♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #220
Talk about the setting of your book. Is it entirely
imaginary or is it based on a real-life place?
Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop! The authors included in this ongoing series wish to thank you for your reads. We appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Prepare to become a regular reader.
The settings of my first two books are real places, even if places lost to time. The Vermont countryside north of Montpelier is a short car ride from where I live. Just so, one may visit the sites of World War II, including Boston or New York. So when it came time to write The Trailokya Trilogy, all of that mostly became history too. If you refer to a post written at this blog’s inception, you’ll start to notice something quite different from my historical fiction roots.
The divergence was actually a return to the unknown roots in my pre-published history, when I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I would become. Back then, I wrote very long winded high-fantasies. The practice was a lot of fun. The historical and the fantasy were always intertwined for me. That is something true from my childhood reading to today’s writing.
What I really loved about settings in The Trailokya Trilogy was that I could do both. This privilege has allowed me to create some really stunning artwork to go along with my writing. You’ll find characters as well as landscapes, and those can be viewed here.
The first book begins in the alternate reality of Zion, which is known as the homeworld of our true selves. It’s a rich world, forever stretching onward to accommodate the myriad souls and duta living there. To build is to use one’s mind, so the creation of things come from one’s ability to be creative and focused, a land of mental projection. Of course, to accomplish this, there is consensus among the inhabitants about the appearance of common grounds, such as the White City. Those with the strongest mental abilities, those who are older–it is their city as they saw it created. The inhabitants since, create within and extend it if they are strong enough to do so. One may think that this a formula for chaos, but when beings are in harmony, there is a gentle give and take of respect. And only those in harmony can exist within Zion.
There are 7 landscapes, so to speak, included within the book: Nirvana, Zion, Avernus, Astral, Samsara, Jahannam, and Oblivion. Nirvana is the creation point, and no one in the books knows it except the King of Zion. Avernus is a gate plane. It exists to protect the other planes from one another. It is the space in between, where nothing and everything exists. Avernus is not the opposite of Oblivion, as Nirvana is. Instead, the realm is what I term a chaos realm, where things are broken into basic parts, striped away, mixed, and jumbled. Nothing, however, is destroyed. Matter and energy are simply in utter chaos. Thus, when a gate opens on that realm, it will overtake everything and scatter it. This prevents the danava and marditavya of Jahannam from attacking Zion directly. They simply cannot reach it, and that is likely because the greatest amount of order is nearest to Zion, so the chaos is stronger at that border, whereas it is much weaker at the fringe of Samsara and Jahannam. The gate is still strong, however. Danava expend a great deal of energy an ingenuity to break through to the lower realms and have so far reached as far as Astral.
Astral is uniquely positioned in close proximity to the Samsaran plane. Its landscape is also one of mental acuity, but it is so tightly wrapped with Avernus that the chaos seeps through, and without that sharpness, one could be lost forever wandering the interminable breadth of that world. It is what you dream it to be. Astral can also be manipulated into telling historical details, or opening gates into other realms below it. It is also very easily accessible from Zion.
Samsara is the universe of which we are familiar. This is where Earth rotates about its sun and humans live out their lives. It is the home of the history and reality we know. However, this land is locked into strict parameters woven into its creation. Although strange things can occur in Samsara, they are aberrations of otherworldly influence. In the series, you will find real places–you could visit any one of the places Dominic travels to in The Shadow Soul, within reason (because specific homes and shops don’t actually exist nor do they belong to the individuals occupying them). There are Ferries across the Channel, trains, France, German, Hungary, Budapest, and Esztergom. Ah, Esztergom. That’s a real Basilica! You could go there, and used to be able to go up on the roof where Maiel has her battle against Morgentus. You could look down and see gate of Jahannam opening below you as the skys stormily open to Zion and the second Conflict threatens to destroy everything.
The places you cannot visit in Samsara, however, are the worlds beyond Earth. There are many races out there, so distant. They inspired myths and legends on Earth, as their inhabitants are remembered, despite the masking, by some souls who wrote down fantastic tales. Alien worlds are yet beyond our reach and are of course written in fiction. That said, some of these other worlds reflect things we know or used to believe at one time about non-human intelligent life.
The next setting is the hellscape of Jahannam. Well, it is hell, but in this series it goes by its Islamic name. This is a dark, sunless world, barren but not lifeless. It is a prison, caked with the dust of the burning. When the conflict failed to gain certain factions the power they sought, they were cast out of Zion and denied the perpetual light that sustains all. A very faint glimmer, something on the level of moonlight is all that is spared them from a crack in the rock firmament. In this darkness, the danava partitioned their lands into provinces over which the leaders of the insurrection named themselves princes and bicker among each other, still attempting to fight the war they lost so long ago. They are are culture of utter darkness and evil. Psychopathy is their normal, and thus the terrain and the dwellings all reflect this. Those dwellings being the remnants of their Zionic creations, cast out with them upon sentencing.
Beyond Jahannam is the plane called Oblivion. It is as unknown as Nirvana, if not moreso. Nothing is believed to ever return from Oblivion. It is the undoing realm. This is the place atman (beings) fall to when there is no other recourse as to protecting all other beings from them. When a being is this terrible, and keep in mind that Lucifer is merely encased in an ice prison in the depths of Jahannam with the worst of his legions, it makes a great deal of sense. That particular attman cannot be healed, cannot be turned back to the light, cannot be staved off from wreaking havoc. It is what they are. Thus, they are cast into Oblivion to be unmade.
