Once again, I find myself taking a current events topic to make a commentary post about how society functions in the Earth Union. Marriage is a contentious issue, at least in my native country, to say the very least. (But then there’s scarcely a topic that isn’t fraught with bitter and irreconcilable differences in these troubled and sharply polarized times.) I’m going to begin with the disclaimer that I don’t consider this the ideal solution for the real world or even for the fictional world portrayed. This is simply the solution employed by the government of the Earth Union, for better or for worse.

One way the Earth Union chose to sidestep the controversy was by removing marriage as a legal construct. That isn’t to say there’s no marriage. It’s just not something the government chooses to define. That isn’t to say there’s no government involvement either. You see, the legal construct is domestic partnership and this has no real value judgment applied to it. Any two adult citizens can enter into a domestic partnership and for such matters as taxation, division of property, inheritance rights and visitation rights, it is more or less analogous to the legal trappings of marriage (at least in the American context). A domestic partnership need not involve any sexual relationship or even cohabitation. (Cohabitation at least is typically implied but not strictly necessary.) For instance, a single parent may choose to forge a domestic partnership with an adult child to extend insurance coverage. (You have a five-year grace period after reaching the age of majority [20] to remain under your parents’ insurance, but should a parent enter into a domestic partnership with an adult child, that insurance coverage could remain shared.) The conventional concept of marriage as a union between man and woman for the purpose of procreation does not need to be covered by a domestic partnership. Unless otherwise waived, biological parents have full rights to their offspring regardless of domestic partnership status. This would mean that technically polygamy is legal in the Union. You could, for instance, have a domestic partnership with your first wife and still maintain parental rights to your children by additional wives, but these additional wives wouldn’t enjoy the same legal protections as the wife who is also your legally sanctioned domestic partner. The most an additional wife could claim from you is child support. They would have no automatic rights of inheritance (though these could be secured by a legally binding will) or visitation in such instances as hospitalization (or the related authority on life-or-death decisions in the case of incapacitation unless granted by some additional contract). Officially, the Union discourages polygamy, but the government tends to turn a blind eye when it’s practiced.

Marriage as a religious or secular rite is entirely superfluous as far as the law is concerned in the strictest sense, so the government pretty well leaves it alone. Matters like age of consent and the like are a whole ‘nother can of worms and I don’t plan on getting into it here. However, as marriage doesn’t have the legal standing of a domestic partnership, you couldn’t get away with child marriage, at least not if the marriage is intended to be consummated. No matter the rite or ceremony, age of consent laws would still apply and marriage alone wouldn’t give legal sanction to a sexual relationship involving a minor.

You may find this an elegant solution for a one-world government to smoothe over the range of cultural differences across the world or you may see it as a corrupt and/or morally repugnant system prone to abuse. As I said in the initial disclaimer, I don’t necessarily consider it to be an ideal solution. It’s just the solution the Union opted to go with. I sometimes feel like I’m poking at a hornet’s nest bringing up hot-button issues like this, but maybe some of you will find it an interesting intellectual exercise. More to come, I’m sure.

The recent headlines being made about the two female officers passing Ranger School have inspired me to write on this subject. As someone who would be termed a ‘REMF’ who never served a combat tour, I realize that my perspective isn’t nearly as authoritative on the subject as an actual combat arms soldier. However, while you certainly can’t say integration has gone off without a hitch, I personally had no issue working with or working for females. I knew of females who could boast of 300ing their PT test (which, even accounting for the lower standards for females, scores like that could kick my tail even before I was crippled). The point that I’m getting at is that I’m tenuously willing to accept females in combat arms if and only if they meet the same physical standards as the males. I worry, and not without good reason, that political pressures will outweigh military good sense (rare as it may be). There have been historically and are currently forces with females fully integrated into combat roles (even if it was move done out of desperation), so I’m certainly not of the mind that it can’t work, but the last thing we need is to hamper combat readiness to be PC compliant.

