Seven Reimagined, A new view of an old story Options

[SubRosa]

A while ago I wrote Seven, which is set in Tamriel. Afterward I thought about adapting it to an original setting. I did a lot of world-building, remade the characters to fit the new world, and got started into translating the story over.

I ran out of steam when I started looking at my over-arching direction, and started seeing some problems. The biggest one was that I had in mind a big High Fantasy story - an ancient race rising to destroy the world, champions rising from the dead, the army of light banding together to fight off evil, and so forth. The twist I planned to this standard format was that the protagonists were trying to stop the war, rather than win it. With finding a peace between all involved being the end goal, rather than destruction.

But the story I was starting out with - Seven - is Low Fantasy (at least the way I define it). Farmers and mercenaries vs. bandits. Ordinary people, with ordinary problems. I like that, as it feels very accessible, and makes the characters, even the extraordinary ones, feel more relateable. So that made me want to continue in that vein, and do a series of stories about a pair of hired spells who are part mercenaries, part private detectives. Sort of like Spenser For Hire or Magnum P.I. with magic. That in turn meant scrapping the entire over-arching story. Or trying to bridge the gap between Low Fantasy and High Fantasy. It left me with a lot of questions, and I was not feeling excited about the answers. So I ended up setting it all aside.

Instead of leaving it all collecting dust, I decided to post what I did finish up here. Maybe it will fire me up to get back to working on it again. People who have read Seven will recognize most of the main characters. Names have been changed in many cases. Some because the originals were Bethesda creations, others to suit the new races/languages. Speaking of which races and the like are entirely new, as is the geography, flora and fauna, how magic works etc... I will put some of that here in this post, and start the actual story in a second post. Let me know if you want to see more of the background notes, and I will put them in this post.


This is a world map

This is the continent of Aulerci, where most of the action takes place



Aela

Loria



The Stone Forest (IRL The Shilin Stone Forest outside of Kunming)

Another example of karst landscape


An Oro (IRL Orodromeus)

A Crumhead (IRL Parasaurolophus)

RL Troodon (the inspiration for the Teodon race)

Troodon front

Troodon head

Ancient Rasen Armor (IRL Samnite bronze armor)

Bronze lamellar armor

Bronze lamellar armor again


Veia Map

Rasen street

Rasen city

Rasen apartment block

Rasen-style architecture





Phereinon

Phereinon again

Malediction

Owl Screeching

Owl Carving





Serves Camna



Wooden mug

Tamac (tomahawk)



Raven pendant

Hrafngoelir

Hrafn's shield

Hrafn's seax


Venca



Rasen bedroom

Rasen bedroom 2

Rasen bedroom 3



Lorcras armor

Hagalaz rune




Horse-Powered Ferryboat 1

Horse-Powered Ferryboat 2

Spirecrown - Saurolophus Angustirostris





Lambeosaurus

Parksosaurus

Ornitholestes

Hadrosaurs 01

Hadrosaurs 02

Orodromeus

Gasparinisaura

Ouranosaurus

Maiasaura

Tropical Milkweed Beetle




Teodon Coloration (this is just what their scale colors look like, not actual representations of the characters)
Alcheon's coloration

Daehyun (a very common peasant coloration)

Dark Eye (though his belly is not so brightly white

Sindeok



Banyan tree

Durian tree

Bromeliads

Bamboo forest

Solagea


Kye Rim Graves

Teodon Dok

Teodon village house

Teodon village house



Earthen rampart, wall, and ditch

cheavaux de frise


Shield Wall training




Fighting Moves
Dark Eye's finishing move against Daeso

Phereinon's belly to back suplex (German Suplex) that she used upon the Arvern Oathman of House Camna

Here is a link to Sindeok's killing move against Brown-Scales

Morte Strike and Half Sword Defense

[SubRosa]

Acadian: I wanted to show some of Dark-Eye's charisma in the last episode, and demonstrate how he stays in command of his raider band. I also wanted to show how they get new members. I created Sindeok to have a pov character within the bandits ranks. Through his eyes we see how Dark-Eye leads, and what his goals are. We also see the inner workings of the cannibal raiders, and how they have been corrupted.

