth. These Dragons wielded the power of Gaea’s elemental magicks, shaping the world to their liking with their minds and their wills.

Soon – or at least, soon in the historical sense – the Old Dragons grew restless with their own territories and their gargantuan companions. They began to form weapons and armor from the iron that Chu’ul had created, using the fires of Sakesh to shape them. They doused them in Glissh’s waters, and swung them through T’rae’s air. Their battles waged for over nine hundred millennia, and for those many endless years, Gaea waited, hoping that one day the Dragons would realize their ignorance and cease their destruction.

When the planet she had created was almost reduced back to its primordial form of a lifeless ball of rock with bubbling seas, Gaea finally intervened. She was displeased at how her creations had squandered the land which she had given them. She stripped the Dragons of most of their magicks, and shrunk their massive girths to modern size. The Dragons retreated to their secluded homes in Tolwyn’s deep deserts, high mountains, and murky swamps and became wild beasts in the eyes of most, until their return to glory came almost one hundred millennia later, in the Year of Pethos.

Thinking it had been her fault that her creations had turned against her, she asked five of her most trusted spirits to try their hand at creation. First, Daeia, a spirit gifted in the art of magick, created the Daeians. Vinilir followed with the Greiy, or, as they are known now, the Elves. Dordarin created his rugged, robust dwarves. Ghaal created a nameless race of magick-wielding, arcane spectators, now known only as Watchers. And Lategolo made the Deguar. To each of their races, the Noble Gods gave the gift of knowledge of the magicks they had been given by Gaea. She was furious, thinking that it had been the power to control the elements like gods that had caused the Dragons to fall from grace to ruin, and demanded that their races be decreased in power before being allowed to populate her land. All the Noble Gods saw her reasoning, and stripped their people of their magick. All, save one.

Daeia’s fury with Gaea’s decision was apparent and harsh. She rejected Gaea’s orders to strip the Daeians of their magick, and allowed them out of her primordial forges to live in the mountains of the Eldûl Thengol. Gaea and the other four Noble Gods, infuriated by her rebellion, ejected her from the Plane of the Gods to the Material Plane, to live an eternal and immortal life amongst her followers.

Daeia, in an attempt to make the best of her exile, taught the Daeians how to best use their gift of magick to shape their world. Seeing that Daeia had not taken her exile to think upon her actions as Gaea had intended, the other four Noble Gods commanded their races to wage war against the Daeians. Once again, the elements of the Lords were used to create weapons to battle others, and fought the Daeians at any chance they could find.

A good millennium into the war, Lategolo realized that the fighting they were engaging in was pointless, and, against the wishes of Gaea and the other Noble Gods, removed his forces from the conflict. The Deguar retreated into their mountain strongholds, in a state of voluntary neutrality and exile from the rest of Tolwyn. Without the help of the Deguar, Gaea was forced to reveal the secrets of æthereal magic to the remaining three Noble Races, so that they might better battle the Daeians and their superior elemental magicks. Daeia, sensing their trouble, instructed the Daeians to retreat into hidden strongholds in the mountains, some hiding with the Deguar, others forming their own hidden fortresses to wait out the conflict. Daeia, it has been said, then used her last bit of stored godly energy to transport herself to the Æthereal Plane of existence, to meditate and perhaps regain her power after a few hundred millennia.

Gaea, now mad with her hatred for Daeia and her race of creations, was said to have retreated into some Outer Plane to which no other God could gain entry to or even find in the first place. Tolwyn was left to fend for itself, and its races were left to their own devices. The races proliferated, covering Tolwyn, but not claiming it in any real way until the Greiy Elves created two races of their own – the Brodhalven and Anskari – to study the behavior of genetically opposing species. The engineered conflict the Greiy had created grew completely out of their control, with the Brodhalven laying claim to what is now the South Fire Wastesands, and the Anskari claiming a large peninsula then called Trellis attached to the Wastesands by an isthmus then known as the Ghûl. Their war escalated to the point of a constant arms race, in which both sides rapidly developed better and stronger weapons and spells to combat the other.
In an effort to “build a better soldier,” the Brodhalven laboratories manipulated the genetic material of various species with the magic they had been taught by their original creators. While trying to breed a race of battle-hardened, quick-breeding and maturing soldiers, one of their failed experiments created the first Humans. Regarding these hairless mammals as inferior for their flow gestation times and relative lack or natural skill, the Brodhalven discarded them in modern-day Selûne and Navareskia. They continued with their war, leaving the humans to fend for themselves, out of reach or concern by the Brodhalven or Anskari.

At some fateful time, two mages on either side of the conflict developed the same spell, now known only by its name, “catasos.” The spell was cast, by some stroke of terrible luck, at the exact same moment by both sides. The energy of the two spells collided in midair over the Ghûl, creating a synergistic reaction of energy that leveled forests for hundreds of miles, and sent a wave of magical energy across the planet.