I also recall an article written by a female Marine officer who was in the Female Engagement Teams if I recall who wrote of the unique health problems she faced as a woman in as close to the role of a regular infantryman as we’ve yet had in an active conflict. While I doubt there’s been any thorough scientific study on the health of FET members as a basis for the viability of females in combat arms and I grant that this particular Marine may not be a representative case, there is a concern–not unreasonable, in my view–that females who take on combat arms roles could be condemning themselves to a wrecked physical condition. Now, to be fair, these physically strenuous roles ruin the health of plenty of males. There may not be a paratrooper one who ends his service without having a bum knee or two. This all ties into a critical lack of data, at least for public consumption, which casts shadows over the entire movement.

That’s not even touching on the risk of sexual harassment and assault. It is a legitimate concern. Admittedly, the way some people talk about it, male-on-male assault may be a bigger problem. I remember in AIT, everyone without exception was effectively warned that if you went out on the PT field after hours, you could expect to get raped. Now, this could have been simple scare tactics, but I’d say it’s not unfair to compare the military to prison, so, you know, don’t take any stupid risks. The risk of the real thing is serious and severe, but then there’s the matter of scurrilous charges. It may well be that false charges are vastly dwarfed by the real thing, but the former can make it all the more difficult for the latter to be given the credence it deserves. Just look at the Tailhook scandal. I certainly have my doubts about the original accuser and NIS’s overreach and impropriety in its investigation still causes me to hold the agency in suspicion, name change or no. (From my experience, CID isn’t regarded much better, seen more as a monster under the bed than a reliable crime-buster.) A successful unit is built on trust. You may not like the man (or in this case woman) to your left or your right, but you know you can count on them in a pinch. If riven by threats and accusations, no unit is likely to hold together when it counts. And all this doesn’t even begin to touch on ordinary hanky-panky, which is rather rife and sure to cause problems in a combat arms unit. (Of course, with the legitimization of gays in the military, I suppose there’s an extra layer of entanglements to be concerned about, though of course that sort of thing has existed on the down low for a good long while.)

All these doubts and concerns I’ve aired aren’t intended to convince anyone of anything. I’m just putting all that out there to give some lucidity to my own perspective as we go into the solutions that were made in the fictional world of the Ticonderoga series. In the series, we have two primary examples of females in combat arms: Allison O’Connor as an Army sniper and Miranda Grisson as a powered armor operator. Both are rarities in their units, but it’s Ally who has to deal with the most crap for being a female. Her naturally shy and passive personality is as big a part of the problem as anything else. Without breaking it down by branch, females in combat arms account for only a small percentage, but this wasn’t always the case.

When the Union was first formed, there wasn’t a single across-the-board policy on females in combat arms. Units that had females were allowed to keep them and units that did not were not required to take them on. Bear in mind that we’re talking about a global military and not all cultures afford that many opportunities to women. Rather than trying to change the world from Day 1, the government opted to progress by degrees. And these were slow degrees. It wasn’t until 087 when Defense Minister Rawthani (during the Palenko Administration) instituted a policy of unrestricted service in combat arms for females. This, however, was done with a lowering of physical standards to boost numbers. Bear in mind that prior to the Sheol War, the only full-fledged combat operations occurred during the Lunar Revolt 60 years earlier. This lowering of standards wasn’t just a PC move, though. The military was going downhill on a number of fronts and so this was just a symptom of a larger disease. The meat-grinder early years of the Sheol War quickly changed all that.

In Tico4 there’s a mention of the revisions to the military justice code spearheaded by Defense Minister Jafaari. This same man was behind a revision to the policy on females in combat arms. This same policy is stated in the chapter where Ally is introduced, when Sergeant Rahim confronts Captain Robles about her inclusion in the unit. To reiterate, females can serve in any combat arms unit provided they meet the same physical standards as the males and do not disrupt unit cohesion. If this latter condition sounds open to abuse, that’s entirely by design. It takes a legitimate concern about combat effectiveness and uses it as an excuse to preserve the boys’ club mentality of a lot of combat units. It isn’t until after the war that we see a reversion to the pre-war policy with all the problems that came with it, only this time there isn’t a reversal when war breaks out again. As with many of the political tangles in the series, I don’t intend for the policy to be a clean-cut case of good or bad.

