scott-martin

Nice. Yuthuppa of all cities may not be the original, but a city built on the corpse of something else and assigned a legendary name in order to shore up someone's sense of dynastic continuity. The god Yuthu is awful quiet these days. On which note, I keep hunting the mother of all inverted ziggurats, the negative mountain of "Serenity"associated with Chalana Arroy that later filled up with water. Any leads?

This is really cool. Do you think the river originally took the "cha" character alien to Khordavu's Alphabet? Z is such an important phoneme in DH that I can see its attribution to the valley people (who might still prefer G/J/Zh to this day) becoming religiously controversial. Also to get back to those sea elves or river people, there are occasional asides to the rivers being opposed to the emergent Lunar Way early on. Wonder if the Arcos was one of the leaders in that resistance.

I love it. Now that you mention it, there is a hillbilly vibe to that part of the world with its clean living and notorious tattoo parlors.

This is really good as we chase the transitions between beast and storm up there. Vadrus as unreconstructed "northern Orlanth" (separate from our southern friend or the western ram god who becomes High Storm for awhile) as lord of the dance . . . a hunter and psychopomp, someone who sometimes functions a little like Waha. King of beasts and end of beasts incorporating totemic consciousness into a new system. Not a Serpent Beast system. A separate solution to the existential problems. A different covenant or survivor pact of sorts that then develops within time. Storm totems. Maybe an entire storm ecology where now only the storm bull and occasional storm ram, storm tiger and so on persist elsewhere. People like the Telmorites and early Ygg would have interacted with that ecology, making their various historical choices. Of course the Bear played a huge role, it got cold up there in the ice age.

Thanks. The context is especially great because it preserves something like a directional war narrative from the theistic perspective . . . and then enough of that narrative persists into the court of the Magnificent to work its way into the standard vocabulary where other concepts get suppressed. The tale of how Incompletes assaulted the world from the glacier side is also evocative.

Very thin despite his long reign. The most immediately interesting thing about these documents from a broad Western POV is that Greg originally knew him as Damoling and this is then crossed out here and there. "Damol" of course evokes the syncretic storm people of the southwest, apparently still a powerful faction in the mid second century and maybe beyond. The prospect of someone emerging from that milieu in the post-Torphing upheavals and then undergoing some kind of conversion/renunciation is very attractive . . . Lofting as last of the continental Children of Damol and under his new rule name the patron of a Hrestolite revival to follow. For our purposes that stretch of the Book of Kings alludes to sporadic intervention to prop up Iselfwal at least from Torphing through Nirgalor, at which point the Enjoreli finally overrun the city and start pushing south. This is of course only the late 280s so presumably the client states are revived and even expanded sometime before the 400 snapshot. Unfortunately I'm missing the late Ahmosing and early Iwerlos reigns (roughly 310-345) so clearly the knowledge eaters have something to hide here.

Possibly a traveler's tale or allusion to what can be read as a social war between Brithini and Seshnegite factions. "Slashela" is also really interesting here, since not even Greg would ever make that kind of typo around one of his oldest creations. We can simply ignore it as a garbled label on a land far from the Khornazelmite POV or dig into it a little as the sign of something going on in the wreckage of the Silver Empire. "Incompletes" might refer to the shrunken nature of the realm, although this implies knowledge of the "complete" Seshnelan realm that preceded it. And it still includes Tanisor. EDIT: My guess is that it is actually a technical term like "meldek" to indicate that these are not quite full people. Would love to know more about the informant here. Dari as occupying an intermediary "sub" human position between humanity in the perfected Council/DH condominium and the "non" human realms is also worth playing with. Does this refer to a non-hsunchen/hykimite barbarian culture or something more specifically religious or cultural? Jarasan doesn't get this label. The Kingdom of Night, on the other hand (which incorporates Arstola and the Elder Wilds), is fully nonhuman. From recent DH experiences with aggressive elf conquest, this hints at a different sense of the relationship between aldryami and uz in this era . . . which is what I'm here for right now. This looks like it reflects a moment when the Council was in the process of Breaking, with the trolls and dragonewts (and southern elves) out while the southern storm people are still nominally in. Other notes: I need to check the Lofting file for his northern war but recall the results being thin. The Redeli are described as being a race apart from the pale Brithini closer to the Pendalites and other continental "beast people" we might classify as proto-warerans today. Interestingly enough the account alludes to the lion cities as centers of maritime trade . . . clearly and unequivocally a lie, right? Right? Everyone today knows those "people" were lucky to have mud huts.

