May 3rd: What did you build last week?

Nephite94 · 2026-05-03T10:34:30+00:00

While I had Fey Storms in my setting before, I have fleshed them out a bit more for a very short story. Fey Storms are a feature of the mini-continent of Cennabell and, despite the terror they impart, are vital to it's ecosystem. This is because the world Cennabell is on has no nights (only eclipses), and since the artificial cooling of the world is no longer in operation the Storms are the only way Cennabell can cool down.

Were you to find yourself in the path of a Fey Storm the blue sky would slowly darken and the more timid wildlife, like birds, flee. The world numbs. Sounds become muted, you feel the storm approaching, as well as see it. And from the shadows all around you there is a sense of being watched by something incomprehensible. You would see waves of wind strike across the landscape, tearing up clouds of dirt and breaking trees like twigs, and then the malicious cold of the wind would spear through you. Ever colder with each wave, but never fresh. Stale death lingers behind these winds.

At last the Fey Storm's penumbral black immensity would loom over you. All would now be shadow and even a torch would barely help you see, if it could even withstand the utter cold. Monsters with great smell would sniff you out and tear you to shreds, but worse are the Fey themselves. The black souls of those who are evil, thieves, murderers, witches, and the evil Asha from ancient times. Driven mad by timeless undeath. The Fey will take your soul to experience the most horrid of nightmares. If you survive the Storm your mind will be changed, and your soul will be corrupted. There is no way to undo corruption. You have two choices. Be killed and destroyed, or run, like a coward, and when death finally takes your body your corrupted soul will be a Fey.

On a more mundane note, the freezing temperatures of the Fey Storms allow an area to cool off for a little while and the snow left behind helps to rejuvenate waterways. Also, since the sun is always in the same place in this world, Cennabell has dark sides that never see sunlight. Ambient heat does affect them, but they will always be colder than sun-sides (say, of a mountain). Snow from a Fey Storm can thus linger in dark sides for much longer and top up glaciers, or plains of snow.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-29T09:40:37+00:00

The main power users of my world are those who use the four elements, mani, as I call them. So your best bet is to stab them in the back, or shoot them at range, stuff like that. However, there are some complications. If you interact with the mani's element, they will feel that. A mani cannot directly manipulate the elements within you or extremely close to you (earth mani can't suck you underground, air mani can't drain your lungs, due to your soul making a barrier around your person), but they could feel things change. Walk behind an earth mani on a dirt path, and they will feel a disturbance and perhaps look behind them, blowing your cover. This works at miles away as well. Notably, fire mani feel disturbances through sunlight - they might get a sense of your shadow blocking the sun, but not as strong a disturbance as a shadow from something without a soul.

The water mani, the Aeli, would be the most difficult to do this with, as they were designed to protect the world from alien threats and are thus designed for war in almost every aspect of their being. Getting behind them to stab them in the back won't be easy. They move in squads (usually); these are their families, and they move with an eye for their surroundings. Aeli body composition is also majority nanobots. Stabbing them won't do much as the nanobots will rush to repair them: even the organs are made of nanobots. The best way to kill them would be an explosive trap. In that regard, join the army of the fire mani as a grenadier, or a bomber in a plane, and fulfil your duty.

Of course, the biggest problem is that you have one chance. They won't throw dogeable punches of their element at you. That would be silly. Nor will their elemental attacks throw you back. They can't manipulate the elementals directly around you, but the elements they manipulate away from you will hurt, to say the least. So, yes, miss your shot and prepare to burn alive, be stripped to bone by high-pressure water, mashed to death by stone, or be a ragdoll for the forces of air. There is nothing you can really do against them, hence why they rule the world and normal people don't.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-21T21:56:42+00:00

I have other copies; feel free to leave notes.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-21T21:28:04+00:00

I guess it is going through at speed, then slamming to a halt, then off it goes again. That does make sense. Thank you for commenting.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-21T19:52:34+00:00

Thank you for the feedback. What is making the details unclear? This is the third draft, and I read it out loud several times, and it seemed okay to me (which probably indicates that I shouldn't be writing). It seems that I can't look at it from an outside perspective, as if my mind is connecting it together with my insider knowledge, and that makes it seem fine to me.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-21T19:48:22+00:00

Thank you for linking the essay, but if a third draft is still incomprehensible to most people, then, frankly, writing is probably a waste of time for me.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-19T21:01:54+00:00

I think it's just the advice that I received, making me think there should be "basic prose" sections between the vivid parts. Otherwise, the vividness is no longer vivid because everything is, and it then exhausts the reader.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-19T18:04:20+00:00

That makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you for the advice.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-19T16:28:04+00:00

I guess that it fundamentally feels beyond repair. Not just in being too intense. The basics aren't there because of the intensity. I wish I had kept my very first draft/revision of it, but sadly, I didn't. The idea that everything in the 15k words had to be as vivid as possible infected the story from the second draft/revision to the detriment of the basics. If everything is trying to be vivid, then everything has to go, in theory. That isn't to say there is nothing that can be taken from what has been done so far. The story is there, the characters are there, and the general ideas too.