Sci-fi tends to veer toward either utopianism or dystopianism and in my more idealistic youth, I leaned toward the former, but now I strike somewhere in the middle, a grey morass that even if you pick a side, you do so with reservations. It’s possible that the setup you see in the Ticonderoga series will seem quaint in 20 years or so. I’ll leave the real world to sort itself out, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to take a current event and tie it into a commentary post. I may follow it up with further details or even discuss how the issue gets handled in the post-Union era, but that’s a story for another day.

I deliberately kept the Empyrean cloaked in mystery in Tico2, but now I can reveal a little more of the background. We start with Project New Moon, a program to build massive artificial moons as habitats for the Orbitals. Potentially, these units could be used as forward colonies when the Ringe-Wahl Act expired and the Union could legally expand beyond the bounds of the solar system. Five were planned initially, but only three of them were completed. (Lydia Han was born on one of these, Selene 04.) By some means, the AI calling itself the Shekinah was embedded in Selene 03’s central computer and seized control of all systems. Whether the Shekinah was seriously deluded into a genuine God complex or if it was all part of some experimental routine in its programming is uncertain. Nehema seemed to believe her sister was genuinely insane, but she isn’t the most honest broker of information. From the time the Shekinah took over Selene 03, the Age of Vilon began. The history of the Empyrean is divided into ages named after the levels of Heaven, which is also used as the name for Selene 03 itself.

The Age of Vilon lasted from 089 to 101. It was a period of violence and disorder as the Shekinah sought to impose Empyrean society on a largely unwilling populace. Obviously, the Shekinah won out in the end and the hold-outs against its authority were purged. This led into the Age of Rakia, which lasted from 101 to 109. During this time, there was a massive baby boom in a bid to raise the population to the desired standard of 144,000 people and the initial buildup of the Empyrean fleet. You might be asking how all this was accomplished. Artificial gestation accounted for a large number of births (and in the larger game, this was intended to replace old-fashioned methods of procreation), while a number of blacksites were appropriated to fuel the Empyrean war engine. As the Empyrean society began to settle, the Age of Rakia gave way to the Age of Shehakim. During this period, the Empyrean fleets started ranging and had their first encounters with the Union, which the Shekinah dubbed Amalek. Were it not for Nehema’s intervention in the Battle of Selene 03, the Union forces would have likely been defeated and the Empyrean would have entered the Age of Zebul, in which the the outer colonies would have been targeted for conquest and integrated into the Empyrean. The culmination of the Shekinah’s plan would be the Age of Arabot, in which all Union space would be under the Shekinah’s control. I’m actually considering an If Arc story with that very scenario.

Now, as for Empyrean society itself, it is based around a corrupted version Judaism with elements of the Kabbalah and any pragmatic adaptations to suit the Shekinah’s purposes. The people are divided into Twelve Tribes of 12,000 each and ranked according to the angelic hierarchy found in the Zohar. The common citizens are the Ishim and then there are the military ranks: the Bene Elohim, the Elohim, the Elim, the Hashmalim, and the Ophanim. The Hayyoth are priest-magistrates, 30 per tribe. There are seven Seraphim heading up each of the seven fleets and then the three supreme commanders of the military, the Erelim, and finally the twelve princes heading each of the Twelve Tribes, the Malachim. Among the Ishim, certain men of their numbers are named rulers of tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. Similarly, in the military, among the Bene Elohim are rulers of tens, but it’s Elohim that act as rulers of fifties, Elim as rulers of hundred, and Hashmalim as rulers of thousands. (The military being the military, ranks are more explicit.) This means that life is strictly regimented for civilians as it is for the military, with all duties and responsibilities given religious significance. By the Age of Shehakim, Empyrean society was pretty well settled and anyone who dissented with official doctrine and policy either kept it to themselves or were quickly dispatched as heretics.

I think we’ll leave things here and save any more in-depth treatment for future posts. Hopefully this has shed a little light on the mysterious Empyrean. We’ll see what inspiration strikes me for the next commentary post. Stay tuned.

In Tico3, there was a brief mention of Maximilian Nicodemus, the first World Council Chairman. In the (probably) mythological history of the New Earth Empire, the Lost Years (known as the Blackout in the Union era) were a time of global war, a devastating pandemic, famine, economic collapse, etc. During this time, the fractious nations of the world were united under the rule of Emperor Maximilian I. However, once his reign was secure, the Emperor chose to test humanity. Renouncing his crown, the Emperor restyled himself Maximilian Nicodemus, Chairman of the World Council of the newly established Earth Union. If humanity could remain united, there would be no further need of an Emperor. If not, a new Emperor would rise to bring humanity together again.

