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 Aela's sex change to be more involved that just waving a wand and saying a magic word. Like anything important in life, I wanted her to work for it. It was also a great opportunity to show one of the ways that magic works in the world, and how it literally reshapes reality in accordance with your will. that is why Camna was so impressed with her. Aela is using magic for how it is ultimately meant, rather than just to sell cheap trinkets to make money. Likewise, that scene also adds more to how aura's work, without it being an infodump.


The that was indeed a fragment of previous edits. Thanks for catching it.




Chapter 10.4

The Nakdeok Queen spent the night pulled up to a clear stretch of shoreline, and the travelers rolled out their sleeping mats on the deck. It was not the comfortable bed Aela had left behind in Veia. The deck was hard, and the air was hot and humid. But the Arvern could still not stop from smiling as she stared at the stars overhead.

The next day they continued their way up the meandering Nakdeok. By now Alcheon had more than proved his worth as a river man, often diving into the muddy brown waters, only to return with a fish clutched in his bare hands. While some might have been doubtful of his fighting ability, all of their stomachs were thankful for the Teodon's presence.

They came across an area where the edges of the river rose up in steep banks of clay. Great flocks of colorful parrots and macaws clouded around the almost sheer surfaces. They darted in and around one another, in a great seething mass. Somehow they avoided colliding. In fact, they seemed to move in a strange sort of unison. Watching them reminded Aela of a rolling and undulating wave, which became almost hypnotic after a while.

"Are they eating the dirt?" Hrafngoelir wondered. Aela looked again, and saw that the Skanjr had been correct. The birds were indeed nibbling upon the earth of the high riverbank.

"Many of the seeds the birds eat are toxic to them," Phereinon explained. "The poisons bind to the minerals in the clay in their stomachs. Then in turn they are safely expelled when the animals… expel."

"How do they know to do that?" Hrafngoelir asked.

"Most populations produce more offspring than their environments can support. So there is always a steady rate of attrition." Phereinon explained. "The first bird to eat the clay gained an advantage over those who did not learn to expel the toxins from their systems. It lived longer, it bore more offspring. At least some of its young learned to do the same. Perhaps this was simply by observing the parent, even if not actively being taught. They in turn lived longer than other birds, and produced still more offspring. In time all the parrots and macaws either adapted, or were replaced by those who had the advantage over them."

"So you subscribe to the ideas of Epicura, from On The Nature Of Things." Loria observed. "That only the most functional lifeforms survive."

"I have seen it with my own eyes," Phereinon contended. "Life is always competing with life. Even the trees in the forest around us fight for sunlight. Only the winner survives."

"What of the Principle of Plentitude?" Loria debated.

"That when the amhranai sang to their sleeping mother Domhan, they created all the plants and animals that were imaginable, because the world would be incomplete without them?" Phereinon said. "That may be. I was not there to see it. But plants and animals do change. Even the manaborn deliberately change them, to suit their needs. Look at the Maelanu breed of horses. They did not exist a thousand years ago. The Arvern bred them from other lineages to create an eidos that is better suited to riding."

"I do not contest that we intelligent races intentionally alter other creatures," Loria said. "We certainly select them to succeed or fail to fit our needs. But do you really think that nature does so by accident? Do the gods play dice with the Earth?"

"It may seem accidental when you look at from a short term perspective," Phereinon said, "in timelines of only millennia. But when you view it over tens of millennia, or hundreds of them, chance becomes certainty. Random become inevitable. Nature's process of selection only moves slower than that of kith. But it does move just as decisively."

"Hundreds of millennia?" Hrafngoelir balked. "That is before even the First Age! The world is not so old."

"I suspect the world is far older than any of us might imagine," Phereinon contended.

"You radical!" Loria grinned. "Even I would not say anything so heretical. At least not out loud."

"But then how could history only go back so shortly," Hrafngoelir argued. "We are only five thousand years into the Third Age. And the Second Age was what, another four or five thousand years long? What was the First Age then, a million years?"

"Perhaps more," Phereinon said. "Perhaps much more. Our idea of history may be only a tiny chapter of our world's story."

"But what of the gods then?" Loria wondered. "What were they doing all that time? And what were people doing? Surely there would be more signs of ancient cities, monuments, roads, and the like."

"Maybe there were no people." Phereinon waved a hand out toward the clay riverbank and the birds clustered there. "Maybe it was all like this, growing, maturing, evolving, into what it is today."

"So maybe creation took longer than a song, but a million years?" Hrafngoelir wondered. "You have some wild ideas my friend."

"The idea of a boat was unheard of once," Phereinon contended. "Yet here we are."

"Since you believe in creatures evolving over time, surely you agree with Gwenael of Alalia's theory of mythic evolution?" Loria asked.

"The physical characteristics of the manaborn races certainly evolve to reflect their own self-image." Phereinon insisted. "Over time - a very short time - mythic values become physiological traits. The Silmar on the steppes of Glastal are a prime example. They did not exist in the Second Age. They evolved from Dark Elves who survived the Great War."

Aela shook her head and pulled Hrafngoelir away while the two talked natural and magical philosophy. Loria could talk about books all day long. When he found the time to read them, she had no idea. Personally, she would rather read a fiction about interesting and relatable people and their successes and failures, rather than dry and dusty philosophy and history.

Still, at least someone was drawing Phereinon out into a social activity. The corpse-pale swordswoman was usually even more distant and remote than Valens. He was merely gloomy and surly! Aela wondered if perhaps that had been Loria's intent with the discussion all along?