Thanks for finding that nit. I had indeed got my names mixed up!


Chapter 3.1

Aela fussed with her hair as she stared into the mirror. While she could use magic to make the long brown tresses clean, keeping them orderly was another matter entirely. Some days it seemed that every strand had a mind of its own, and that mind was keenly aware of its need to embarrass her. Aela was certain that spending days onboard a ship was not helping matters. Not with the damp air from the sea all around.

"I suggest shaving it all off." Loria crowded in the mirror behind her. Somehow his soft red locks managed to behave themselves. He was an elf after all, and their races were all known for leonine manes like the one Loria possessed. But perhaps most importantly, it was not her hair. The Arvern was certain that was the most important factor.

Aela made a face at him, eliciting a laugh from the willowy elf. "I'll shave your hair off when you're sleeping!" she threatened.

"Then I shall be the most handsome bald man in Veia," the Silaine preened.

"That you would be my friend," Aela could not help but crack a smile at the elf words. She wished that she had even half of his self assurance, not to mention good humor.

Loria stepped away, leaving the small mirror all to Aela once more. With a sigh she surrendered, and tied her brown hair back into a ponytail. At least it would be out of the way, and no one would mistake her for a giant ground sloth. She hoped…

She turned to find that Loria had already drawn their empty bags up onto his cot. He had long since put aside the elegant black and silver robes he used for adventuring, and instead wore a simple tunic, vest, and trousers of red and brown linen. She too, wore a simple skirt of linen, cut short in the elven style, along with a chemise and tightly cinched bodice. The two of them looked entirely ordinary, except that Loria still wore his enchanted amethyst ring of course, and Aela her crystal spiral necklace.

The tiny cabin that the two of them shared had a small writing desk situated against the outer hull. Directly opposite that was a door leading to the cargo hold. Flanking them were a pair of folding beds. Beneath each cot was a sea chest. In reality these were nothing but boxes nailed down to the hull, but at least they offered a place to store their belongings during the voyage.

Aela watched as the elf passed a glowing hand over first one, then the other chest. The latches to each popped open as he released the locking spells he had placed upon them. Neither mage was concerned with someone stealing their clothing, even enchanted as their adventuring gear was. Loria could always enchant something else to replace it. But their loot was another story. Mail shirts were not so easily conjured up. Rarer still was the cuirass of ancient Dark Elf steel. Aela knew that would fetch them a healthy purse of gold all on its own, and would go a long way to paying off their debts.

So after filling her traveling pack with her clothing and other things, the Arvern mage joined the elf in loading up their loot into a pair of sturdy canvas sacks. A trio of swords did not want to fit into the bags, and they were forced to leave their hilts protruding from the lip of one sack. Thankfully the armor folded down piece by piece, fitting much easier in the bags.

Aela was not so thankful when she hefted one. "It feels like there's a hadrosaur in here. Or at least a horse," she groused as she drew it up to her shoulder.

Loria grunted as he did the same, and led the way out of the cabin and into the hold beyond. The large chamber had once taken up the entire space from one side of the hull to the other. But at some point wooden walls had been installed to create the row of tiny cabins from which they had emerged, along with an identical string of berths lining the far side of the ship.

The remainder of the space had not gone to waste. The center of the hold was crammed with crates and barrels of cargo lashed down to the deck. More containers hung suspended from nets that swung from the ceiling beams. That left only a narrow passage free to either side, and the pair of mages found it to be bustling with the rest of the vessel's passengers, who all appeared to be just as eager as they were to make their leave.

"This would be much easier to carry if you would just summon up a gnome." Loria dropped his bag to the floor with a clanking of steel. "We did not graduate from the Ingenium just to drag heavy objects around."