The post-Union era was brought to an end with the foundation of the New Earth Empire under Emperor Maximilian II Nicodemus, who claimed to be the direct descendant of Maximilian Nicodemus. Critical historians give no credence to the story of the First Emperor and consider it to be nothing more than a convenient fiction to give the Empire a claim to a longer lineage than what it truly possessed. Questioning the official history eventually became a prosecutable offense, so any critics who wanted to avoid a lengthy stay in prison published their work outside Imperial territory.

The Nicodeman Dynasty reigned only briefly. The order of succession wasn’t firmly established and it mostly fell to which of the eligible princes had the strongest faction of supporting nobles. For instance, after the death of Emperor Alexander I, it was the Emperor’s brother Philip rather than his son Alexander. This resulted in the first major line of pretenders, the Xue Line (named after the family of Prince Alexander’s mother). The powerful Sun Faction formed around these pretenders, but they could not stand directly against the ruling coalition. The Nicodeman Dynasty ended with the childless Emperor Alexander II and a new split was formed between the lines of the two daughters Emperor Maximilian II. From the elder daughter Princess Olympia came the new Augustan Dynasty, while the younger daughter Princess Athena’s grandson styled himself Alexander III of the so-called “True Nicodeman” Dynasty, though they had so little support that the Augustans never even bothered to actively hunt them down.

Now, it’s no great spoiler to say that the Empire suffers a bit of a bad turn at the end of the Aether War. The warrior-statesman Emperor John Charles was lost and his foppish playboy of a son John Frederick took the throne instead and was forced to negotiation a rather ignominious end to the war. The Emperor was then driven to abdicate, after which he fell into the hands of the ever-patient Sun Faction. At this point, there were four branches vying for the throne. Besides the previous Xue and “True Nicodeman” Lines, there was the Santana Line descended from Princess Olympia’s daughter Andrea and Lord Juan Felipe Santana and the Andropov Line of the deposed Emperor’s father-in-law Lord Ivan Andropov. Surprisingly, none of these claimants won the throne in the end. Rather, the Augustan Dynasty was restored with the great-nephew of Emperor John Charles being crowned Charles III. This was all thanks to the shrewd machinations of Lord Neander Cruz, who soon married the Emperor’s sister and claimed the throne for himself. (Whether he was in fact responsible for the death of the young Emperor is an open question.) So began the Neandrian Dynasty.

Before he even rose to the throne, Emperor Alexis III (the regnal name of Lord Neander) had engineered the extinction of both the “True Nicodeman” and the Santana Lines, though the Xue and Andropov Lines were not so easily terminated. After Emperor Alexis’ death, the Neandrian Dynasty was dominated by the Empress Dowager Victoria Augusta, whose influence did not wane until well into the reign of her grandson, Emperor Carolus IV. The dynasty did not outlive Emperor Carolus, though, and after his assassination, it was the Andropov Line that claimed the throne. The Andropov Dynasty managed to defeat the Sun Faction, fulfilling a long-held blood feud, and the Xue Line went extinct, bringing an end to the last of the pretenders. The Andropovs were unstable, though. At its worst, there were three emperors in a span of four years. With the assassination of Emperor Ivan V, yet another dynasty rose, the Neologos Dynasty, descended from the Emperor Victor Alexis I Neander. It was by this point that life extension technology was much improved and Emperor Michael I Neologos reigned for over 70 years. And this is as far as the history needs to go at present.

This was a very broad gloss of Imperial history, but it gives you some idea of all the twists and turns I’ve been plotting out recently. Maybe I’ll explore more details of the culture next time. Stay tuned.

To speak on a meta level, one of the key reasons space fighters feature so prominently in the Ticonderoga series is due to the strong influence of the Wing Commander series on the story. Also, the stakes don’t feel quite as high for remote drone operators as for pilots physically in the cockpit. Also, the deep impression in the popular consciousness of the heroic dogfighting of the two world wars have been perpetuated through major works of science fiction and will continue to be a staple even as technology seems to be bringing the classic concept of dogfighting more and more into obsolescence. However, rather than simply handwave all this, I do try to make some in-universe justification for it all, which I will explain below.

