I was thinking Friz was going on a spiritual journey heading away from a small monastery in the foothills of those couple mountains near the middle of Eastwood.
the temple would be not so mountainous as the Tibet ones, but similar.
he could easily meet Kirnon on his way east.
OK, cool!
All of the following is “if approved by Quill”, of course: some ideas that could help to ground our characters in the World of the Makers.
All please forgive the enthusiasm this novel’s worth of reading represents – I just can’t wait to start playing my character, and the game, and I guess it shows. And gaming is a collaborative effort, so I intend this as a starting point; please change it up any way that pleases you better.
I put two tiny red dots on the updated map in the spoiler, and connected them with a thin green dotted curvy line. First I’ll talk about where and what they are, and then I’ll describe a little more likely detail about them, “if approved”.
- One of the red dots is the monastery. I placed it just to the east of that small central mountainous group – I think that’s the one you meant, Zook, out a little way from the mountains into what probably is a foothills region – to match what you said: not as mountainous as Tibet.
- The other red dot is on the lake that lies east of the monastery across the southern reaches of Eastwood. If there is a lake, there are probably a few tiny fishing settlements, gatherings of five or ten houses of families or clans that use the lake for their food supply. The red dot is one of the larger settlements. I’ll explain why, below.
- The green curvy line is a path through the southern part of Eastwood between the monastery and the lake.
The monastery, and its path through Eastwood to the lake:
Small streams run down out of mountains, too small to show on a map on the scale of the World Map. (They are on CaraVela’s maps, though; sun glint turns even a tiny stream to a ribbon of molten gold, strikingly visible from a few miles up.) One such stream runs by a monastery in the steep foothills; access to its fresh water is one reason the monastery is located where it is.
In the foothills around the monastery, the stream runs on the surface rather than underground because the rocky soil pushes the water table up within a few feet of the surface, but as the stream wends its way into the forest of Eastwood, it sinks down into the thick topsoil and runs mostly underground, following the water table that gets deeper year by year beneath the weight of old leaves and decaying wood. Following the roll of the rocky folds beneath the forest on its way to the lake, occasionally the stream reappears in pools and ponds on the surface, wherever it has cut a dell into the soft soil.
The monastery is named Yun Shin, “New Cloud” in the common tongue {as translated from Chinese}; it faces east into the rising sun where the clouds of light spring over the horizon new each morning. The monastery leans against the mountainous foothill to the west; a path to the east comes right to the monastery’s stair, the same steps where Friz was left for the monks to find. Travelers on the path, well-worn over centuries or more, between the monastery and the lake, follow the stream’s course though they may not know it, as they too pass from dell to dell for shelter and water along the route. A week of travel on horseback, and two or more on foot, the road is not as hard as some, even though the Eastwood can be a wild and dangerous place, especially at night when the shelter of a dell is very welcome, with a rocky wall at a traveler’s back and a pool of water at their feet, lying between their sleeping roll and the forested wilderness beyond.
At the lake end of the path, the stream contributes to the headwaters of the much larger river running down to Kazs, the nearest rivertrade port toward the lowlands. Where the path and the lake come together, trade supplements the fishing village there, and it has grown to be the largest of the fishing settlements around the lake, the landing where the riverboats come with lowland goods. Besides its dozen or so houses, the village has a general store, and the trades that take special skills or equipment: a smithy, a cooper, a healer, a cobbler, a glassmaster. Farm and fishing families can work leather, metal, wax and wool on their own, but the practiced hand of a master can make goods more durable, useful, and of greater variety than a farmer’s can.
Life in the lake settlements is as hard as the wind and weather. In the warm seasons, the winds rolling off the distant seas are funneled lakeward by the eastern and western ranges, increasing their intensity from offshore breezes into gusts that ripple the lakes and crackle through the trees. The fishermen rely on the steady winds out of the south to tack across the length and breadth of the lake. In the long colder season, frozen storms howling south off the northern mountains, with their short days and thin sun, are bottled up by the eastern and western ranges, and the strong fronts to the south against the wet, heavy air pushing inland from the sea. The cold can last for many months, and even in the southern reaches of Eastwood, the lakes freeze most winters; lake settlements have boats and rope nets for summer, and picks and pole nets for winter, to be able to eat all year round.
