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whetstonefires · 4 years

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an exercise in worldbuilding

It is always simplest to start from a point and move outward, and so we begin in the Tower of Sight, where our twelve-year-old hero will first find himself summoned into this world.

The Tower is four hundred feet high, gently tapered, with a circumference of two hundred feet at its base, and the top three of its forty floors are filled with brass telescopes of every size, pointing in every possible direction, including several that do not exist within the normal three dimensions of space.

To the West these many spyglasses overlook a wide plain, all the way to the horizon, golden at this time of year and frequented mainly by roving herds of grazing beasts, both wild and tame. In the half-league nearest the Tower, tall grasses give way to the narrow strips of tilled fields, where the grain stands tall, almost ready for the harvest. If any harvest will come.

Near the other side of the Tower of Sight, a stone’s throw from the eastern point of the outer wall, runs a great river, green when the sun does not strike it directly, except in the spring when its tributaries flood and it turns to churned brown. There was a bridge here once, though it is long fallen but for the stubs of its pilings on each end, and nowadays all crossings are by ferry.

A small town clusters on both banks, even so. The roofs are of red tile, the stucco of the houses painted in shades of blue. It stands empty, but has not had time to fall into disrepair.

More farmland, speckled with villages in the same style of tile and paint, with wells in the center where they are not built on lesser watercourses, stretches away to the east, but if you look through one of the telescopes turned that way you will see it give way to blue mountains. (If you look through an enchanted telescope you may see trees without needles fail halfway up the nearest of the great peaks, and even these fail before the top, though there is a span of nearly barren stone past that line, before the snow begins.)

The range of mountains curves, and you can see them with the naked eye toward the south, on a fine clear day. To the North they fall away into a gentler, older range, which cannot be seen by ordinary human sight from this place, but which wrinkle the land between the plain and the sea into rolling green hills.

The green band of the great river cuts a sharp path through these after coiling its way lazily north over the flatlands, and spreads into an abbreviated delta full of sandbars which is generally considered a nuisance to navigate, though navigated it normally very much is.

There is a city there, the nearest one to the Tower; its outer limits have spilled up onto the hills, and its tallest spires can be made out with mechanical aid, but only one telescope in the place can cut through earth and stone to make out any of the doings of the city proper, and calibrating it to focus at a particular distance and not dismiss all solid matter is a tiresome nuisance, and only rarely worth the trouble.

The very brave and sure of foot can keep their eyes on the surrounding country all the way down the Tower, until their sight is cut off a few stories above the ground by the six shining white sides of the outer walls, because the most direct (if not the quickest) route between the ground and the great sky-searching telescope on the roof is a great spiral stair wrapping around the outside.

These stairs, like the outer wall and the tower itself, seem to be of marble, although a great enchantment must have been worked when the tower was raised for this to be so, because it is far stronger than any other marble to be found anywhere, and unlike marble statues erected in city squares has never suffered wear from the weather.

The wall and stair are of pure white, like the marble quarried in the much-contested eastern foothills of the Evrin Dulle, but the Tower of Sight itself is built of blocks veined with every color, pale blues and purples, reds and greens and golden-duns all mottling toward white and grey and black, as though its builders determinedly sourced their materials from every source of marble on five continents.

It is furthermore banded in three places with rings of solid color twenty feet high—first, nearest the ground, the warm pale red found in some of the ruins on the isles of Thassalen that is quarried nowhere anymore, and which no one knows where it came from to begin with, then the delicate even green still found in small quantities in the most seaward copper mines of the Farlon Barrens, and finally, nearest the top, the prized pure black found only in the village of Xemahan, some way inland from the Trident Coast.

The Tower is a beautiful and timeless construct of art, but our hero when he sees it from a distance for the first time will find the effect of so much color, triply striped and encased within a white spiral, slightly frenzied, and make a remark no one present understands about a Doctor named Seuss. His guide, the dousing tracker Amnaphi, will assume this person to be a famous astronomer from his homeland.

Within the even hexagon of its outer wall, the Tower encloses a great parkland, enough that if it was all put under cultivation it could easily feed as many people as could live in the Tower itself. And indeed, there are records that show the Tower of Sight was once incorporated as a town in just this way, before the Ten Years’ Winter.