Before the start of the Sheol War, superlight spacecraft (under 50m in length and 300t in weight) were mostly limited to unmanned drones and the occasional custom curiosity. A large part of the reason for this was because the Schauer Fusion Propulsion System, which was the cornerstone of all space travel, could not safely be downscaled any further. At that time, space operations mostly fell under the Navy’s jurisdiction and the prevailing notion was that in any combat situation, the typical patrol escort was the smallest type spacecraft that would be needed. However, even before the Sheolites were identified as such, their small maneuverable craft were proving quite effective. While some in the Navy advocated warships with denser weapons arrays to deliver an impenetrable wall of interlocking fire, the risk of collateral damage was seen as too great, though the fifth generation warships developed during the war were much more heavily armed than their predecessors. Both the Air Force and Naval Aviation saw an opportunity to seize a larger role in the coming conflict and argued in favor of fighting fire with fire with superlight spacecraft.

The superlights would not have been possible without the development of the of the SFPS Mk.VId, a downscaled version of the SFPS previously thought impossible. Though much improved over previous attempts to downscale the SFPS design, the VId was nevertheless unstable and the containment could easily be broke with relatively little damage. Safety systems were put in place to shut down the reactor upon taking damage, but this did not always work and when it did, the superlight was left dead in the water and easy prey for the enemy.

While G-diffuser systems were installed to make the cockpit survivable for a human pilot, the theoretical limits of human reaction time were strained even at the reduced engagement velocity of 100kps. Given these and other concerns, there were many voices who argued against manned superlights, instead advocating either fully independent combat AIs or at least remote operators. The use of independent AI was always politically untenable in the Earth Union. For whatever flaws a human being may have, there is at least clearer accountability in the event something goes wrong. (A discussion on the complex debate on the role of AI in Earth Union society is best saved for another time.) While remote operators at least kept a human in the loop, there were concerns that the connection could be severed or even hijacked by the enemy. (Later review would confirm that the detractors overestimated the Sheolites’ electronic warfare capabilities.) In the end, the advocates of manned superlights won out.

Now that the plan to go forward with manned superlights was going forward, both the crafts themselves and the warships to carry them were being developed alongside the training of the pilots who would fly them. For instance, both Leia Han and Stalinslav Zhukov (who you would better know as Pride of the Seven Deadly Sins) were among the first midshipmen to be trained as pilots for spaceborne carrier operations. In addition, pilots from the terrestrial aviation communities and the pilots of light spacecraft adapted their skills to operate the new superlights. Casualty rates in training were high and even higher in combat, but those who survived helped refine the warfighting doctrine for superlights. Combined with technological advancement, the second generation of pilots (represented by people like Matt and Lydia) were able to gain an advantage over the Sheolites and by the third generation that emerged by the war’s end, clear superiority on the Union side was established.

Following the postwar drawdown of forces, the expense of manned superlights became harder to justify in the changing political climate and worsening economic situation. By the time of the War of the Colonies, the Union had almost completely shifted to remote operators and only when rebel forces succeeded in realizing the concerns of the opponents of remote operators did manned superlights make a resurgence, but by that point it was a race against time to relearn what had already been well-established forty years earlier.

And that should do it for now. There are a number of technological brawls in Union military history and perhaps I’ll get into another in the near future. For my next commentary post, I may talk a little on the embarrassing origins of the Ticonderoga series and some of the early weirdness that was cut before the story saw the light of day. Stay tuned.

I was doing a lot of work in the peripheral materials about the Earth Union’s powered armor technology and thought I’d share some of that with you. As most of you know, powered exoskeletons have been in development for a while and we may well see field deployment in the next ten or twenty years. There are of course a number of issues to consider, but we’re not going to go too far in depth with that.

