Evening, we’re four days from the publication of Fire Betrayed. If you order your Kindle copy now it’ll arrive on your account just after midnight 1st December 2017. If you order a paperback copy on Friday you should have it a few days later. And remember, there will be some special offers just for release day.
Anyway, back to the point of this post. Erce, the world of the Fire Series, and the short stories that should be published sometime next year, is part of the story as much as any of the human characters. Part of writing the stories has been the process of feeling out the world the characters lived in. Erce built itself as I tried to work out why the Empress of Belenos would interfere in Northern Isles politics, or why attitudes to magic and technology would differ between kingdoms. Later novels in the series will bring up bits of information about Sumoast and the relationship between Umar and Camar that make sense in the context of the novels but opened up the rest of the world as I was writing. I had to put the information somewhere so it didn’t overwhelm the narrative.
Erce is a mostly-spherical planet, like known planets in our real-world solar system, with an encircling ocean and three large continents, with an active core and lithosphere. Areas of ice cover both poles and all the continents have human occupation. It has one satellite, called Cardinal and the sun in this system is slightly larger than our own Sun. There are five other planets in the system but most are too small to be seen and, like Cardinal, in the Fire Series there is no reference to them. Later stories may refer to them.
The largest continent, known as the Great Continent, for its size and extensive (in terms of both size and duration) civilisations. It is the home of the Belenosian Empire as well as lands north and east of the Empire. The Empire extends south below the equator of Erce. The Belenosian Empire originated in the central southern part of the continent and extended north and west to the great inland sea of Thetytes, taking over the network of trading and roads left by the crumbling Thetytes Empire that was born in the Theth mountains to the east of the inland sea.
North of the Sea is a jumble of small kingdoms who trade with both the Empire and the kingdoms of the Theth mountains, and help funnel goods from the east of the continent to the Northern Isles through trade routes that avoid Imperial taxes. The far eastern lands of the great continent trades directly with the western lands of the Camari continent, and the southern continent of Bemose. Depending on where on finds oneself on the great continent, life can be comfortable or not. Some areas of the continent, especially in the Imperial Heartland, can be dry and hot, where as the eastern kingdoms are warm but quite damp in places, with heavy rain and extensive rain forests. There are some isolated islands between both the great continent and Camar, and Bemose.
The Northern Isles are the remains of a mountain range that flooded at the end of a previous ice-age. Other than Umar, the Isles are attached by the continental shelf to the great continent and the human population of Calman, Albon and Sumoast arrived from various parts of the western edge of the great continent. Umar is the remains of a volcanic hotspot, with a series of mounts that show definite marks of eruption several million years ago. Whatever was powering the volcanic activity settled down long before humans got near enough to populate it. The soil is good but the isolation means the population remains small and a unique culture, very different from the rest of the Northern Isles developed. The human population arrived from the western continent of Camar.
The ocean between eastern Camar and the Great Continent, in which the Northern Isles are located, is called the Camar Ocean.
Camar, is a large continent to the west of the Northern Isles and extends for ten thousand miles from the north pole to just south of the equator. It is about three thousand miles east to west and due to the lack of an inland sea, the centre is very dry. Major cities exist along the coastal areas and inland towards a mountain range rising a thousand miles from the eastern coast. Another mountain range rises about seven hundred miles west of the first range. The valley between is dry and volcanically active, a rift valley of frightening size that isolated the people on either side until relatively recently. Western Camari engineers developed simple hot air balloons a hundred years before the events of the FIRE Series, and have managed to build a successful regular service between east and west cities.
Trade with Bemose is brisk, the engineers of both continents working with each other to develop technological advances that have yet to filter through to the Empire or the Isles, except for the cannon that the Umari use in battle and introduced to the Alboni during the war with Sumoast (See Hidden Fire), and mechanical watches, a luxury item that filtered through the Empire to the west of the Great Continent.
The people of this continent generally live in city states surrounded by farmland that supplied the citizens with food and healthy exercise. Outside the cities, small villages and extensive road networks connect the communities together. New developments of air bases and subsequent community growth has caused some unrest between these new communities and the existing city states. In the north-east, trade is heavily regulated out of the continent and has a strong bent towards timber and furs. The north-western edge of the continent has extensive coal and iron reserves, and specialises in steam technology and strong trade links with Bemose. Further south, both eat and west of the rift, the damp heat allows three harvests a year of a large variety of crops that are traded with the northern cities, especially in the west.
Bemose is considered an unfortunate continent by the residents of both Camar and the Great Continent, because sixty percent of it is in an polar region, spending four months or more of the year in darkness, with regions further north slightly warming as it gets closer to the equator. The northern-most tip of this continent is thirty-five degrees south of the equatorial region and surrounded by the Bemose Ocean. The Bemose Ocean extends north and the sea between western Camar and the eastern edge of the great continent is known by the same name. Further south, the ocean becomes the Ice Sea, a treacherous area where few sailors will go, although the iron ships of Bemose were successful in leaving the southernmost cities, including the capital, Kimcay Bay, at even the darkest time of the year.
The reason the Bemosians tolerate these conditions is because beneath the permafrost there are large supplies of minerals and precious stones. The Bemosians control the world trade in sapphires and the best diamonds. Gold is a lesser export although tin and copper make up a greater percentage of their exports both to the eastern kingdoms of the great continent and to southern Camar. They also provide whale oil and baleen to the rest of the world.
The citizens of Bemose live in underground cities. Above ground, giant iron domes which sprout a forest of chimneys provide some protection for those who need to work in the open, such as the foundries inland and on the coast, the rendering factories and the fish drying racks and canneries. Underground railways take people and goods between settlements and to the northern ports where they travel to Camar or other islands by ship or airship. These railways emerge into the freezing air at intervals of ten miles to allow fresh air into the compartments. They grow some food in the northern reaches of the continent but also rely on mushrooms grown underground and imports from Camar.
People who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I have a growing document that contains appendices, from which this post is taken. One day, if you’re really lucky, you might get to see the appendices in its full glory. Honestly, I might regale you with histories of the main kingdoms and lands in the Fire Series in the coming days, or I might wait until I release Fire Awakened and Fire Storm in 2019.
Yeah, that’s the other news. Because I’m completing my Masters next year I won’t be able to focus on Lizzy and her friends. Fire Awakened is a complete second draft, but there is a lot of work to do, and Fire Storm is planned and the first draft started but I got distracted what with starting the Masters degree. Those who have read Fire Betrayed have cursed me for making them wait so long to find out what happens. I got sworn at by text message!
Everything Is Better With Dragons 
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