WIP Update – 10 Mar 25
I didn’t feel that writing a couple sentences to finish off Chapter 3 of CoP was quite enough to warrant a post (though I know I’ve done it for such minimal work before). I did go ahead and do most of the work for the review post, so it wasn’t like I was spending the day idly. Anyway, we had a rather sharp contrast with all the work I’ve done on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials since. I’ve been focusing on the houses of the Eight Stars, especially House Leon, House Crucis and House Wulf. I decided to have House Leon belong to a line of rí túath (a sort of tribal chieftain/petty king), so I ended up creating a thousand-year line of succession for it. However, the main line eventually gets excluded, which explains how they ended up in Gladius. There’s a similar story with House Wulf, where the family ends up splitting into the half that carries on the Conqueror’s mantle and the half that rules the freehold granted to Wulf by the Emperor after the War of Ban. If this was not enough, the Gladian lord Ingwald of Glasford (a fiefdom in the area of Stormtree) provides the glue to bind the two houses together.
You see, Gearalt the sixth Defender was not chosen to be the tanist to succeed his father as rí túath, so he ventured out to seek his fortunes abroad. He spent a spell in Titan as a mercenary before returning to his homeland of Fodla to be rejected a second time, so he then went to the Greater Gotland Empire, where lent his sword to the faction supporting the future Emperor Reinhardt III. This faction also included Ingwulf the sixth Conqueror. Ingwulf was already connected to Lord Ingwald of Glasford and when he and Gearalt forged a marriage pact between their grandchildren, Gearalt was added to that connection. This was what led his son Leander to participate in the Gladian War of Unification, which brings us to the status quo you’re familiar with from the Gladius Cycle stories. In fact, Percival’s maternal uncle Ingwald (the grandson of the previously mentioned Lord Ingwald and the head of the cadet branch of House Wulf that took possession of the family’s Gotland holdings) was the one acting as his proxy as head of House Leon during his minority. You might find it ironic that the two families are so closely knitted together given what happens in the stories, but this sort of thing wasn’t all that uncommon in real world history, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise in fictional history inspired by the real thing. For some real fun, did you know that House Hassani has married into House Crucis not just once but twice? That’s a story for another day, though.
I’m having a lot of fun with this, of course, but I really do need to redirect some of this energy. We’ll see if I manage it or not. Stay tuned.
Tags: Characters, Commentary, Gladius, Miscellany, Tellus Arc, WIP Update
Characters, Commentary, Gladius, Miscellany, Tellus Arc, WIP Update | James Carmack | 11 March 2025 |