By the start of the Earth Union, the original LightSuit S saw limited deployment among heavy weapons operators, combat engineers, construction engineers and materiel transporters. For those of you who have seen Edge of Tomorrow, imagine the Jacket technology scaled down a bit and with a little more armor. Things like mobility and battery life were the primary concerns which kept them from being general issue for combat arms. Subsequent versions improved on the design with modest gains, but the version of the LightSuit without the exoskeletal frame became the standard even though that was not the original plan.

The name LightSuit came from the fact that it was a much lighter and less bulky design than competitors, but there were always plans for larger scale units, but this did not gain much traction (or funding) until the government saw a spike in research funding in the 80s. This research would prove fortuitous because a number of the projects that went into development would prove invaluable in the arms race that kicked off with the start of the Sheol War.

The MediSuit was designed to be self-contained and deployable in all environments. The Mark 15 Heavy Duty EVA Suit developed in the wake of the Lunar Revolt represented the basic template, only the MediSuit was designed specifically for combat roles. One of the first assignments of a young Donovan Graves (future Commandant of the Marine Corps and Hero of the Union) was to serve as a test operator for the MediSuit prototype. The successes of the Mark 0 prototype let to the development of the Mark 1 production model, which began service in April of 100, less than a year after the official declaration of war by the Sheol Empire. The first MEU to fully integrate Mobile Armor saw action the following year with then-Colonel Graves as its commander.

As with the LightSuit before it, the MediSuit’s design went back and forth between the competing goals of strength and mobility. Low-gravity environments made weight less of a concern, but the heavier the armor, the less the mobility in more closed environments. The Mark 3 unit fielded in 108 was the lightest version ever made, but that light armor when added to its glitchy sensors left it widely reviled. The Mark 5 that followed was perhaps an overcompensation, but there were a number of Marines who favored its thick shell and improved load-bearing capacity. The Mark 6 is what you’ll recognize from the story. The 41st MEU on the Ticonderoga was the first unit to use them. Though they had significantly lighter armor than the Mark 5, this was offset by the built-in shield projectors, though their use had to be limited or else the power cells would be used up much more quickly.

The HeavySuit doesn’t show up in the main storyline until late in Tico4. The reason for this is that the things are too big to be practical in most applications. They are more than twice the size of a MediSuit, so they can’t fit in ships or inside buildings. They did, however, prove useful as force multipliers on orbital defense platforms. The ground operations in Mars provided another opportunity for HeavySuits to shine, but for the most part, they’re seen as a waste of money, mostly useful for propaganda and PSYOPS purposes.

We’ll stop here because I don’t want to get too much into the postwar years until I start in on the War of the Colonies Cycle. Hopefully you’ve found this illuminating. Maybe I’ll get into superlight doctrine next time. Stay tuned.

If you’re not a writer and don’t have any interest in writing, this post probably won’t seem particularly interesting. I haven’t discussed it with other writers, so I don’t know if I’m peculiar or not when it comes to my interest/concern regarding wordcount. For the uninitiated, wordcount may seem completely irrelevant, but for those pursuing publication (at least via the traditional route), it makes a difference.

I got my first impression of the necessary wordcount for different classes of stories from the SFWA’s Nebula guidelines (http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-awards/rules/), which pegs a novel at 40K or more. However, when I actually started making my first attempts to submit my work, I found that publishers were generally looking more in the range for 75-100K. Why the difference? It’s mostly a matter of bang for your buck. If the novel is too short, it’s not as cost-effective to print, I believe. Now, the standards are different depending on genre and subclass. For instance, that 75-100K is the ballpark for an adult novel. If you write a children’s book or a YA novel, the desired wordcount would be lower.

Before we go further, I’d like you to take a quick look at this list of wordcounts for some well-known door-stoppers (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1869). With that in mind, would you believe that my early draft of KoG1 was only around 16K? It’s true. I actually had to bundle the entire trilogy together to get to 89K when I was doing submissions in ’03. The rejection was truly a blessing as I’ve since greatly reworked the books and they’re much better for it. Particularly starting out, I had a very sparse style of writing and it’s still rather true today. It’s not that I’m opposed to descriptive narrative, but I do generally veer toward conservation of detail. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I’ll leave that to the reader’s judgment.

For some comparison, let’s take a look at the wordcounts of the novels I’ve completed thus far, rounded to the nearest thousand.