"No, we graduated so you could learn to use weightless spells," Aela shot back as she set down her own bag of loot. "I thought your major field of study was materiality after all?"

She was thankful for her own knowledge of vitamancy, which among other things allowed her to increase her strength with magic. With that in mind, she gathered up her mana and channeled it through her body, using it to infuse her muscles with newfound might. She found her bag much easier to manage when she lifted it a second time.

"I found it more expedient to major in financial transactions," Loria winked. He filled his hands with light, and Aela recognized the Lighten Load spell he cast upon his own bag. She also noted that the Light Elf made no move to cast the same spell upon her own sack of loot. Instead the wizard raised his over-stuffed bag with ease and nodded down the passageway before them. "I thought you majored in spiritism though."

"I did," Aela said, "as well as vitamancy. But you know how summoning spirits gets the hayseeds excited. It's been four hundred years since the Sacerdotium was broken by the Skanjr. But in some places you would never know it. They'd be coming at us with pitchforks and torches before you could say Inquisitor."

"Aye," Loria smiled, "and then we'd have to kill them all. With nary a gold coin or gemstone to loot off their poor, wretched bodies. Best to let them live instead."

Loria led the way through the hold to the stairs leading up to the deck. It took some time, as they had to wait for over dozens of other people to go before them. Most of them appeared to be at least from the middle classes, given their linen clothing and moderate displays of jewelry. But some wore the velvet and upturned noses of the gentry. She was surprised to see a handful of what could only be peasants, given their rough-spun clothing. Even just a few days passage aboard a ship was not cheap. Aela wondered what would bring such a person with little coin to spare onboard, or send them on a journey hundreds of miles away?

Most of the others paid little mind to her and Loria, but once in a while someone stopped to stare at Aela. She knew that look all too well. She had been receiving it ever since she had transitioned to living female at the Ingenium. It was partly a gape of shock, partly a smirk of ridicule, and partly a sneer of disgust. She might as well have been something unnatural and revolting they had the misfortune of discovering upon the bottom of their shoe.

Aela sighed, and tried to ignore the people around her, and the disquieting feelings they conjured up. She wished they were back in the wilderness again. At least the animals and the trees saw her for who she really was, rather than simply as the body she had been born into. Even the Rasenna often said that animals were good judges of character. It was too bad they did not find a lesson in that…

She was glad when they finally made their way onto the deck. Not only was the fresh air a relief, but the chance to break away from the crowd of humanity was a balm. She made her way toward the prow of the ship, taking care to avoid the Rasen sailors who scrambled all about. That gave her a good view of the harbor ahead.

Tall cliffs of grey-white limestone rose up from the sea ahead and stretched off to the east and west. Cut into the barrier of rock was a strait of water roughly a mile wide. Into this channel their ship ventured. Aela saw the stone walls of a city rising high above the cliffs on the eastern bank, round towers flying pennants in the stiff sea breeze.

The Arvern Witch felt the stirrings of mana within the water below her. She did not even have to fully shift her senses to the aether to feel the undine taking physical form under the ship. By now she was so attuned to the energy of nature spirits that she could always feel their presence, especially one as powerful as this. The water spirit took hold of the ship's hull, and gently guided it into the strait.

Aela traced a thread of power from the spirit back onto the ship. She found it attached to a Rasen standing atop the sterncastle. He was a middle-aged man with a long curly beard, holding a staff in one hand. Aela almost laughed. He could not have looked more like a wizard if he tried. He might as well have been plucked from a bard's tale. Beside him stood the captain and several of the other officers and men of the crew, whom Aela noted were also all Rasen. In fact, Aela did not see a single Sea Elf in the ship's complement, in spite of that race's well-known mastery of the waves.

A glance upward showed that the crew still worked the sails high atop the ship's pair of masts. Even with the assistance of the water spirit, the vessel still had to make its own way into port. Aela had never heard of an undine being able to move a hundred foot ship all on its own. Not given the tons of cargo she had seen within the hold.