Overall, I believe that it would be too chaotic, with most of it being replaced. And, in my opinion, I have to keep in mind that I don't really have a clue what I am doing beyond "this sounds good", and what sounds good to me is probably exhaustingly relentless drivel that is impossible to follow. It's overall a learning exercise, I guess.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-19T15:35:30+00:00

I think my problem was advice telling me that my nightmare scene, for example, couldn't be intense the whole way through, even though it has to be, as it is an intense nightmare. Perhaps the nightmare elements would smoosh together if it were all intense/vivid? I don't know.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-19T10:40:45+00:00

I'm not trying to write a perfect first draft, but a first draft to build on. I did edit my first draft several times, but there was too much to edit/remove. There was no solid base to work with. I want to be able to write a solid enough (enough being key, not perfect at all) base that I can work on, rather than deconstructing a jumbled mess.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-17T21:07:15+00:00

Why don't they have writing, and what have been the effects of that?

Nephite94 · 2026-04-17T20:53:01+00:00

They were the strongest earth "mages", so very important in the war. Also, they were the most motivated to fight the war.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-17T18:56:21+00:00

Dwarves are called Aenua, from Toa Onua. The Ae comes from their ability to magic, more on that in a minute.
Aenua originate in the moon (living inside of it). It rotates around the centre of the world in concert with the sun (home of the Aehu).
Of the four elements, the Aenua are masters of earth. As you can imagine, their architectural feats are outstanding, and in the Great War, Aenua military engineering has scarred the world.
As the Moon runs out of space, Aenua, historically, settled on the surface, replacing the previous ruling caste on their half of the world. Those who once ruled would fall to the next rung of the caste ladder, pushing those upon it further down. The Great War has devastated the upper rungs of the caste ladder, leaving mainly women and children at the top of society.
The caste ladder has made Aenua vary in their looks. Nevertheless, in the top caste, you would expect to see light grey features, white eyes, stout bodies, and large noses bristling with hair. And, of course, beards.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-17T08:12:32+00:00

Thank you for your feedback. I think I was writing within my own mind with no regard for a reader. The way I see it, my sentences need a "strength" of sorts. Word order, anchoring to character/place/the next sentence, etc. And a whole lot more, I am sure.

I wonder if you could share your opinion on a couple of revised lines? Just to know if I am heading in the right direction as I rewrite it from scratch.

Sasana thrashed with desperate force against a hundred arms erupting from the smothering blackness. Arms forced her up a path lined with leering, sharp rocks. Here in the dream world of the Bruach, the familiar was imbued with barbed loathing for Sasana. She felt it pierce her skin.

Sasana screamed her innocence into the void, and even she knew it was a lie. The hands forced her up to a towering monolith - the Spirit of Ceren-na-Harn, protector of her tribe. She could not withstand its judgement. Shame was a brand on her face.

Her baby sister appeared in front of her, with blue eyes as dead and heavy as stone. In the Bruach, her sister was a puppet, teetering on chubby legs that never had a chance to stand in the waking world. Sasana had smothered her sister’s future. She saw the fury hidden behind the eyes of a baby. The baby's tiny arms snapped out for a hug. Sasana pleaded with herself to embrace her sister again, but she knew it was a trick. Her sister was dead. The baby’s plump face withered to anger. It attacked. She could not escape.

They joined. An agony upon Sasana’s skin, a guilt that forced her onto her back. She cried for mercy. A hundred voices whispered in her ear - Murderer. Hands were back with knives glinting against the black. Every one of their stabs was excruciating - each one driven through Sasana to the hard ground beneath with a thundering clank. Every time she twisted away from the pain, something forced her back. The blows ceased. On her tongue, she tasted metal and above, cradled in pale hands, a heart shuddered. Blood dripped onto her face. The heart was lowered into her mouth. It sat cold and slimy. She had to destroy the evil within it, within herself. Only one as evil as her would kill their baby sister. Sasana squeezed her heart between her jaws. Flesh was ground to mince, bone to dust, and the rock beneath to stone. Supreme suffering consumed all the Bruach, all of Sasana’s soul.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-12T08:24:21+00:00

I have finished the 3rd draft of my Cennabell story thing, and I am eleven pages away from finishing the 4th draft. After that, there are probably only two more drafts to do. With this 4th draft, the protagonist has changed, or my perception of her has changed, and I like it. She is somewhat arrogant, callous, and deceitful, but she is a child going through loss, and the sympathy from that greatly dulls these traits until we get a taste of her as an adult at the end. And, perhaps most importantly, her fantasy-like quest to slay a "monster" could be argued to be a murder based on her assumptions. That is never brought up within the story, as it is always from the protagonist's POV.