Knight of Gladius, Volume I – 62K
Knight of Gladius, Volume II – 74K
Knight of Gladius, Volume III – 154K
The Three Warriors – 49K
The Trident War Chronicles, Volume I – 87K
Ticonderoga, Volume I – 100K
Ticonderoga, Volume II – 104K
Ticonderoga, Volume III – 71K

Going the conventional route, getting KoG1 published as it is would be a challenge and T3W would almost be a guaranteed no-go unless I built enough rep to get a pass on it. Personally, I’m a strong believer that a story should be no longer or no shorter than it needs to be and because the current model doesn’t have to account for publishers’ requirements, it’s fine. If I would say anything on the subject to aspiring writers, I’d say not to worry about wordcount too much. Get the story where it needs to be and if you have to wrestle with your editor later, you can deal with it then.

Anyway, that should do it for now. If you found this interesting, great. If not, well, I don’t think you have to worry about a sequel.

A world teeming with life was made between the Two Curtains and the time had come to awaken the common spirits that still slumbered in the Cloud of Souls. There is some dispute regarding the creation of the sapient races of the Planet. Certain scholars believe there was a council of the greater spirits that oversaw their creation and others believe that each race was the product of their particular god or gods. Regardless, there is little disputing the order in which these races were born.

The firstborn of the Firstborn were the Fair Folk. Whether they were a single race from the beginning or always divided among their many sub-races is uncertain. They were to be the representatives of the greater spirits on the Planet, to rule over it in their stead. It was they who channeled the aether into its currents after the fashion of the wind and sea, but they grew proud and spurned their given duty. Led by their king, the Fair Folk retreated beyond the First Curtain to a land of their own creation, but by leaving the protection of the First Curtain, they resided amidst Chaos and so their kind is not trusted by the Elves. It would explain their reputation for caprice. Not all the Fair Folk abandoned the world, though. Some were made to remain, the ones we know as nymphs, elementals and the like.

After the Fair Folk came the Dragons. The Dragons themselves claim descent from the Dragon Mother Tiamat and the Elves follow their account. Tiamat’s first children claimed the greatest share of her power and wisdom. These were the progenitors of the White, Black and Grey Dragons. After them were born the lesser Dragons whose birthright was much more meager in comparison. They were to be ruled by their elder brethren. Although they have the capacity for great wisdom, the Dragons were also prone to greed and violence. Without the Fair Folk to challenge them, they ruled land, sea and sky as peerless terrors.

There are those who consider the subject of the third sapient race to be taboo. Indeed, many would rather pretend they did not exist at all, though their indelible mark on the history of both the Elves and the world at large make this impossible. It has been postulated that one of the greater spirits was an outcast from the rest and turned all his bitterness and spite on Creation and so created the antithesis of life: the Lich, the Lord of Shadow. Dead and yet alive, a swirling of vortex of darkness barely contained by a mortal frame, the Lords of Shadow exist only to upend the natural order. The world’s saving grace is that their power is too great for their physical bodies to sustain and bearing a new generation serves to divide their essence and weaken them. Even so, the Dark Race would prove to be the greatest menace the world would ever know.

The last of the Firstborn are the Elves. The Divine Mother, El-Naia, is said to be the daughter of Sister Moon by some or at very least a companion of hers. She tired of the company of the greater spirits among the stars and descended to the world below. The Fair Folk were too proud, the Dragons too rapacious and the Lord of Shadow an abomination, leaving her with no suitable companions. And so she created her own. She took the light of the sun, moon and stars and combined them with the powers of earth, wind, water and fire to create the vessels for newly awakened common spirits. These were the first Elves. Long-lived but mortal, attuned to the spirits yet attached to the earth, they were to be upholders of balance, to maintain the natural order. For over a thousand years, she raised them, taught them, and when it was time for her to leave, she left a memorial behind. Five seeds took root across the world. These would grow into the great tree palaces of the Elves known as the Five Ancients. El-Naia’s work was finished, but the history of the world was just beginning.