For seven generations now the Tower has been held by the Watchers of the Stars, an order of wizards originally from the Duthwaithe, and they have kept it more as a retreat of contemplation than a working estate.

The only gate, in the southern wall, leads the visitor up a broad avenue paved in glittering granite, lined with stately beech trees, and just beyond these to either side an expanse of grass is rarely allowed to grow tall, as a small herd of goats is unleashed upon it once a week. At all other times, under normal circumstances, it is a pleasant lawn, where in the warm months what students have come as learners to the Tower may be found attempting to attend to their star-charts and metallurgy texts.

Thirty minutes’ easy stroll brings the visitor to a small artificial lake that lies at the foot of the Tower; it is stocked with several varieties of edible fish, which are caught by line as a recreational activity, and regularly served at supper. The wizard Chanult Foi, who was magister of the Tower for twenty years until last month, devoted a three hour block of time to ‘meditation’ every week, which took the form of fly-fishing from the nearest curve of the Tower steps.

To either side of the lake, and the Tower itself, are gardens: to the east, vegetables and herbs are grown, often with more artistry than prudence. The students generally have charge of this garden, apart from the more esoteric herbs which are tended to by a specialist, and competitions of aesthetic routinely spring up, resulting in elegant spirals of onions and gorgeously ornate trellises for the benefit of beans.

To the west grow the flowers, many of them with magical uses but some grown purely for their beauty. Kings have been known to try to sway the Watchers to their side with the gift of a particularly fine or rare live rose bush.

The northern third of the Tower’s park contains neatly regimented orchards, apples, pears, plums, and a few rows of carefully tended peaches and apricots, all clipped flat against low brick walls angled south and slightly west.

The brick absorbs the sun all day, and radiates its warmth back; fruit grown along fruit walls ripens faster and later into the season, and the peaches and apricots have survived every ordinary winter as a result, though normally they cannot tolerate this climate.

(For many years the proposition of sheltering some or all of the fruit walls behind glass, to increase their effectiveness, has been debated at the semi-annual colloquiums of the Watchers of the Stars; thus far it has always been rejected despite being rather more wizardly than simple fruit walls, which are not uncommon at these latitudes nowadays, because the space constraints of the current arrangement mean that the proposed design would require cutting down some of the existing trees and demolishing at least a few walls, and wizards, while enthusiastic about innovation in the abstract, hate change.)

The inside of the north wall itself is covered in grape vines. They were harvested three weeks ago, and pressed, but the wine-making process was interrupted after that point and the juice has all been drunk raw. There is currently considerable debate over whether the security risk presented by having a climbable side of the inner wall is serious enough to waste the potential food value of the vines’ future fruit by cutting them down.

The Tower grounds are filled with refugees.

The first to arrive were housed inside, battered survivors of the battle that killed Chanult Foi, bearing word of disaster. There was not enough space left after that for the river-straddling town of Meryn to all relocate to the Tower, so those who did not fit indoors set up camp around the rim of the lake—half clustered near the great doors and half in the partial shade of the last pair of beeches.

This division corresponds imperfectly to the usual split of the town by the course of the Meroda.

More have come since. From the villages nearby, and a few further away, although the further from the river they live the less willing farmers are to leave the grain standing in the fields even if the news has reached them. A wave of people fleeing ahead of the advance of the Moon People along the northern coast, joined and followed by people from the city who had the will and means to withdraw, but could not get passage on a seagoing vessel west, and so turned their hopes southward to this fortress of wizardry.

The lawns are now too trampled by human feet to have any extra substance for the goats, and the annual flowers have been crushed and the carefully tended bushes cut back in the flower garden to make more space.

So far the vegetable garden has not been uprooted, though it has been subjected to unsanctioned raids; one student has regretted aloud valuing beauty over efficiency at planting time, in the spring, when all seemed well. Makeshift pallets line the spaces between every fruit wall—the injured are being laid out here, now that the Tower is full, to get the benefit at night of the warmth meant to mature fruit.

Even the granite avenue is inhabited, now, although a corridor has been kept open to allow for what comings and goings remain necessary in the expectation of a siege.

The fishermen of Meryn, with additional labor sourced mainly from the nearby villages but also by delta and harbor-folk who liked their chances on the river better than taking their small vessels across the wide sea, go out every day to catch and smoke fish, and there are hopes that the advance of the Moon People will hold off long enough to let the year’s grain harvest be taken in.