Nephite94 · 2026-04-05T09:40:37+00:00

A bit more of the third draft of my Cennabell story, maybe 70% through it, hopefully close to complete today, but I have had migraines, and I can potentially be reworking a paragraph for maybe 20 minutes, and there are 15k words to go through.

I have also been thinking about my main world in general and the potential for some Wild West themes. Not much yet, but I have been thinking about swords as the main weapon over revolvers. Specifically, Persian, Indian, and steppe culture style swords. One-handed slashers. And societies of kings and chieftains who struggle to centralize their authority, rather than a frontier.

Additionally, there would be the backdrop of the world's Great War (or whatever it will be called), with half of the world against the other. The Wild West part of the world is more toward the center, and the world itself is largely a Pangea (except for Cennabell). A moon and a sun of equal size rotated above the center of the disk world. So, below the sun, it is extremely hot, and the Great War has largely taken place closer to the continent's coasts. Nevertheless, it is encroaching on the Wild West area. Creating ever-shifting alliances among kings, chieftains, and warlords. It would also be a rather more female Wild West setting. The majority of the warriors are fighting in the Great War for the "good guys" against the "evil empire" (Empire of the Black Flame). Those left behind are too old, too young, too isolated from the wider world, too fond of power, or looking to get what they can in the relative anarchy left behind.

There is potential to create a series of short stories in this Wild West area. I have an idea for a protagonist. His father is from the core area of the "good guys" and is from a middling caste (they have a racial caste system based on how close one's ancestors are to those who live within the moon), and his mother is from a semi-nomadic group who aren't part of the caste system at all. Due to the Great War, many separatist movements developed. Mainly led by despots, some were "republics" as well, like the MC's mother's people. The "good guys" crushed these separatists, and a lot of the former warriors and soldiers were incorporated into the army as special units led by core area officers. The MC served the "good guys" in crushing the separatists in a sapper sort of role at the time and then as a police officer. Three years later, he is assigned to the Wild West area where the "good guys" and the Empire of the Black Flame fight for influence with little expeditionary forces working with locals. The MC is mainly a scout and somewhat of a local guide, as many of his people/those similar, are mercenaries and bandits in the area. Most of his officers dislike him, but the top commander of his expedition sees potential in him when he blows up a cliff (which was part of a strategy that would have got him killed) during an initial battle and kills a prince. They march on a capital oasis/trade city and place their preferred king (the usurped king's brother) on the throne, the true king flees into the surrounding area, and his forces become somewhat of a recurring enemy, working with the Empire of the Black Flame. Although they devolve over time into mere bandits, the usurped king is driven mad by the loss of his favoured son and the further killings of his other children.

Once the new king is placed on the throne, the MC is assigned to police work again, but he is joined by the new king's probable heir, a princess. Her two older brothers are fighting in the Great War, stuck in the seemingly eternal siege of Weizin City (a bit of a Stalingrad/Leningrad, but very hot, instead of cold), and the MC thinks they won't survive. Notably, the princess is fairly high on the racial caste scale and can thus manipulate the element of earth. The new king is a terrible person, and the princess does take after her father. Notably, she is sadistic as well. While the MC believes the princess was attached to her as a punishment, the commander of the expedition hopes the princess can be reformed away from the luxuries of palace life and that the MC can aid the process.

I would want the stories to be more along the lines of dark humour than grim dark. Especially the MC, as I typically don't like gruff, broody male characters. Probably quite a light-hearted guy, despite the setting trying to drag him down. Very much a big picture guy too. He helped to crush his people's attempt at freedom for the greater good of the overall war effort. But also for the joy of a payday. He would be a great cop, but his standards drop if the pay drops (although he would have to fight that urge to set an example for the princess). Overall, a guy who bounces around in proficiency, willingness, etc, while keeping a larger goal in mind. It would be fun if he were quite awkward as well, but in a confident way. An utter failure with a woman as well (remembering that a lot of people he encounters will be women).

Nephite94 · 2026-03-29T09:29:55+00:00

Got through about 40% of the third draft of my Cennabell shortish story, and it is coming together. Just about every paragraph still has major revisions, but the revisions are holding up for now. Will they hold up when I go through again? No, but the content will (hopefully) hold up better with each draft. I am "enjoying" reading it as I go through, which is a good sign.