This is as good a place as any other to tap in the piton and see how much weight it holds. I wonder now if the "river folk" who plagued the early colonists were another species of the elusive murthdryans. The sources from this era simply refer to "triolinae" but these are probably not saltwater cetoi. Following them up to the lakes may reveal a few things. But the sources I have are fragmentary on the northwest. We have yet to accumulate the kind of systematic historical data that we now have for Seshnela, Heortland and Dara Happa. That's okay. It will come. What I have is a few snapshots that amount to anecdotes. There are no first wave Brithini missions to the northwest in the original Seshnegi Book of Foreigners. Instead, the expeditions go to Frowal, Neleswal, Hepedwal (in "southern Brithela, now sunk") and Horalwal in a then-unpopulated eastern region of Brithos. Either of these last two may be allegorical or esoteric in symbolism. What concerns us is that in the time of Kaldes there's a bride kidnapping, "a sister to our founder" seduced into a Fronelan bear nation, the Redeli. She was proud there, a queen. Her name is not Menela, by the way. These Redeli are at least occasionally allied with "Vadeli" as well as the Enjoreli who ride bulls. After this episode the Brithini are uncharacteristically humbled and leave the northwest alone. Around 110, the scribes of King Sonmalos recorded a memoir from a man who described himself as a member of the Redeli people. We learn that they were a bear nation who competed with the bull riding Enjoreli of the central plain and had an ambivalent relationship with the Telmorites. They used copper implements and had at least coastal boats in imitation of the Brithos colony at Isefwal. (The origins of this colony are a little controversial unless I am misremembering a source. I'll report back on that when time permits.) Then by 396 one of the Arkat narratives discusses the way the Gbajites "managed to gain a foothold in the kingdoms of Nenanduft and Iselfwal [sic]." A more organized bull nation, the Losk-alim, retaliate by sacking Iselfwal and a third city, Alorket. Then the northern Telmorites get involved on behalf of their Ralian cousins. Mostali and "their new Jolanti allies" are also present. We know that by 415 Talor has allied Losk-alim, Redeli and presumably anti-Gbaji wolf people against Nenanduft. These are all beast peoples. Bright Empire presence is allegedly eradicated by 420. A separate epilogue tells the tale of "Talor the Old" but feels more apocryphal than usual and the dynastic continuation is missing. The sources I have are then silent on the north until the terminal imperial age. A "Kingdom of Beasts" hykimite pantheon becomes very interesting as an alternative to lightbringer-centered storm worship in the south. Obviously they correspond to something like the modern universal cults now but at one time they would have demonstrated more totemic aspects. This may actually have been a major source of their resistance to Loko-style storm since they would balk at worshipping an entity they would understand as a goat.

I hear you. This is why my question was open ended. A lot happens between 265 and 400. For example, the sweep of the Reforestation and Clearing shows up in the 50-year maps of Peloria, which is why I went looking in the first place . . . but we would never know about it from the snapshots, as great as they are. And those maps cut off roughly at the western tip of the Sweet Sea. Our sense of the northwest is less systematic. Every data point needs to do more work but is paradoxically more vulnerable to the limitations of perspective. What does the map maker's sense tell us about the Far West as it existed around 350-375?

So while refreshing my sense of Dawn Age aldryami politics I was struck by this map from the Fortunate Succession: Sadly other archaic Pelorian maps in my possession end with the Sweet Sea so this is the only time I recall seeing all the way to the northwest coast in this era. When the bigoted Khorazanelmites said "Kingdom of Beasts," who exactly did they mean?

Nice. When you worship the light exclusively, the storm looks dark. When you worship the storm, the thunder darkens and the lightning lightens. For me the tragedy of the Council was when politics and prejudice determined that the new god would be bright. The dark quite rightly objected. But in a black-and-white world, he had to be one or the other.