With luck, care, and wizardry, everyone here should be able to survive the winter, if all the grain within sight of the walls can only be reaped and threshed and stored away.

(Space will be found for any herdsmen who, seeing the enemy advance, drive their beasts in to be slaughtered for the common pot; hope is being hung on this as well, although undoubtedly most of the plainsmen will rely on their own nomadic lifestyle to keep them out of the way and outside the focus of the Moon People, and will not come near settled habitation any time soon.)

This morning, the student standing north-sentry in the Tower of Sight saw a great column of smoke go up from the city of Tolphis, at the mouth of the Meroda. Magister Heron Yl Fanult, Chanult Foi’s successor, spent an hour carefully tuning the spyglass that can look through solid matter to confirm what they all knew: the Moon People had reached Tolphis, and sacked it in a day.

Half of them are making ready to turn south along the Meroda.

Fear is metal in everybody’s mouths. The ancient walls of the Tower will hold—should hold—they have always held before—the Tower of Sight has never fallen but by treachery or deceit, the enchantments laid in the ancient days are too strong…but the Moon People are the successors of the ancient magics, and just because they could not break the walls the last time they came, according to legend, does not mean they have not worked out a method now.

Everyone who has a weapon and the knowledge of how to use it keeps it close, as a comfort. Labors over the sharpness of the edge in the evenings, sometimes, when there is nothing else to do but sleep, and sleep will not come. People who have only the weapon and not the knowledge scramble to obtain the latter, and people who have the knowledge and not the weapon scramble to barter or improvise one.

Young wizards sit in their bunks, six each to rooms that were previously individual, and hold lighting cupped dancing in their palms. Practicing.

Outside, the blue hats and scarves of the townspeople and villagers mill about the edges of the lake, like floating petals caught in a swirling eddy. The people who retreated upriver from Tolphis can be found sitting still, today, because they are weeping.

Those who fled along the northern coast ahead of the storm are a mixed lot, more grim than panicking because they are the ones who retreated this far alive, scattered across the park in smaller groups—some with their heads decorously covered, though not always in the blues that are customary along the upper Meroda, others with naked crowns of braids, or cleanshaven in the nautical style of Hedro, where fur hats are worn for warmth rather than courtesy, and long hair is considered a risk because if it gets wet it cannot be easily removed, and this can cause a fatal chill.

The hale survivors of the First Battle of the Second Descent sit waiting in their leathers, jack-chains and helmets laughably inadequate armor against the coming danger, and yet the best hope now just as they were on Carun Tol once the wizard fell; their wounded lie still, except for a few who have been taken with fever and thrash at the foot of an apricot tree, or a pear tree growing heavy with yellow fruit.

A wizard specializing in physic, the same one who has had charge of the powerful herbs these four years, bends over a man who has been deprived of half his left leg. The golden threads in her green kirtle that mark her focus and her rank flash in the sun as it begins to sink, and sweat stands out on her brow. Threads have escaped from the braids pinned across the top of her skull: she has not had the chance to take them down for two days.

At the very top of the Tower of Sight, Magister Yl Fanult steps away from the telescope-that-looks-through-hills with a soft sigh. He makes his way around the circumference of the tower room to set his face into the viewplate of the great lens array of the roof, trained as it long has been upon the face of the moon. No change there.

He leans forward to peer through the narrow glass that has been turned on its articulated base to face the middle of the room, and relaxes very slightly. At least there has been no catastrophic alteration there, either.

He steps over the ring of silver set into the floor of the chamber. Lowers himself to one creaking knee and blows into the upraised spout of the ring of glass tubing inside of that, then hurriedly caps it, stands with care, and steps over that as well. He snaps his fingers for a spark that falls into the deep circular groove full of distilled spirits, and steps through that as well. He is not burned.

He bends another time and pours out the small copper pail of water he fetched himself from the well in the basement of the Tower, filling the final circle.

Steps over that, and pauses just long enough to breathe in.

At his feet lie a glittering piece of gold ore, a moonstone, and a carefully sanded round of pumice. Heron Yl Fanult lets the breath out again, and stoops.

He cannot take much time. He has only until the ring of fire dies.

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