Hello and welcome to the Valteic Archive! My name is Joe Worthington, and I am the author of the Rememberant Story. So, what is this place? The point of this archive is to invite you deeper into the world, to the continent of Valtiel, where the story takes place.
Painting A Wide Stroke - Valtiel as a Whole
Valtiel, or the known world, as it’s more commonly called, is a continent. It’s not one realm, nor one region. Think of it as the Mesoamerican world, a vast and diverse place filled with many peoples and societies, beliefs and traditions. We can divide the continent into three core zones: the north, the center, and the south. Additionally, these three zones are divided between east and west by a great mountain barrier. Like a spine descending down the middle of Valtiel, the Espas Mountains serve as a natural demarcation between east and west, between nations, cultures, and histories. The land plays a key role in Valteic history, and the Espas Mountains are at the center of it, both literally and figuratively.
Starting in the furthest north, we see rolling arctic tundra, snow year-round, and a freezingly inhospitable land with almost no people. Here, mammoths roam and nomadic hunter societies make their living. At the top of the known world, the towering Espas Mountains begin. On the eastern half of the northern zone is Arerlundur – a kingdom of fjords, alpine forests, rugged hills and farmlands at the bottom. We also have the small realm of Talesia, nestled in a plateau within the mountains, literally walled off from the rest of the world by their "white wall." On the western side of the north is Heremor, an empire of sweeping steppes, rivers and dry plains.
As we continue south into the central zone, in the east we begin to see the first vast cities built along rivers and coastlines in the heartlands. It’s a beautiful temperate landscape full of lush forests and to the further east, the alluring Alessian Isles. West of the Espas Mountains is a vast desert sea in the center of which snakes the known world’s longest river, the Iteru, the cradle of one of Valtiel’s oldest civilizations. Here are oases, and to a smaller extent savanna, but the land is arid and unforgiving. A small and treacherous path, known as the narrow pass, does meander through the mountains, connecting east and west, but it is a long and many times dangerous journey. And so, east and west, here in the central zone, exist nearly isolated from one another.
The southern third of Valtiel is the most physically diverse region, consisting of vast jungles in the east, savanna, desert, and archipelagoes in the west, with dry plateaus, beautiful rivieras, and lush forests on both sides. Here, the Espas Mountains make their descent into the sea with a narrow strip of land at their base for travel to cross between east and west on land.
The Context: Changing History
When our story begins in The Fall of Kings, Valtiel, is a fractured place. We have kingdoms, city-states, theocracies, and all sorts of blossoming societies. Furthermore, Valtiel unlike the real world, experienced the eruption that came with the onset of a bronze age, but never experienced the ensuing political collapse like we did on Earth. It’s important to note this because some of the societies in the story are innovating cultural aspects that don’t quite sync up with our world – and that’s okay because first and foremost it’s fiction, but also the way in which Valtiel’s societies evolve over time has taken a different angle than Earth’s. This is important too, because as I set out to write these stories, fundamentally, I wanted to tell their history from the perspective of those living it – I also want to avoid falling into the fallacy that history is linear. For example, I wanted to clarify that all civilizations don’t go from quote-unquote classical societies into medieval ones and so on, because each experience is different from one culture to the next, and some of them – especially when not having gone through a Bronze Age collapse – might innovate differently than we might expect.
So, as you enter into the world, you’ll see that some places in Valtiel have strongly emphasized engineering, or the arts, while others have entrenched themselves in tradition and suspicion. All of these places though have a story to tell, and each of these places will be explored even further in my books.
When beginning The Fall of Kings, you will be brought into Valtiel from a small island far in the southwestern periphery of the continent: Kepherete. Kepherete is only the beginning though, by book’s end, you will have visited Reavon, Arerlundur, Melaine, and the Alessians Isles.
Conclusion
As I prepared writing the first book in the Rememberant Saga, I began with the land; it’s an incredibly important place to start because it informs us not only of where we are, but what we see, what’s around, and what’s possible. Part of this is the greater story – how did Valtiel get here, why is it here, who was here before the present civilizations existed. All of these questions have been answered by the various world religions, and all of these questions inform the mindset of our characters too, whether they realize it or not.
For now, this helps us get into the mindset of what place we’re talking about – a vast and diverse continent with a lot for us to explore. I am so looking forward to sharing this journey with you. I hope you enjoy it, and I can’t wait to explore more of Valtiel with you in this archive. For now, safe travels and happy reading!
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