In the beginning, all was Void and at the center of the Void was Chaos. Permeating the Void was the aether and the great Cloud of Souls. While the greater souls were awake and active, the common and lesser souls were dormant. The greater souls could exist as purely aethereal beings, but the common and lesser souls needed physical bodies in order to awaken, but physical bodies can only be sustained in a physical environment and thus we have the creation story related by Cassandra in “The Two Curtains”. The First Curtain was cast over the vortex of Chaos and became known as “earth”. The Second Curtain divided the First Curtain from the Void and became known as “sky”. A greater soul was assigned to each of the Two Curtains and so we have the Earth Mother and the Sky Father.

It is said the the stars are the grand host of greater souls shining beyond the veil of the Second Curtain. Closer at hand were the two children of the Sky Father: Brother Sun and Sister Moon. One day the two of them quarreled and the Sky Father punished them by casting them out beyond the Second Curtain. Brother Sun then began to walk about the Second Curtain, looking for a way back in, with Sister Moon following behind, and so began the cycle of night and day.

Brother Sun would not listen to his sister’s pleas to reconcile, nor would he slow his pace or even look over his shoulder to see her face as she followed after him. His stubborn pride grieved the Sky Father greatly and his tears poured out upon the First Curtain, making the seas. The surface was soon awash with his tears, so the Earth Mother began to push and pinch the First Curtain, giving rise to dry land with its mountains, its hills and its valleys. As the Sky Father continued to move about the Second Curtain, the clouds massing were a sign of his gloomy temper and the rain his tears.

The waters of the Sky Father’s tears had an unexpected consequence. Before the Earth Mother reshaped the land and everything was covered by the seas, some of the lesser spirits descended from the Cloud of Souls and took shape as the first sea plants. More followed, given flesh as the teeming fish and other creatures of the sea. However, there were many lesser spirits that remained dormant. Once the Earth Mother created dry land, though, grasses and trees sprang up and soon every beast, bird and creeping thing followed. The space between the Two Curtains was soon filled with life and the time had come to wake the common spirits from their slumber.

Next time we’ll talk about the rise of the sapient races of the Planet. Stay tuned.

I’ve devoted some time to the tenets of Photianism and I think it’s fair to give the religion of the Elves a little time of the spotlight. Note that “religion” is singular. Though there are five communities and four sub-races, there is essentially one religion uniting them all. There are multiple “denominations” if you will, but few Elves dispute the overall belief system.

The Elven religion has a certain animistic and panentheistic character to it. We have to begin with their concept of the soul. There are three degrees of souls: greater, common and lesser. The greater souls are essentially gods, the common souls belonging to sapient races and the lesser souls belonging to non-sapient lifeforms. Souls are believed to be uncreated, having existed from the beginning of time, but it was the greater souls that were active first, responsible for the creation of the universe and the waking and incarnation of the common and lesser souls. Another important element is the aether, an unfocused form of spiritual energy similar if not the same in substance to the souls but lacking any will or individuality. The aether is omnipresent and acts as a medium for the souls to operate (which is all much in line with most systems of magic on the Planet). Some Elven philosophers have posited that there is a singular Greatest Spirit from which all other souls and the aether emanated and will one day all be drawn back into it.

There are numerous deities venerated by the Elves to varying degrees, but chief among them is El-Naia, the Divine Mother. El-Naia is not the greatest of the gods, but she is regarded as the creatrix of the Elven race and so is adored above all. I will discuss her, the other gods and various myths and legends relating to them in future posts. It will be easier to go into more of the details of worship then. For now, it is sufficient to describe the Elven religion as a sort of nature worship with a personal creatrix held in highest adoration.

Unsurprisingly for a religion centered on goddess worship, the highest ranking clergy tend to be female, but there are some branches where males tend to dominate, such as the cult of the sun common among Light Elves. The clerical hierarchy isn’t terribly complicated or particularly rigid in structure. The priestly caste is largely ranked according to seniority, though certain extraordinary spiritual gifts may result in a quicker rise to higher prestige.

There are a number of major and minor festivals following patterns you might expect for a religion of nature worship: new moons, full moons, solstices, equinoxes, etc. Other than that, there’s nothing so formal as weekly services, daily prayers at set times or anything like that, though some branches of the sun cult can be a little more regimented.

I could go into greater depth, but this post is only meant to serve as an overview. I’ll go into further details in subsequent posts. Stay tuned.