Twilight of the Idols

Almost there! Not being published yet, though getting my 5-free copies done through Createspace. but it feels like a step closer.

More on Elyden

some more notes to try and solidify tone and setting:

• Elyden is a rotten place, ancient and decaying beneath the languid dreams of the Demiurges. Seas, already barren and polluted from millennia of industry, are in retreat. Empires are in decline. Corruption is the rule - governments struggle to maintain order as resources run out across the globe. Strife and rebellion are commonplace. In other places coups have already toppled the governments and nations lie sundered, their lands prizes over which rogue patricians and magnates fight, their previous loyalties discarded. Small towns are either cut off from the heartlands of their once-nations or lie dead, populated by dregs and wretches struggling to survive. Corpses litter a land that is increasingly unravelling, the laws of nature dissolving even as the Demiurges' dreams grow more despairing and bitter. Millions are dead, their bodies a feast to carrion-beasts, their bodies leading the way to the few cities that remain: shallow mockeries of the civilised order that once was, these city-states stand as bastions against the grotesqueries that threaten to drag the world deeper into chaos. The hinterlands between cities are a festering wasteland where the dual forces known as the Firmament and the Penumbra hold sway, altering the landscape in unimaginable ways that rend once-sane minds into madness. degenerates and grotesques haunt these lands, and where a semblance of society exists it does so in morbid tribes and archaic sects that serve as black echoes to the fragments of normalcy that struggle to survive.
• The laws of nature are uravelling. It has been a long slow process of decay that has brought the world to its knees. Elyden was crafted through the toil of the once deific Demiurges, though they have long since fallen from grace. embittered by the lofty rank they once held, many have fallen into despair, the powers that once helped them create continents and oceans now polluting their dreams, warping the natural world. For it is they who are at the root of all that ails the world.
• Elyden is an ancient place, covered in ruins and dozens of strata of mortal life, going back to the first ages, perhaps a billion years past. the place is rife with ruins and the eerie cyclopean monuments built by and in dedication of the Demiurges. That these monolithic structures remain in any form at all after the passing of so many years is testament to the artifice of the Demiurges and their followers. elsewhere, continental shelves, once submerged beneath coastal waters lie exposed, little more than deserts of salt and dessicated corals. Ancient machinery lie fossilised, their secrets impossible to decipher. Once-proud metropolises stand, half broken and abandoned, their people either died (genocide, starvation, ritual sacrifice, war...) or left to join other settlements.
• Despair and grotesqueries. the people of this world have lived this way for generations, and in some areas this has gone on for dozens if not hundreds of years. entire areas once devoted to industry lie abandoned, the earth a scar of open-caste mines and quarries. lakes and inland seas are either dried up or polluted by bright-coloured chemicals. Everywhere the signs of the inevitable end are increasing - stillbirths, deformities, hydrocephaly, cyclocephaly, aepathy... the list goes on. The mortals of Elyden know their world is ending. Customs have changed and adapted to this. Some regions cling to a semblance of normalcy though in this world, they are the strange ones, living in a world of distorted traditions and broken dreams, ignoring the realities of the world. what were once deities are either forgotten or reviled as the cause for this decay. once-immaculate tenets and dogma are recycled, polluted by new apocryphal texts and used as propaganda by warlords and crusaders hoping to gain followers for their own causes. most hope is extinguished and where it remains it is distorted, as sickened as the world is grey. The Demiurges care not for the mortal's struggles and observe the world unthinking as they slowly decay to their own despair.
• the legacy of the ancient demiurges can be felt everywhere - from ancient monuments to the corruption prevalent in the world, it is their actions that shape all. Though now rotten an forgotten by most, they are still central to the fate of the world and some hope against all the evidence that if awakened and elevated to a position of power, their thoughts might yet be turned from grim darkness to rebirth. It is a fleeting hop, though and most who know of them despise them for their langour and ignorance of the mortal race's struggling. most demiurges are recognised as 'dead', their bodies monolithic and fossilised, blighting the mortal realm with their presence. Despite this infamy, many regions now recognise them under corrupted forms, and might worship them under archaic guises, giving substance to entities they might not fully understand - or care for - their plight.

so, themes of Body Horror and Dying Earth, which are two of my favourite tropes and genres.

boring physics stuff... i mean important physical characteristics

So, after a hiatus of sorts (working on some map commissions and trying to get some work done on my gigantic stereographic world map) I'm back with what might possibly be my most boring post,a bout aphelions, eccentricities (not the interesting sort) and orbits.

      The following is a small excerpt from about 10,000 words-worth of details that will be included in the stereographic map (amazingly, most of the surface of the image is actually a map, despite all those words!) and I thought I'd include them here to show I'm still alive. Most of the information below was slowly cultivated over my many years of working on the world, updated, replaced, changed, tinkered with, until slowly it became something believable.

Regarding the Sphere of Elyden

Elyden. She is our home, hanging in the Æther, product of the divine shaping of the Two-and-Twenty beings known as the Demiurges – shaper-gods whose literal hands were (and are, in some cases) responsible for the creation and evolution of this terraqueous globe that is called home by us and so many other peoples and races.

