I believe that yesterday I promised artwork, yes? Well, here it comes. This is a picture of the World Tree before the Godsrage. Yes, there’s a dragon in the picture. It’s either ridiculously huge, or a fair bit closer to the front of the picture than the tree is. Once again, this picture was done by Jackie Felix.
Ancient Dreams 
I can buy “the World Tree is absurdly enormous” considering Sistina’s tree is… also stupid huge (granted, not on that scale, but hers is both stuck in a cave and… probably a hell of a lot younger?).
Alternative option! Adorable tiny dragons!
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Yeah, the world tree is supposed to be like… Mt. Everest-sized huge. There’s reasons for that, and part of it I’m drawing from Norse mythology, with my own spin on it. Also, adorable tiny dragons are already a thing. ^_^
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There’s this cute short story featuring an elf girl and a dragon hatchling on Kindle, Sapphire & Lotus … doesn’t really do anything aside from being cute, unfortunately.
Great art. For a tree hypothetically carrying a world (or multiple ones) it’s not at all too large, I’d say. Well. Going by the Norse one, anyway. There, depending on the source, one root of the tree is supposedly large enough to cover Niflheim, one of the nine worlds. So, yeah, it’s “large”.
My favorite pop-culture use of the tree is probably in the Ar Tonelico universe (the name is derived from Japanese for ash tree, which in turn is a reference to the world tree). Basically, there’s a bunch of crazy large, magical towers that enable human life and function as world trees. When you posted your “What I listen to” thing, I was kinda thinking about whether I had any song (with lyrics, for a challenge…) I’d fit with Sistina; and, if anything, the soundtrack from those games fits. Vaguely. ^^
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*ponders how much to say* Eh, it honestly doesn’t matter, and won’t come up in the plot of any of my books, so let’s just say it.
The World Tree is an integral part of the cosmology of my setting(s). The elemental maelstrom is the source of all mana and power, but it’s too wild to be used directly. The roots of the World Tree span through the various planes of existence, and into the maelstrom. The World Tree refines and reduces the power of the maelstrom into a manageable level, and then distributes mana across the layers of reality via the ley lines. Ley lines are quite literally the veins of magical life throughout the universe, and the destruction of the World Tree during the Godsrage was… bad. It, more than even the destruction of Demasa and Kylrius’ respective pantheons, was what caused the devastation, and yet a few of its roots still survived, and magic persisted, though much weakened (thus High Magic couldn’t be used in intervening millennia).
I will also add that /this/ world tree is rather, umm… vulnerable, by the standards of my primary setting. That universe came later down the chain of creation, and thus was made to be able to defend itself more easily. Anyway, if one can reach the World Tree, they can also use magic to easily reach any world in the cosmos, but that’s a slightly different subject.
There’s a whole lot that goes into it, but there ya go, a basic rundown of what’s in my head. Now to look up Ar Tonelico.
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Amusingly enough and parallel-universes aside, that’s actually not so different from the function of the towers in Ar Tonelico. Except it’s about sound and songs there, not mana and spells.
The games aren’t all that great, but the lore is crazy detailed. They invented a emotion-based language (with 12 dialects), two scripts to write the language, and an entire world with history and weird technical details that’s based on the idea that sound equals energy accessible through songs. Well, it’s basically very Japanese.
Great lore doesn’t save otherwise mediocre games in the same way great world-building doesn’t automatically make a great book, but it can be pretty impressive nonetheless. There’s this “Diadem from the Stars” saga for example, with an overarching plot that’s just completely random (basically the heroine travels the universe to get to her mother), and individual plots for each book that mostly make me want to set the novels on fire, but each world she visits along the way is just impressively well designed and properly “alien”. But, again, doesn’t really save the series from itself ;)
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Yeah, I read over the basics, skimming it somewhat. I’ve always loved music-based stories, in part because of my own background with it, but I know my limits. In most artistic endeavors I’ve done decently, but not excelled. It was an interesting game world, I’ll definitely grant that.
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I have that book, Sapphire & Lotus. It’s not bad. Though I wouldn’t call it a short story at 250 pages. More a short novel, but a fair bit longer than a novella.
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Hmm… considering the standard that most authors go by, that’d be a novel. Most authors I’ve seen consider between 17,500 words-40,000 words to be a novella, and at 250 words per page, that’d end up being 62,500 words. Not too bad.