River trade runs from late spring to late fall, between freezes; in that warmer time, stores for the winter make their way north, and raw goods for the lowlands travel south. By late fall, a small caravan back to the monastery brings the final load of thimbles and needles, barrels and lowland herbs, back across the trail through Eastwood to tide the monks through the winter.
If Friz is traveling east from the monastery on the trail – also a journey toward his roots, perhaps, since the path at the stair where he was left leads to the east – and a journey toward the new clouds of the rising sun from which the monastery takes its name – he might well come to the lake; perhaps he began his spiritual journey after the last frost, in early spring – a classic time for spiritual renewal. Especially with the big celestial event on the spring Equinox about to happen, an event even more especially important to a journey toward the sun – more on this later!
If Kirnon grew up near Eastwood, he could have lived near the lake, and there could be good reason for it. His “parents”, the family who raised him, would likely not have been chosen at random; they would have been chosen with care. Also it might not be likely that they were simple lakelander fishermen, for whom a strange child might be too difficult to accept at all. Rather more likely that they came upriver from the lowlands, bringing more worldly experience that would help them with such a child. Why then raise Kirnon in the lake country? A less important reason: It could be a place where he could grow up undisturbed, far more privately than in a lowland city, as he came into his powers. A far more important reason: It could be a place where his powers could come into their own, possibly maturing in just the right setting to become fully expressed. A place of water. A place of howling wind. And a place of shadow: the largest shadow in the World. For the lake could be the very place in the world where the Equinox eclipses occur: at noon on each Equinox, spring and fall, perhaps where the perfectly regular moon’s path intersects the sun’s path with mathematical precision, and its shadow comes down onto the lake country for six minutes of totality –so perfect it may be, in this World’s creation.
Water, wind, and shadow could have steeped into Kirnon, echoing in his Blood in just the way he was made. And when it came time for him to leave his elemental cradle, this lake country, perhaps he might now simply have come to this lake and its trading village for the riverboat that would take him south, anticipating the first riverboat in early spring, arriving with the gawkers coming to witness the spring Equinox eclipse.
That would place both Kirnon and Friz in the same village at the same time, waiting for the riverboat coming up from Kazs. And… CaraVela might be on that riverboat, coming up from Kazs to enjoy the eclipse herself, pick up an order she placed last fall for specialty glass, and raw sand; perhaps this lake bottom has some of the finest sand in the Makers’ World, and so the glassmaster here is among those who make the best Magic-grade glass items, despite or because of the remote location.
Friz, Kirnon, CaraVela; little do the three of them know that the spring Equinox eclipse may have special meaning to each of them, far beyond its wondrous appearance to the other onlookers. For Friz, it may represent a renewal of the sun, a namesake event sacred to the Yun Shin Monastery. For Kirnon, it may represent a celestial acknowledgement of the supreme strength of conquering Shadow, that courses through his blood. For CaraVela, it brings her back in memory to the moon and her years long journey to walk on it so long ago, and the grand majesty of moons, planets, stars, and galaxies moving across the void that stirs her soul. Special to each, and yet so different to each, in their own unique way: For Friz, Sun. For Kirnon, Shadow. For CaraVela, Moon. Three travelers; the three aspects of the eclipse.
And if the three possibly are together at that time, on the riverboat out in the middle of the lake where the viewing of the eclipse is at its unobstructed best, they might each sense that the other two have been deeply, deeply moved, far more so than the rest of the onlookers around them… a subtle bond and sense of power among the three of them that the other onlookers cannot share.
Just some ideas that might appeal to you to round out our places in the world (with Quill’s approval)! How does this seem to fit, for Friz and Kirnon? As I said at the beginning, this is just a beginning. Change it up any way you like, or run with it in whatever direction.
Whatever we decide to do with this, it was fun to write!
EDIT: fixed tpyos :-)
