A few people have asked me about the unique world where Bella meets Jake. In the book, #3-Bella, there is quite a bit learned about the formation of that place. However, it is mostly from Bella’s viewpoint and from what she learns from casting her spells and interacting with the power-structures that hold the world together. There is no name for that world, although it does become known as Jake’s world, after he joins the Order and more people from there and other places in the multiverse visit it. The elves have a name for it, once they had discovered the lost tribe of their kin that had been moved there eons ago, but it is a long string of vowels and utterly unpronounceable.
One might call that world Tapestry, as it is one of the Map-Worlds. A place, not a planet, that was constructed by several thousand wizards 1.3 Million years before the events told of in the SmallPowers sagas. It was constructed with an idealized notion of a mega continent with two great nations, one east and one west. In the east, kingdoms of men. And in the west a kingdom of elves. Along the north and south edges were vast mountain ranges for the dwarves and the goblins. Around it an endless ocean that grew more turbulent the farther you went from the single continent. Sailing, flying, or spells of travel would not permit you to delve farther than a few weeks away and get to the edges and see that the world ended very abruptly.
It, the world, was the dream-world made real by the foundational wizards who constructed it, populated it, and set it in motion. And the dream was brilliant, for a very long time. But time does play its part, and time is a cruel master. For the first five hundred thousand years the place existed in the idealized framework envisioned by its creators. The kingdoms of men thrived, and generation after generation of them rose and fell in successions and cycles of both the great and the miserable. The elves, with the span of thousands, grew wiser and built great works of science and art that were unfathomable and enthralling. At some point, no one is quite sure when, but it was nearly the half million point, trolls emerged from the multiverse. With them came their sovereigns, the ogres. It has been suggested that the Titans had seen the place in their long treks through the multiverse and seeded a small colony of their pets. Others have said that the Titans, being evil, are delighted by sowing discord everywhere they go.
All the while, mountains crumbled and mountains rose along the north and south edges, depositing an endless refilling of the central east-west valley. The spells that created the place grew stronger and led to another race evolving. The Kentmen spawned out of the wizardly people of men. Their skin became blue and they learned to revere the land itself. The other peoples did not like the looks of the Kent, nor did they like the direction in social forms that they took. They grew to be shamans, rather than wizards, and they also grew to hate the other races. Elves, men, dwarves, goblins, and ogres were destructive to the land. None of them loved the world, they all used it like it had no value beyond what they could wrest out of it to put in their purses and dominate with their armies.
Another quarter million years would pass before anyone would notice that something had become a problem. Three quarters of a million years had passed since the creation, and there was a lack of any change, yet underneath there was stress building up. The creators, while wise and powerful they may have been, had not thought about how long the world would last and what pressures would build-up after thousands of years. What had been a center line of high hills midway between the east and west portions grew higher and then grew to mountains, distorting the whole structure. The lands of elves and men were soon, after a hundred thousand more years, were soon separated by a maze of new mountains. The dwarves found nothing to mine in these new mountains and the goblins found them to be too variable to build their homes among. The distortion was also reflected in the Kent, having emerged as a people of the world, the illness made them grow bellicose and violently antagonistic towards everyone else. Great wars between men, between elves, between all the races, filled the next hundred thousand years. History and social forms that had lasted for eons were ground into dust. Even the elves forgot the glorious past. Nine hundred thousand years of history were lost in that era. And all the while, the land grew more and more distorted, the end of the world was coming. Not quickly, it would be another three hundred thousand years before the stress pushed it all to the brink.
A survey wizard of the Order would visit it, about the time the western half of the continent had also become pushed up to high mountains, and he would see that if something was not done soon this world would destroy itself and all the people perish. By the time the file made its way through the council of the wise the place was clearly past any hope of saving. However, Nepheron had an ace up his sleeve, Bella. She, and some fellow questing wizards, had saved a world that was said to be equally beyond the point of saving. And so, he sent her there. In part to learn more about worlds that were truly doomed, but also from an abstract feeling he had that her destiny, and that of the future of the Order, was tied to this world in some obscure way.
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