April A-Z Blogging Challenge: M is for Mountains

[aldersprig]

The Meme Master Post

M is for morning, the moon, and the mountains.

As I write this, it is morning, and I am thinking about mountains.

As you may have noticed from J, I have been playing with world-building for Reiassan. I've also been working on history-building, going back to prehistory for the proto-Calenyena (I still need to figure out the Tabersi (proto-Bitrani (See here)).)

(The Calenyena and the Bitrani as (as far as they're concerned) the two nationalities on the continent of Reiassan. The setting is fantasy, people ride goats, there's magic and war and I'm very fond of it.)

The mountains play large parts in the Caleyena history, over and over again. The nomadic herders who could become the proto-Calenyena ended up in a mountain valley between two ranges - the mountains were such a figure of their early history that their counting figures are based off the seven major mountain peaks in that valley. In a language which genders almost everything as "useful" or "not useful", mountains are one of the few things counted as "beyond use"; the mountains had near-godhead to the proto-Calenyena, along with the moons and the sky, the sun and the river.

(In "modern" Caleyena naming, characters have an initial vowel if they are part of the royal family - Arinyanka, Enerenarie, Empress Edaledalende, and so on. Those vowel sounds correspond to the sounds at the beginning of each of those "beyond use" words.)

I am fascinated by mountains. I'm a lowlander; I grew up in the Great Lakes Basin of Ontario Lake (A wide flat area where the lake used to be). Hills used to make me sick. But some of the strongest childhood vacation memories I have involve mountains - the Alleghanies, the Adirondaks, the Blue Ridge Mountains. They've lovely, and they are as much fantasy to me as magic and unicorns. I suppose it's no surprise that I chose to fill my fantasy setting with so many mountains, then.

Besides, if I hadn't made them mountain-dwellers, they wouldn't be riding goats. :-)

Reiassan has a landing page here.
Edally Academy is a serialized web story set later in the timeline; it can be found here.

Comments

[inventrix]

That's kind of amusing to me, because I've always lived in mountains or foothills, so they're what I consider "normal". East coast, at least. The ones out here are weird and awesome.

[aldersprig]

It's like "there's a lot of snow" for me, I guess.

[inventrix]

Oh you can go even more direct a comparison. xD Like, flat land? Places with actual horizons over land instead of the ocean? They feel super strange.

[aldersprig]

Still boggling over this but it makes _sense_ but horizons.

Did I ever mention that cloudless skies freak me out?

[inventrix]

I don't think you have! They don't freak me out but they do read as Wow This Is Really Odd. We get them (cloudless skies) infrequently but regularly out here, especially in the winter. The cloud patterns here are very different, because of the dramatic terrain.

...put us in the middle of the prarie on a cloudless day and we'd both be like "AUGH WHY" xD

[aldersprig]

Urk, no water, yeah. I'd be like "the roof is gone help... oh god which way is north?"