The Brodhalven-Anskari wars ended at that moment. The lands of the Brodhalven burned, and became the South Fire Wastesands. The peninsula of Trellis became molten and cracked, severing itself from the Ghûl, and turning into an uninhabitable magmatic plain for the next few thousand years. The only remaining traces of the anciend Brodhalven and Anskari civilizations, other than a handful of surviving members of each race, were the cities of Sekhi Kree, and the now crumbling and abandoned Ceridost.

The wave struck the Greiy of the southern continent, changing them – some more than others – into the Chadro’av and the Whyssh. The Whyssh, accepting their transformation, lived mostly on the surface word in forests, with small habitations in the llistinoh, a network of underground tunnesl that stretched under the entirety of Tolwyn. The Chadro’av, much further changed by the cataclysm than the Whyssh, retreated entirely into the llistinoh, eventually renaming it the Vyzthun, its current name in the Chadro’av distorted form of Elvish. Ghaal’s race of Watchers was hit the hardest, however, as most of them lived in the modern-day Dhimghôl, in and around Sekhi Kree, and in Kwalish. Their souls, so readily tied to magical forces, were ripped out of them by the catasos wave, leaving their bodies as lifeless shells that walked the land immortally without any purpose or direction.

With the Daeians, Deguar, and now the Greiy in hiding, the Dwarves aloof, and Ghaal’s Watchers unable to do much of anything at all, the two exiled races, Humans and Dragons, finally had their heyday. The human races in Selûne and Navarskia spread out, claiming their own lands and establishing the nations that now control the landmasses of Tolwyn. The modern Aeries, formed in Pethos’ Year by none other than Pethos himself, joined human with Dragon to objectively protect the lands of Tolwyn, submitting to no government control the Aerie council didn’t see fit. The year was so important in Tolwine history that all years became referred to with Pethos’ Year as the standard of reckoning. By this standard, Gaea created the world during approximately the year 1,000,000 BPY (Before Pethos’ Year), and the Cloaklands-Alluvian Treaty was signed in 385 APY (After Pethos’ Year).

Almost one-and-a-half millennia after the formation of the Aeries, researchers within the Aeries discovered a vile force in the land of Tolwyn. It seemed that without the protection of Gaea’s domineering spirit, the emotions of Tolwyn and its creatures had reached the lesser spirits and Gods that ruled over Tolwyn’s surface and its various personalities. Some of the less scrupulous higher beings had gathered together all the rage of Dragons, wyverns, drakes, and all other draconic species into a sentient energy that called itself the Dracorage. This force, closely allied with the legions of Shadow that had grown out of the empty Nothing in which the Gods resided, slowly began to infiltrate Tolwyn, first through lesser species such as wild drakes. The Dracorage climbed the evolutionary hierarchy until it reached the Dragons and Dragoons of Ansar and Ocûl Aeries. It was then that the Dragons and Dragoons themselves began to become corrupted by the Dracorage, becoming Black Riders and Shadow Riders, servants of the Dracorage, and, more than the Dracorage itself realized, the Shadow itself.

The first known encounter with Shadow riders came approximately six hundred years ago in 1,904 APY, when a four-rider-and-dragon patrol came across two Riders above the Dûlwood. The Dragoons followed the Riders about five miles behind down the Manda River, over Peakstone to Mount Goren. After indicating to the Aerie that they were going to close in to investigate further, they were never heard from again. Pethos’ direct descendant Dren, then Sky Captain of Curin Aerie, officially released information that the Shadow was attempting to gain a foothold in Tolwyn through the Dracorage. The Aeries, after building their forces for more than five hundred years, finally decided in 2,451 APY to make an assault on the only place they know of where the Dracorage had a solid foothold – Mount Goren.

Led by Krackon, the Sky Captain of Ansar, the assault was the greatest single flight of dragons and Dragoons the Aeries had ever made since their interdiction in the short-lived Cloaklands-Alluvian wars. Hundreds upon hundreds of Dragons rained down fire on the Shadow Riders and their Wyverns, utterly destroying the south face of Mount Goren. Krackon and others went in to the rubble of the mountain to destroy any eggs the Wyverns had left, and, after heavy fighting inside, Krackon was the only one of a full company to return. The entire rest of his company of trained warriors had been eaten, burned, or otherwise maimed, as Krackon described it. What kind of force destroyed them, however, he did not say.

The only other recent incident in which the forces of Shadow could even be implicated was the razing of the Alluvian capital city of Duran. For unknown reasons, a creature calling itself the Chimera came to Duran in 2,496 APY, demanding to see a local merchant about some sort of weapon. When the creature was apparently not appeased, it returned the next night and leveled the entire city to rubble and ash in under an hour. It is still unknown as to whether the creature had anything to do with the Dracorage, but it is more than likely that the Chimera was a servant of Shadow dispatched to execute the direct destruction the Dracorage had become incapable of after Mount Goren. Since, no reports of Shadow Riders or the Chimera have filtered in to any governmental or Aerie intelligence sources.