Yeah. And then what? The aldryami speak of multiple iterations of the Grower / Taker cycle. They remember multiple deaths and multiple rebirths. It isn't linear history and it isn't the wibbly wobbly of godtime either. Another mythic economy. "Thamus Panmegas tethneke."

That's his mythic economy. For those who love God Time paradoxes, Flamal was always the dead, dying and resurrected god even before the confabulation of Taker as death. His city is where that happens. Sacred Rebirth, which is a trick Eastern Brother Genert has yet to achieve and Southern Brother has yet to require. Of course all of this is buried in the seasons of elf and other schismatic cycles, green and brown, Utoni and Vustri, sun and storm, on and on. I am not sure the old temple complex was stone or wood as we know it. When it died, the hard parts might have been locked into dead stone while other parts blew away on the wind. But that's a much more complicated story. I like bringing jade into the conversation. They might have had a cutting stone now lost to a history of systematic plunder, drawing on a source that has been cut off. The coast has a history of tectonic activity and there are local accounts of the Rockwoods emerging catastrophically via the living mountain seeds. The punchline to that one is that the local Lodril entity is an erosive force here, shaking the mountains down when they get tall enough to offend the sky. Greg likes erosion. Maybe the right landslide unearths something hard and sublime in the depths. Maybe something like glass. Somebody has since taken it all away or it wore out.

Still really busy as the old world burns. This is all great. Some scattered applause: I have increasing conviction that Flamal occupies this function in this part of the world at the Dawn but that rite was only incidentally incorporated into the primary monomyth. One of the "lesser bonuses" that drops out of it is a different relationship with Beast rune that informs how the rider totems evolve versus the lycanthropic totems. I will show my work later. I like it. The variant elemental theogony reminds me of the catechism of the Altinelans, who have Humakt [sic, "air"] as son of Zrethus ["ether"] and Gata while Lodril ["fire"] produces Ehilm parthenogenetically as a sun to rival storm. I do not think Grower is worshipped in that system separate from Flamal but can be convinced otherwise. (This is probably another of the elf mysteries.) I like this too but don't know where I want that to go. More work needs to be done throughout!

There will be blood. But this is how the world cycles.

I wonder if this was on the northern peregrination we see in the Tradetalk Kingdom of Night history or in that other ancestral center of AA worship from his Troll Gods writeup: Halikiv. Either way a Chalana is available. Looking at all this great horse stuff I wonder two more things: 1. Whether religions like "Pure Horse" are synthetic reconstructions with or without Bright Empire influence, in which case currents of illumination may persist around FHQ etc. 2. Whether the explicitly sorcerous "unicorn" known in '90s Western materials is itself a reconstruction separate from the light ladies' magic mounts but itching to be reintroduced to its estranged cousins in a Hero Wars context

Not Jeff so this is precarious . . . asking my own question here to evade the thread drift demons. The wyvern corps gets about a page in Strangers in Prax if you can get access to that or bend MOB's ear. "Bred and trained by the Lunar Empire for centuries . . . used by the army as elite messengers and are also trained to fight." What I want to know: who within Time has been to Brithos and was it roughly where Old Trade is now?

Love it. Would be nice just to have the Sword of Tolat. EDIT oh, the inestimable Dave Cake got here first!

