Art!
It’s Thursday! Here’s a drawing I did a while ago of my main characters from Shades.
And, perhaps a couple of maps. It’s funny, I actually didn’t draw these until the first draft of the story was almost done, when I finally needed to know exactly where things were.
Here’s the world as a whole. You can see Aschera and Chisge in the upper center area. The village where Raphel was born is almost due west of Aschera, on the other side of the Midplains. The red area is the cursed Midplains, top-left pointing stripes represent Mantle territory, top-right pointing stripes are Cowl territory, and crosshatching is disputed territory. (You may notice that there is quite a bit of disputed territory, and that the Cowls have much less undisputed territory than the Mantles. The Mantles are winning the war when the story opens). Iadnah and Lanschport are both southern Cowl cities. Iadnah is nominally under Mantle control, while Lanschport is purely Cowl. Lanschport has a rather unsavory reputation even among Cowls, which is probably why the Mantles don’t want it (people on Verre have odd superstitions about the ocean); both Geris and Teja hail from that city. The battle of Iadnah plays an important role in all three of my major Cowls’ pasts: Mora lost her husband, infant daughter, and father; Kaladan lost his faith in the Mantle cause and turned Cowl; and I haven’t yet decided how Raphel was involved (but I have decided that he needs to be).
Here is Aschamon. A great deal of the action in the first and third books takes place on Aschamon’s campus, so I needed to know exactly where each building was in relation to the others.
It sits on a hill in the western quadrant of Aschera (Aschera I have not mapped yet. Not sure if I need to). The Temple and the main sorarc tower are the hub of the school, both physically and spiritually. The small triangular buildings are the dormitories: one for the youngest (gray) students, three for the various ages of Mantle students, and one for the cleric students. Saeli lives in a Mantle dormitory, even though she is not a Mantle; she and Cara got special permission to be roommates, and since Cara is a Mantle, the school allowed it.