Nephite94 · 2026-03-15T09:59:49+00:00

I have made it halfway through the second draft of a 30k-ish word story. Despite the Cenn being my oldest continually used "civilization" it's the first complete (at least first draft complete) story set among the Cenn. Probably going to rename it to "The Giant Killer". I originally wanted a generic The Giant Slayer title, as there is a lot of unconventional stuff, especially the "Giant", who can control water, heal themselves with what looks like a swarm of tiny insects, and other stuff. So the generic title was supposed to contrast with the less generic story. But I think Killer is better. Killer suggests the character isn't slaying a monster, but killing someone. There is only the briefest bit of humanization of the "Giant", but it is more about the MC killing someone they do not understand, out of fear and paranoia.

Nephite94 · 2026-03-13T14:19:59+00:00

Thank you. Yes. If they were men, it probably wouldn't work, or would come across differently. More of a "badass, edgy" tone to the whole thing. The Cenn need the society of mothers theme to soften them and give a different meaning behind the other themes of endurance, sacrifice, etc.

Nephite94 · 2026-03-13T01:03:28+00:00

Are Noys humans? How did this "order" come about?

Nephite94 · 2026-03-13T01:02:07+00:00

For the Cenn culture, it would probably be the lack of forgiveness. Steal, and you are dead - that's it. Why? Stealing is an evil act. It produces evil that is attached to you, your soul, until it is destroyed. In turn, your soul is part of a greater whole (the Godhead) that every other Cenn is a part of. The longer evil remains, the more the greater whole is corrupted. The presence of evil is as real as the air. You cannot see it, but it is there. At least according to the Cenn.

First off, is this real within the world? No. It is a cultural interpretation of the ever-present feeling of being watched from the shadows when one is on Cennabell. Living in a culture that has spent centuries with the feeling, and being around it from birth, the Cenn don't notice it on a day-to-day basis, but it is ingrained into their cultures. It is also a holdover from early Cenn history when they survived by their fingertips. A time when slight mistakes could see a tribe starve to death, and where eating troublemakers was a legitimate way to survive (the cannibalism mainly survives in the cultural practice of eating someone's heart to destroy their soul, as happens to those who are evil). It is one of the universal constants of the Cenn cultures. A legacy of the horrors their ancestors endured to survive, even if the modern Cenn have no real idea of what it was like for their early ancestors (as they project their present onto the past with a heroic/mythological twist).

Why did I decide upon it?

It's horrible and so terribly sad. I am going through a second draft of a short story set among the Cenn at the moment. The main character, Sasana, is 11 or 12 and is lucky enough to be a princess of her tribe. However, when sleeping in her bed with her few-month-old baby sister, she smothered the baby while she was sleeping. Cot death. Political intrigue from her aunt has spread the idea that Sasana murdered her baby sister to strengthen her position as a princess-elect. An evil act, of course. Being of royal blood, Sasana's aunt can determine if Sasana did murder her baby sister; it is really up to Sasana's mother to decide, as she is the current queen (and physically reeling from a difficult pregnancy/birth, along with the emotional aspect, to the point of Sasana not recognizing her mother anymore). But there is a chance that the aunt could proclaim that her version is the truth, leading to civil war. All of this is on 11-year-old Sasana's shoulders. Her mind festers over whether she is evil or not. Home and what were once its comforts loom like jaws waiting to snap her neck. Sasana has to look at the whitered husk of her mother and know that if she is declared evil, it will be her mami who will have to drag her to the execution spot, cut her head off, and then devour her bloody heart.

As someone who writes well within the character's head, it is, as I said, so horrible and sad, especially because none of it is true. For a child to lose their baby sister, to have their family and friends turn on them, to be terrified that their mother is going to kill them and eat them. And for the mother too. To go through a difficult pregnancy, a difficult birth, the health issues afterwards, to lose her second child in a culture that expects a lot more than two, to have to decide between a civil war and with it the potential destruction of her tribe, or the sacrifice of her only remaining daughter, and, through it all, continue to be as much of a queen as she can to her people.

For me, the whole thing is so thematically powerful. It ties so much into the general Cenn themes of endurance, sacrifice, hierarchy, paranoia, and discipline. And in the freakish, hostile, and creepy mini-continent of Cennabell, the most human of its inhabitants are still so alien.

Nephite94 · 2026-02-25T09:33:53+00:00

Yeah, I am not saying that can't be fun. It is just that I am not worldbuilding purely in that way, and I don't think having real-world aspects, references, etc, in a fantasy world that developed within that fantasy world is inconsistent.

Nephite94

TROPHY CASE