These are big questions and the answers are fertile. Thanks for opening the door. For me it truly does boil down to "the god king didn't want the elemental languages to converge so they didn't." The deep logic behind that blanket "NO" is where it gets interesting. Esrolian has a long history of isolating from the more overtly Storm-facing rival system across the bay, even to the point of eradicating Orlanth from time to time. I think about Dansk and Svenska. The vocabulary and syntax might be practically identical but the social and political compensations of pretending that they are distinct and unintelligible override the convenience of everyone admitting that they can understand each other. There's also the nuance that "Esrolian" may easily survive in the female mysteries of Heortland (craft terminology, cradle rhymes and any other argot you want to shift into when you don't want the men to follow the code) but that's not the landscape male-oriented adventurers experience on that side of the bay. "Heortling" as a construct is implicitly gendered as a kind of rejection of the Esrolian universal. It's all in Freud. Geographically the field of admixture would have skirted the Plateau so negotiating transmission or maintaining diversity was the Only Old One's headache. (I need to take a closer look at his background role in the terminal Dawn Age material in light of what we know now.) Behind the scenes I do see the potential for heightened political divergence and (failed) unification in the Adjustment Wars era with a tendency to drive vernacular Esrolian underground as it were . . . there's a lot we still need to learn about Imperial Ernalda. Ezkankekko is strangely absent from the record (OOO AWOL) and might even be sleeping through the Kill for all I know. By 1250 the Earth Arm is apparently united against the gender trouble of the Imarjarins and only incels talk shepherd language. Either way these are fragile and increasingly isolated populations as you note, with linguistic enclaves ossifying like pueblos across the American Southwest. We don't know a lot about this era because with the coming of blessed Belintar we see it was a dark age of failed coping strategies. Belintar loves a pan-elemental system and bureaucratically enshrines the Esrolian/Heortling split. If anybody raises meaningful resistance their names are even lost to the unsympathetic lunar records we have.

Top post of the season easy. Thanks. The "heroic movement" trick seems to be burbling up in a lot of places these days. I love it. Why trudge on through unpleasant Middle World terrain when you can walk the weirding way and go under. Besides, nobody in the Dead Place to join up on the victory tour. The Inora tantra here is also extremely useful. Cold never bothered her anyway but her seclusion makes the rest of us thirsty.

A little excess can be a marvelous thing. Preserving linguistic diversity supports an unusually robust knowledge worker population: the beards need to be able to run multiple translations of documentation and Trade remains critical across communities. We charge for Trade Services. And as Issaries rejoices, AA recedes just a little farther into the background. This pleases the god king for multiple reasons. Admittedly we can imagine a history where Trade absorbs the birth languages that came before but that isn't god's way.

It's an achievement. Speaking for myself, anything I resent can always be scratched out as the anathemas of a rival heresiarch . . . but simply having this material on the table takes us closer to truth. There is something about the Enjoreli and those northern colonies (adopted by marriage if I recall) that I'll dig up when time permits. The persistence of AKEM within Sog is definitely a challenge.

And the shape and the power of the Voice rang out in strong low tones: tell them that God, whom you have called MLKN, is dead but the world continues. The old law that forbid these things of you has ended. Tell them to gather together and be nourished. This is what we do while we are waiting. Next year in Malkonwal I hope to see you here.

You're doing great things. Someone needs to do them! Looking more closely at that particular map series Theuz emerges by 100 and "Arolanit" first appears in a different map series that dates from after the devastation of Kaanilland (110+). The accompanying tribal map on that one has this as Utoni territory for what that's worth. Arolanit is a lot of trouble for me because in my view uninterrupted Brithini tenure in the area is not supported beyond propaganda. The Srotolinae, likewise, are absent from the tribal era in the texts I have (sad to say the Roots are only the tip of a dangerous iceberg, you have exactly the documents you need) . . . they really only emerge in the disintegration of the Seshnegite Empire as a new political identity briefly distinct from the Dangk and the Galaninae. Who knows what the official truth is! Reading behind the lines of the Safelster In The First Age reference I'd suspect "Srotolin" is some concept or entity of the Bright Empire now lost to us but briefly recovered around the God Learner collapse. For what it's worth the "Theuz" map is also fairly clear that the northern colonies are part of an immediate post-Dawn wave . . . only Neleswal and Frowal show up in 0 but the usual Fronelan suspects are there by 100. This has been superseded by the Guide maps but it's worth seeing where Greg's head was in this era. (These maps also have a vast but apparently shallow Lake of Nralar and a smaller Cup of Neleom much higher north in Enjorela. The lake is gone by 100 ST.)

Nice catch! Arolanit appears as such in early Dawn Age sketch maps (for your purposes it's good to note that Theuz is already extant) and the timeline of the Srotolinae is messy (pre-ST "long form" dating). If I were betting right now I'd say Srotolin was what the Bright Empire occupation called the territory "at the time" . . . but not its original name.