I may take a look at it… but I’ve been having a really hard time getting into books lately, and I don’t know why. :/
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Okay, I’ve got a new theory. Sistina will become the new World Tree over the course of several more millenia and her “sphere” of influence will encompass that whole planet.
Yep, I’m sticking with that and the only way this head canon is invalidated is if Sistina dies in the next book.
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Must’ve totally misremembered this. I honestly thought it was shorter, but apparently not. Although I don’t trust Kindle length all that much. The audiobook says it’s only 5 hours, which would be at best half a full length novel, unless something odd is going on there. But, eh, really couldn’t say anymore.
I also read some other Dragon stuff not too long ago; Dragon Temple Saga. To put it bluntly, it was weird as … you know. Includes dragon-sex and being addicted to dragon-sex, which seems what bugs most reviewers. Personally I thought they made a bigger deal out of it than it was. Great world building anyway, but the plot was kinda ~meh.
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Hehe. No comment, I’ll leave you to your theory. However, I draw your attention to Fate’s musings in Spells of Old.
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Honestly, anything over 50,000 words is considered a full-length novel. Spells of Old is about 124,000 words, and will likely be about 14 hours in audiobook form. The term full-length novel is… fuzzy, at best.
And I also used to be super into dragons. Now it’s cooled somewhat, but Through the Fire is going to involve a dragon villain, so there’s a possibility there.
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Like with any “popular” creature just saying “it’s a dragon!” has become fairly meaningless anyway. Every time I think authors cover every variation they still come up with something new … I mean, those sex-addiction-drug-poison dragons in Dragon Temple are fairly weird, but they aren’t as weird as in Jane Fletcher’s Chalice series, where they exist outside of time and thus simultaneously at every moment they’re alive or something odd like that. Heck, D&D has a whole collection of weird dragon-types.
Sometimes it becomes a bit ridiculous, like vampires that don’t need to actually suck blood. I suppose technically that’s not required by any definition, but it’s just a personal feeling that at some point when creating something maybe you should call “randomfantasycreature” instead of something traditional if it’s so friggin’ different from the norm …
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Yeah, I can agree there. My dragons are fairly classic to D&D. Large, scaly, breath weapons, and intelligent. Can shapeshift into human-ish forms sometimes, too, and occasionally with more unique appearances.
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Hi, I wanted to say thank you for you work and I hope you will continue to write in the future.
In my opinion, “Ancient Ruins” was pretty good, even more so, for a first time author. But “Spells of Old” was even better. I also liked it, that you listened to your critics and wrote more chapters from Sistina’s POV.
I also wanted to say, that I like Sistina as a MC quite a lot and I hope that after the current Trilogy you can find the inspiration for another work / Trilogy with Sistina and Phynis as the main POV characters.
But regardless, if you should continue with Sistina or not, I will defiantly try to read forthcoming project’s from you.
To Spells of Old:
The chapter in which Sistina and Lily put down the sign for the dungeon and the reactions of the adventurer are pretty funny, but I think you can even top that, if Sistina would ask for advice from the adventure to make her dungeon even better (some sort of a suggestion box).
The only thing I am missing, is a bit more action / combat from Sistina (Book 3: Fight against Tyria?)
I am really curious for the last book and how you will end it. Especially, what will happen to Tyria, Sistina and who is this new demoness at the end and how did she learn that Sistina was Marin?
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When Farris died, Death already told her, that Sistina is the World Tree reborn.
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Correct! I made certain to put that in, but wasn’t certain how many people would catch it. Sort of like the Marin thing… though I think some people don’t realize that Sistina herself doesn’t realize she was that Marin.
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I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the book!
Now, I’m not sure I’m going to do more with Sistina because of two things, really. One, she’s really powerful, and two, she can’t really go anywhere. I really don’t want to have her levitate her mountain or something to go mobile… and yes, I seriously considered that possibility.
Spells of Old:
Sistina intends to ask for advice on the dungeon. She actively enjoys watching people challenge it, so she isn’t going to neglect it. And don’t worry… actual threats to Sistina and co. will appear in Halls of Power, and fights will happen. As to the last part… not telling. But it will be answered.
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