There is nothing in the realm of Oblivion. It is nothingness itself. Though this may seem quite similar to Avernus, one must keep in mind that in Avernus things are just in chaos but they can be brought back to their whole state prior to entering into the plane. There is no gate into Oblivion, either. It is only accessible by the jñanasattva (those like the king of Zion, who came there from Nirvana).
If you want to learn more about these worlds and what real places and fantastical places there are inside them, you will have to check out the series. This tiny blog post can hardly do it justice. There is a richness of detail that only story can impart.
Be sure to check out the places and worlds the other authors have written about for their part of the hop. Click on their links below…
What a complicated series of worlds? Do you have a diagram to refer to when you are writing?
I did not while I was writing, but I made one after for readers. It’s been with me so long, I know it very well.
Wow, there’s some detail in there. What an achievement. I love world-building on a grand scale, fitting everything together and getting it to work.
I love it too, but it was pretty overwhelming when I started. The concern of, “This makes total sense to me, but will it to another person?” constantly hung over my head.
Sounds an interesting world you have created there, Kelly. Your imagination must be rather more developed than mine, lol!
I think we just are in different areas, not that our imaginations are greater or smaller than others. Thank you, though. I hope it is interesting!
You have people from Jahannam attacking Zion? Interesting. Does your Jahannam reference the Islamic Jahannam?
Only the name Jahannam came over, just like only the name Zion came over–terms for hell and heaven from variant cultures. (hang on as I get long winded again… LOL)
No. Jahannam is laid out like the Classical Greek underworld. The premise of the book is that we all come from what we collectively think of as heaven, and incarnate here to evolve our souls (Samsara plane – basically a hologram world) with the aid of the race of dutas (angels) who were charged with our oversight. Some of the things that we know in our real lives seep through the cracks despite the veil between worlds. Those things are often adapted into our culture and philosophies, not always entirely correct in their assignment and explanation–meaning: you remember the name of the prison plane (jahannam), probably that it is a place of evil, etc, but not other planes, such as astral, zion, nirvana–collectively, however, pieces of the puzzle pop up across the world, while others fill in information from what they believe to be true (sometimes even outright lies), and that gets culturally or philosophically canonized. Another instance: The commander of Walhall (like the nordic Walhalla) is Sephr and he and the guardians there resemble Persian culture. (Walhall is the armory of Zion–not Viking heaven. It is where the duta young (after attending the Ordo Priori) basically find out what order they will be part of and when their atman is read to see what care it will need in the coming eternity of evolution (the end result being to become higher beings that return to Nirvana.) Wallhal also has dragons (called Lungs, that resemble the Asian artwork of dragons) who keep the armory safe from unauthorized personnel, so no one is grabbing up arms or messing with order stashes, Cherubim and Thrones (duta races) also serve here. It is where their penannular tech is developed and fashioned (nano-tech armor/uniforms). The items stored there are considered sacred. Only the king, who takes orders from beyond Zion, and in consultation with the High Council, can order missions/wars, etc. The orders store penannular and supplies that are no longer in use, or are being built for future guardians/members.
So, additionally, those imprisoned in Jahannam were cast out by the king and council (and the higher entities), and Jahannam was created to hold them, so they could no longer bring harm to the other planes (souls and duta). It is a duta term (those are the people who created and inhabited Zion before souls). So it’s a Zionic word in the books, not Jewish or Islamic.
While the text uses theological terms, it defies human religions as we know them. It’s actually an anti-organized-religion text–and I am sure I’ll be excommunicated despite not being a catholic for it. It imagines all the places and beings as Ultraterrestrials (aliens so to speak), not paranormal entities. They also do not adhere to, for example, catholic ideas about cherubs and the like, Lucifer isn’t out there actively causing issues, because he’s deeply imprisoned for his insurrection and incapable of it, despite Danava (demons) efforts to release him.
Even within the duta culture, you see rumor and misinformation being held as truths, because not everyone was there in the moments/places things happened, so stories build up around them based on he said/she said. They have a super long history, and things can get muddled for younger generations who are not careful with their learning. There is, also, clearance levels for certain information. But regardless, as you know, even if someone is handed an accurate history book, they will not always believe what is there–even when it is absolute fact. That’s something that always has fascinated me about human beings: the ability to deny concrete/absolute facts on the basis of their personal opinion and feelings.
I’m sure the book series will upset many people, who will find it a threat to their beliefs, but it is a dark fantasy/paranormal/horror Fiction. It imagines a home world that created ours and whose culture has been appropriated and misrepresented either on purpose or unintentionally. Our reality isn’t the book’s fictions. It would be mega cool if it was, and I would be in and out of other planes as much as I could be if it was.
“long winded high-fantasies.”
There are so many things to say to that alone. Like “I remember those!”
Okay. Love the graphics. I like to take found pictures and the amazing brushes available today and see what happens. But they are cheesy compared to people who spend time on visual art. Nice work though. Here’s a thought, and maybe I’m off base, but do you think that a good graphic enhances or enables the reader’s perception and cuts down on excess verbage? That has been a lifelong discussion from “art” to commercials to book and album covers.
Thank you!
Graphics: Have fun, and don’t worry about them being cheesy. That’s how you get better at it.
A good graphic is awesome to have, but not all readers want that, because they feel it frames too much of the story, and doesn’t allow their imagination to fly as they wish. It can also serve to sour their ideas. That said, there is a reason that graphic novels are so popular! Just like anything else: not everyone will like what you come up with, and that is okay.