May the Darkness be merciful (Black Jewels and more)

The last collection of short stories she published has Daemon get together with Surreal like.... 200 years after Jaenelle dies of old age? And it explores how that happened and the kid they have after and all that. It's nnnnot my favorite but I will grudgingly admit that it is canon, so into the interpretation soup it goes.

You know, that's a damn good question. I don't think either of Saetan's surviving sons had kids, but I could see Hekatah maybe keeping the name and bestowing it on other families in Hayll post-divorce. She had a little while to get up to fuckshit before the first war between the Realms, I think.

 

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA W H A T

I was not prepared for that! goddamn. uh. poor Surreal???? I guess when your race lives for thousands of years you gotta make some compromises eventually

Hekatah is as good an explanation as any, I think. she has all her plots and shit, and it was technically legally her surname for a good while

 

YEAH it's uh, not my favorite. :') I'm actually not fond of that particular collection in general, and it took me like three years to read it because I heard about the Surreal thing and got mad enough that I refused to, but hey, I guess we all technically knew that Jaenelle wasn't going to live forever.

...Though I still kind of wish he'd had kids with her instead. Ah, well.

 

the most important question of our times: has anyone ever done up a map of the Realms, or is it left entirely to the imagination?

 

Left entirely to the imagination I think, which meant that on reread it came as a surprise to find out that Dhemlan Kaeleer and Little Terrielle shared a border.

(Little Terrielle also shares a border with Dharo and Dea al Mon, but I'm not sure how the rest of the Realm shakes out. I know Little Terrielle is coastal, because the island of the Dark Council is pretty close by, and I know all three are roughly temperate instead of being arctic like Glacia and Ebon Rih, but the size of the Territories is left up to imagination too.)

 

this is very good information... and honestly, probably the best way to work out locations is by approximating climates... do u know of any more off the top of ur head (I'm gonna look them up also)

Bishop on her website does refer to herself as 'geographically challenged' while supplying a map of Dena Nehele, which is relevant to The Invisible Ring and maybe nothing else? Shadow Queen? (haven't read it yet iirc)

 

also, when browsing the BJwiki yesterday, I got myself totes spoilered for some things re: the Twilight's Dawn jewels and incredible shenanigans

Spoiler: Twilight's Dawn deets and my subsequent reaction

T H E Y F U C K I N G W H A T

 

Invisible Ring and The Shadow Queen/Shalador's Lady, yeah. Which might be the only reason why it gets a map-- all three of those are fairly contained, so actual approximating distances and shit isn't as hard.

Off the top of my head, I think Nharkhava is supposed to be either temperate or sub-tropical, Scelt and Sceval are both temperate and vaguely reminiscent of the British Isles, and the Fyreborn Islands, Philan, and Tigrelan are all supposed to be roughly subtropical too. Arachna is temperate, probably, if the spiders have to go in for winter, but I don't think Pandar or Centauran ever get any elaboration.

In terms of distribution.... Glacia is on the same side of the continent as Scelt, Sceval, aaaaand maybe Dea al Mon? Arceria's up there with Glacia in the arctic areas, but I know it's definitely off to the side, and I think Arachna is over there too.

Dhemlan, Dharo, Little Terrielle, and I think Nharkhava are all on the other side of the continent. I can't remember if they're supposed to be eastern or western, but I know they're pretty distant from each other because of how long it takes her to journey from one to the other.

Actually, come to think of it: is the size of Kaeleer roughly the size of North America, or is it roughly the size of Eurasia? Because that could affect distances pretty well too.

(Askavi is roughly equidistant from everything because. Askavi.)

Also UHHHHHHHH I am. Not sure about that. Because I'd have to reread (and I really don't want to) but that was definitely not... the impression I got from that whole scene there........................

 

ayyyyyyyyyy this is excellent, thank u

fair enough :P fanwikis aren't necessarily complete or accurate, it is quite possibly different. I'm super indignant on behalf of Surreal, for the most part.

 

just reserved four Jewels books from the library I might be jumping the gun with the Shadow Queen ones bc I have Opinions on landens, but if it comes to it, I can return & read them later instead

 

so if we work from the assumption that the Realms exist on a planet, then Ebon Askavi is in the very center of a landmass, maybe a single massive continent. some of the territories have seasons, so there is some degree of axial tilt - the continent itself is not necessarily dead center on the planet's surface. this would mean that there are coastal territories out at the edges of everything, which maybe works and maybe doesn't. other possibilities are inhospitable wastelands at the edges of deserts, or mountainous fault regions that no one and nothing wants to go into. there is no mention of timezones but they could very plausibly exist. current hypothesis: a Pangaea-sized continent on an approximately earth sized planet, with a bunch of territories being landlocked or gigantic or both.

I'm gonna need a very large piece of paper and a lot of sticky notes.

 

Zuul was mentioned to be in a desert, and more than a bit unpleasant to live in if you were left mostly to our own devices like the slaves were, so that points to deserts.

