Silvahni Cadence

It has been many months since I have posted; I have been busy crafting an epic world that feels lived in, carries real consequences, and holds many threads woven together, all in preparation for Kin’dal, book one of the Aurean Legacy Series.

I am very happy to be nearly finished, the editing is taking longer than I would like but that is the norm in the craft, editing can be the most difficult part. What do you keep? What do you cut? Answering these questions for an epic genre fantasy book has taken me some time to figure out, because I, for one, want to keep it all. Of course I cannot do that.

I decided to write this article about the world in a general sense, how I crafted it and what it means to me.

Valdris was a whim. I have no years behind it, nor decades; it was a fresh idea I discovered not long after my first published book, The Last Hope: Chronicles of The Seer & The Warrior. On a whim, I decided to find a tool to craft it. I went over in my previous article, “Two Series, Two Approaches: Why I Write Differently”, as to why I chose to write with AI but I want to speak more about the world of Valdris.

Crafting a world with an epic scope is not easy; everything must be taken into consideration: What they eat, what they wear, their cultural history and why their culture became the way it was. Was it geography, trade, or a historical incident? They also must differ substantially from one another, if there is too much sameness your story begins to look vague without much depth.

There are eight human races and six elven races, with twelve kingdoms. One elven race does not have a kingdom: the Salavar elves are my world’s nomads, the word meaning literally “sea-wanderers”. Two human races are not actually different races but a division that fractured their kingdom into Stormwatch and Greyveil, though they occupy territory very near to each other, they have become distinct kingdoms. Their names are the Corvani from Stormwatch and the Haldren from Greyveil, great houses that caused the divide two millennia past.

The fifteenth race is the Aldren, the hybrid offspring of elves and humans, who likewise never held a kingdom. Regardless of which human or elvenkind their parents come from, they are all genetically the same people. They were hunted down for the past two millennia; the peoples of Valdris believe their race to be extinct, lost to the Broken Age and the persecution that followed.

You might have caught my math, fear not, I have not made an error; there is one human race I will keep from this article, they also never had a kingdom but their story is tragic and ancient.

The world itself consists of a large landmass in the center with many islands (my last count was around 40), some large islands, but the majority being small islands known as simply the Outer Isles, regardless of where they are.

That is one half of the world; the other half is Drath’vael which translates to Boundless Dark Depth or The Boundless Darkness. As one of my characters described this ocean:

“—that desolate stretch of coast where no settlement had ever taken root, where the waters of Drath’vael struck those shores like divine judgment rendered without ceasing. It was said of the Drath’vael oceans that squalls would rise hundreds of feet, tempests lasting months at a time.”

A brutal place. No sane sailor would ever try to traverse it, and the Morenthi elves, Valdris’s greatest sailors, would never attempt it. Though most forget about the Salavar who spend their entire lives upon the seas and oceans, even among the peoples in my world, they are disregarded as irregular and highly eccentric.

Regardless, half the world is tame with oceans that have typical storms, more heightened storms in the northeastern ocean called the Dawn Ocean that surround the kingdom of Thal’varen, where the Morenthi currently reside after their kingdom Mor’thelas fell in the Shattering, two thousand years past. The rest of the world is a nightmare to traverse. This world’s brutality not only lives in the story and its history but upon the very waters of Valdris.

As you can see from just this short insight, this world is vast and full of history, dangers, and many kingdoms and peoples. It has taken me time to make sure that most of it was fleshed out. There are still some things I need to craft and decide but as of right now, it is a mostly finished world.

I look forward to revealing more and more about the world of Valdris! For now I will leave you with this quote:

“Some crossings cannot be unmade. The strait between shore and purpose claims more than ships—it claims the certainty we carried when we set sail.”

—Chronicles of the Fallen Shores, attributed to King Aaltomir of Mor’thelas, The Awakening Era