"Down the Spout we go," Loria murmured as they entered the strait.

The channel did indeed remind Aela of a spout as they entered it. In her mind's eye she imagined that Bronze Sea as a teapot. Then they would be entering the base of its spout, which she knew would eventually empty out into the Inner Sea far beyond the isthmus upon which Veia sat.

Aela noted that abutting the walls of the city on her left were also the turrets of a castle. Many of its battlements and towers overhang the cliff, to look directly down into the strait. Aela could even see embrasures cut into the very walls of the bluff, some so large that they must have been for stone-throwing artillery pieces rather than archers. A similar castle stood upon the far bank of the Spout.

Aela knew that catapults had a limited range. But given the height of the cliffs, she imagined that such weapons from the fortresses high above could reach any spot in the channel below. Here was the reason for the lack of Sea Elves and their vessels upon the Bronze Sea. Thanks to Veia's dominant position in the Spout, it was the only large body of water in the world that remained a human pond.

The city of Veia proper came into better view after they passed into the channel. The cliffs fell away in a vast goose-egg to the east, creating a wide harbor beyond the mouth of the strait. This left a long horn of land between the port and the Bronze Sea to the north-east, jutting out toward the mouth of the strait. The fortifications that Aela had seen before rested upon the tip of that horn, while the city itself stretched out to the base of the horn and out into the highlands beyond.

Down at sea level, stone docks stretched from left to right around the nearly circular harbor, brimming with ships. Most were human vessels with high curving prows and sterns like the two-masted hulk which Aela sailed upon, or smaller one-masted cogs. However, here and there the Arvern mage noted the graceful lines and characteristic triangular sails of a vessel belonging to the Silisce. She knew that this would be the last stop in the Sea Elves' journey. For the merchant princes of Veia would not allow them, and the competition they brought, any farther into the wide expanse of the Bronze Sea.

Beyond the docks, nestled at the base of the cliffs, Aela noted rows of square and rectangular buildings. They were constructed in the Rasen style, with walls of whitewashed stone, and red-glazed tiles covering their slanted roofs. The largest ones could only be warehouses, but even in the distance she could make out the colorful signs of smaller inns and aleshops.

Smoke from cooking fires rose into the skies, and Aela followed the fumes. They rose along the bluffs, where a road had been cut into the stone, crisscrossing its way up to the city high on the tableland above. The avenue ended in a massive gatehouse that protected the way into the metropolis, whose great bronze gates now stood open for traffic. Horse-drawn wagons and carts climbed the road to vanish with the gates, only to be replaced by others that issued forth to begin the descent to the sea below.

Veia Map

Rasen street

Rasen city

Rasen apartment block

Rasen-style architecture

"Do you smell that Aela?" Loria puffed up his chest with a deep breath of air. "That is the smell of money. By the time we sell all of this, we should be able to pay off Mamarce the Knee for half a year in advance."

Aela wrinkled her nose at the thought of the usurer in Alalia. She owed him more money than she cared to think about. But without his loans, she never could have paid for the Ingenium. Especially after all of her scholarship applications had been turned down. Somehow even though she had graduated at the top of her spiritism class, she was not academically gifted enough to earn a financial deferment from the school.

Aela shook off the memories. Instead she produced a small hand mirror and comb, and went to work straightening the strands of long, sandy brown hair that had broken loose to harry her face. Once she was finished she proceeded to check the light dusting of makeup around her eyes, and the soft shade of rouge on her lips.

As she had a thousand times before, she sighed at the plain features that stared back at her in the silvered glass. She looked convincingly female enough for most people to never give her a second glance. But there was always one person in every crowd who noticed her slight adam's apple. While her magic had given her an hourglass frame, her shoulders were still a bit too broad, and her hips too narrow, and her breasts too small. Never mind her man-hands. Some things even years of magic could not repair, at least not yet. If only she had been born a normal woman…

Aela put the mirror away and tried not to look at the other women around her. There was no point in reminding herself of how she did not look after all.