The year now is 2,501 APY, and the current state of affairs in Tolwyn is a bit of a mess. Ansar Aerie’s Sky Captain left on personal leave and was replaced by the ailing Krackon. Alluvia and Navareskia’s treaty is slowly degrading after Navareskia again tried and failed to invade the Lesk Isles, against the wishes of most of the rest of Tolwyn. The Cloaklands are still instituting a strict “no unlicensed magic use” policy in their territories, and Shojuno is isolating itself from the rest of Tolwyn for fear of war. This about brings things up to speed.

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A Brief Note About Tolwyn’s Technology, Or Lack Thereof

Tolwyn has as yet had no need to evolve or advance purely technologically. Because of its denizens’ abilities to manipulate elemental magick and Etheræl magic, Tolwyn’s people have blended basic technology and architectural and mechanical skills with magic to create most of the instruments of Tolwine daily life. After its official discovery by the dwarf Thovkuik, the Etheræl plane and the source of Ether magic became the subject of great amounts of magical research. These studies by the great mages of Tolwyn revealed that the energy within the Etheræl plane could be harnessed to a greater and more permanent degree than the simple spells of mages that conjured fireballs and shield walls.
Elevators, for example, use magical power capacitors made of micro-aligned crystal facets to power the winches and cables of the shafts. Gas lines run under Alluvian cities, using magical catalysts to draw swamp gas from collection stations around the marshes of Kwalish and refine it into useable energy-producing fuel. Even massive wooden siege weapons such as trebuchets have been magically augmented the be made as hard as tempered steel, and using overly heavy weights, can hurl balls of Etherælly-charged wheroplasm – the physical manifestation of magical energy – over distances greater than any simply gravity-powered weapon could.

This dependence on magical energy, however, has inherent drawbacks. When magic is dispelled by wide-area spells, machinery in permanently enchanted installations begin to malfunction for periods of time ranging from a few seconds to a few days. When spells are directed, however, machinery can be permanently shut down until its empowering spells are re-cast. Because of these problems, some independent companies, most notably the Ctrelli Mechanics Corporation and the Haas Trading Company, have been investing in developing purely mechanical solutions to problems that have “traditionally” been solved by magical means.

Ctrelli has already created a working elevator system and communications network within its on headquarters in Æfer, both using water power and malleable crystal wire as power sources and conductors, respectively. They have also pioneered a way of mass-producing steel without the use of magically superheated furnaces, and have been researching uses for many of Tolwyn’s more “unusual” indigenous minerals. The Haas Company, as well, has been sending expeditions into the South Fire Wastesands and across the Eldûl Kojunko to look for remnants of civilizations that had once lived there. Their most productive visits so far have been to Ceridost, the old Brodhalven capital, where their researchers have been finding signs that an ancient race, referred to in Brodhalven as the “Idari,” possessed technology that allowed them to manipulate crystal wires and inherent energy sources without the use of magic. They haven’t released any more information than that to the general public, but they apparently have been formulating plans to look for Idari artifacts that were previously removed from the city.

This recent rise in exclusively technological development has started to divide the Tolwine population by whether they prefer to use technological or magical solutions to problems, be they problems of engineering or daily life. While technological advancement has not become a concern of most of the population, the people living in and around the city of Æfer have been directly exposed to more new technology than most others. Both the Haas Company and Ctrelli have their main bases of operation in the city, and the technology that comes out of both of their workshops and warehouses astounds many. Æfer’s residents, as part of a neutral city-state, have broken off from the mainstream view of the rest of Tolwyn, and generally use little to no magic in their daily life, replacing it with newly developed technology. As a result, the Aerfalle region has become one most often avoided by mages except to pass through as traders, as the citizens of Æfer regard their use of magic as a copout.

Other than that outlying situation, the conflict between magic and technology has caused little in the way of change or problems in the culture of Tolwyn as a whole. Ctrelli and Haas, however, seem confident that somehow, they’ll change part of the Tolwine way of life. Eventually.

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EDIT: For those of you who love dorkiness to the nth degree, you can find a Map of Tolwyn on imageshack. God I scare myself sometimes.

[Mistress Sheena]

Well, I already told you about one grammar error, and I didn't catch anymore while reading the other two chapters. I was really engrossed in the story and wanted to read more.

It also hit me that I can write like that too, given I gave myself enough training. xD

But I really like how the story is going, and I like the parts where you inserted the humor with the horse, like where Taere nearly fell off of Ether when it finally got moving. And also how Ether unhooked itself and started wandering the town.