            Elyden is the third of seven known Ætheric bodies, sometimes known as planets, to have been discovered by observers (astronomers, astrologers, orrerists, Penumbrists, et al) within the system known as Sorchar; the others being, in successive order moving outwards from our star Sor: Hael, Algol, Elyden, Liviad, Gnihlas, Cykranosh, and Nihav. Others have been postulated by mortal observers, though the evidence given by otherworlders and those with abilities beyond the ken of ‘mere mortals’, suggest that the Sorchar system is complete with one star and seven planets. Many of those stars are themselves orbited by one or more satellites, with Liviad and Gnihlas each known to possess seven and three, respectively. Elyden herself is orbited by two satellites – Arakhamé the Red and Siella the White (Details on the two satellites may be found elsewhere on this treatise).

            Elyden orbits Sor at a mean speed of ~65,000-miles per hour in a counteclockwise direction when observed from above the northern pole of Kholamor. She orbits Sor at a mean distance of 92,000,000 miles, with a periapsis of ~90,500,000-miles and an apoapsis of ~93,500,000-miles. She has an equatorial radius of ~6,028-miles, with an equatorial circumference of ~37,880-miles and a polar circumference of ~37,815-miles and an estimated total surface area of 455,957,666-miles.

            Elyden is a rocky planet, with a metallic core, rocky shell and earthen crust in the depressions of which collect oceans of water; giving the term terraqueous globe (Elyden is thought to be the only terraqueous globe in Sorchar, with the other planets thought to be either terraous or gaseous in nature). Above this is an atmosphere that retains gasses due to the sphere’s gravity. It is this atmosphere that largely protects us from Ætheric cauterity, severe effects of the elementae vitale originating without Elyden and also regulates temperature extremes between night and day.

            Of the seven Sorchari planets, Elyden is thought to be the only one with an atmosphere and liquid water, both believed to be vital components in the propagation of mortal life, though it has not been entirely discounted that other forms of life might exist on extraterraqueous globes or even in the Penumbra of the Firmament themselves (indeed, the number of creatures whose existence relies on one of the two elementae vitale, as they are called, would lend credence to the belief in extraterraqueous life, though little solid evidence exists to support it yet). Some claim the very existence of isawhani (Otherworlders) is direct proof of the ability of either the Firmament or the Penumbra of spawning and sustaining ‘life’, though given their detached and, for want of another term, alien personalities, first-hand evidence has been difficult to glean.

            Despite this mystery, Elyden has had no shortage of what naturalists classify as life (described as Vitalism – the fundamental difference between organic and inorganic matter, and the belief inherent that life can only be derived from organic matter), even in these dark days that bear witness to her death throes.

            If one disregards the corruption of the natural world and goes back, even as little as one millennia, one can find a plethora of examples of life in almost all conditions imaginable – the is little-to-no terrain or climate catalogued by our brave explorers that have been unequivocally bereft of life. In some form, minute as it may be, some manner of life exists. Be it microscopic organisms that subsist on the oxidisation of metal, or the gigantic behemoths that lurk in the abysms of our oceans, life has, since the appearance and hubris of the Demiurges, proliferated, and there is little reason to doubt that it will disappear any-time soon.  

Characteristics of Elyden

Age:        ~1,000,000,000 years

Epoch:   Sixth Age of Mortal life

Physical characteristics

Mean radius: 6,023-miles

Equatorial radius: 6,028-miles

Polar radius: 6,018-miles

Flattening: 1.0016616

Mean circumference: 37,845.5-miles                            

Equatorial Circumference: 37,880-miles                       37880 / 1436 minutes

Meridional Circumference: 37,815-miles

Surface area: 455,957,666-miles²

Land area: 235,274,155.656 (51.6%)

Sea area: 220683510.344 (48.4%)

Volume: 915,504,739,986.3-miles³

Mass: 2.9739x10²⁵ pounds

Equatorial gravity: 32.06 Ft/s²

Sidereal rotation period: 0.9972 d (23^h56^m4^s)

Equatorial rotation velocity: 1,582 m/h

Axial tilt: 28^O46’23”

Minimum surface Temperature: -103.4 ^oC

Maximum surface Temperature: 71.9 ^oC

Firmamental pericentre: 1.02~/O/∞1.08

Firmamental apocentre: 0.82~/O/∞1.01

Penumbral pericentre: 1.21~/O/∞1.32

Penumbral apocentre: 1.33~/O/∞1.57

Orbital characteristics

Mean distance from Sor: 92,000,000 miles

        Periapsis: 90,500,000-miles

        Apoapsis: 93,500,000-miles

Eccentricity: 0.02564275

Orbital Period: 365.8572 days

Average Orbital Speed: ~65,000 mph

Satellites: 2

Atmosphere

Surface Pressure:

Composition: 76.2% N, 19.64% O, 0.87% Ar, 0.042% CO₂, 1.624% Fir, 1.624% Pen