 

Pangaea-style supercontinent sounds about right-- we know that the way the Winds extend out is in a massive web, but there's no mention of the end connecting in a perfect circle, which means that the radials extend only so far... probably roughly about as far as the edges of the continent. Zuulaman didn't have a landing web I don't think (APPARENTLY DHEMLAN IS COASTAL TOO?????) because the winds don't extend out over the ocean much, so only the close, coastal islands likely have Wind access.

Which makes me wonder: is it that there's one continent, and three overlapping globes for the Realms, or is it that there's two continents, on polar axis away from each other, an Ebon Askavi at each, and all of the Realm Gates exist on similar polar axis? And then Hell is... something else, because we know that Hell behaves strangely and that it's the one Realm you can enter by virtue of, like, dying, and not just traveling through the Gates.

(Theory: this is why Jaenelle could jump the Realm webs as a child, because she didn't view them as an obstacle. The massive stretches of darkness between the two Realm webs (i.e., the oceans) didn't even register, because she was pretty used to ignoring the Winds at the time anyways.)

 

I had always imagined the reals to be on literally different layers of existence, main because of the partial mirroring like there being to dhemlans and two askavis. I´ve always imagined the entire world to be a lot less grounded in physical reality than ours.

 

dang, I hadn't even thought about an opposing continents setup. that could explain why some places exist in both realms, but not necessarily all? like, the degree of migration and willingness to establish a sister territory vs. set up your own new territory, with blackjack and hookers etc

so maybe Terreille doesn't have a Glacia equivalent - it's unique to Kaeleer's latitude as a continent :D and since there are several races long-lived enough to know if there was sucha thing as continental drift occurring, maybe it doesn't happen anymore? what if Hell is the uncanny lifeless core of the world

tbh I'm down with dimensional explanations too, but this is a lot of fun

 

We know that the Blood are definitely old enough as a... collective? That Hayll was a) firmly established and b) a major cultural center when Saeten was born; I think he and Andulavar died a little past their prime, so roughly 2-3000 years old, and that was 50000 years before the start of the trilogy.

Geoffrey is older than that still, old enough that those 50000 years seem small in comparison, and Draca is old enough that Geoffrey has no idea that she had connections to the dragons (or that Lorn was alive still) up until the second book. So maybe when the dragons all went to eternal sleep, whatever they did sort of... put the world in a sort of stasis. We don't get references to earthquakes or volcanic activity like, at all, and no tsunamis either, so it's very possible that there's no tectonic movement at all because the same system that established the Winds also pretty firmly locked everything in place.

(Secondary pet theory: when the dragons all went to rest, they created all the major intersections in the web of the Winds, with the majority of them below the Keep, and that's why the Winds are in the pattern they are, with sometimes arbitrary wind strengths passing over different areas.)

Hell as a literal mirror-verse upsidedown version of the rest of the world, like if you took the two continents on the exterior crust of the planet and then inverted them so it's technically on the inside of the crust. But also in another dimension. Because MAGIC.

 

I'M SO EXCITED and now it's time for dragon theories

Spoiler

dragons existed before the Blood, and the transfer of their power is in fact what created the Blood, so they were around for a good long time before suddenly and thoroughly dying off. and maybe continental drift has stopped being a thing, such that an established landmass setup exists and will remain unchanged for the next approximately forever. continental drift pretty likely relies on subduction and molten core activity. what if the dragons relied on geothermal heat and environments to thrive? such that the cooling of the planet's core and the decline of the dragons went hand in hand. and if so, what if the giant echoing territories they dug out under the planet's surface became the realm of Hell?

 

oh man jinx I owe u a coke

 

welp, the wiki says that the realms are actually physically above/below each other, so maybe 'Hell is in the planet's core' is a wash. overlapping continents, then? similarly sized but possibly not identical?

 

I'm tempted to dismiss a lot of the things the wiki says, honestly-- there's something like maybe eight editors, and it's possible that they took that interpretation from the "jumping between the webs" and "terrielle is the realm of the light, kaeleer is the realm of the shadow, and hell is the realm of the dark" motif going on.

Now, if Bishop had said something along those lines about the physcial reality of it, that would be one thing, but we'll never know, because the wiki never sources anything either! How grand. How grand.

(Other considerations for that stretch of light to dark in terms of realm shit: depending on the strength of the dragons who went to rest in the various realms, the Winds (and the underlying Realm web that makes them) might rank lighter or darker; Hell, as the realm where everything dead lies, holds the darkest strength, and Kaeleer, as the realm where it seems like Lorn and Draca and Draca's daughter went to rest is the second darkest, leaving Terrielle as the realm where most of the lighter/weaker dragons gave their strength. This actually says nothing about the relative strength of the Blood, only the land they walk on, because Saeten, Hekatah, Dorothea, Lucivar, Luthvian, Daemon, Tersa, Cassandra, and most importantly, Jaenelle were all Terriellien born. Kaeleer might have stronger Blood atm because of Dorothea's purges, and might have more overall strength with a greater concentration of mid-rank and low-dark jewels, but Terrielle has more extremes, with both lightest jewels and darkest jewels pretty consistently coming from them.)