ComplexVariable

All good things must come to an end, or so they say. Not even the sun shall last forever. Youth gives way to life, then to old age, and, at last, to a long rest. I used to believe that. But now, I’m not so sure. All that I know is what I must now do—for her sake, as well as mine. Whoever you are, if you are reading this, then it means that I have left, for good. No, not dead; merely elsewhere. And though there will come a day when I, too, am dead, I will still live on. All of us shall, and in ways we can scarcely begin to imagine. Death is not what I once thought it to be. Dear reader: you may consider this notebook my last wil

 "Oh, Nerric, you’re going to have to try harder than that.” A calm fell over the literature class. The students were as silent as the stately bookcases against the back wall—but with far fewer words. The light of the late afternoon streamed through the classroom windows; stray fibers at the back of the teacher’s pastel green bodice glowed like gold in the sunbeams. Nerric Togaroff looked up from his book to his teacher. Her imperious stance and long, curly brown tresses cast a shadow over him as all eyes converged. “What?” The young man feigned ignorance. That might have worked with almost any othe

("B1" = Book 1 (i.e., The Song of the Wind; it takes place in AY 1829. "BfB1" = before Book 1; E-years = earth years; Aurhìm's years are slightly longer than those of our own world; for convenience, I often do my temporal reckoning in E-years before converting the dates into the corresponding A-year (Aurhìmine Year; "AY") values.) The center of Seterras is rather flat, and slightly below sea level at many points. Similar to Earth, Aurhìm experienced a glaciation period (characterized by alternating micro-ice-ages and micro-greenhouse-ages) beginning about 1.5 to 2 million E-years before B1. During the cold periods, the clim

As a rule of thumb, rural folk (farming communities in the middle of nowhere) exhibit the characteristic attitude of being primarily concerned with only those things that directly pertain to their livelihoods. So, in such localities, formal knowledge of math and science and magical theory and stuff tends to be minimal and scarcely distributed (at least, as of the 19th century). Nevertheless, while there might be a want of formal knowledge in rural communities, they are still capable of using magics to assist themselves in their daily lives and labors. Some families deign to educate their children in magic (at least, in how they themselves und

(Sections will be marked by horizontal line breaks. If applicable, there will be section headings written in bold.) The Maridan peoples have always considered themselves to be the true “spiritual successors” to the Dahrian Republic, and indeed, there is a grain of truth in this. Marin proper had been the first Province added to the Dahrian Republic following the establishment of the Republic in 1113 AY in what would become modern-day Drexel. Furthermore, of all the Provinces, Marin and the Maridan expressed the greatest opposition to the conversion of the Republic into an Empire. Prior to Marin’s confederation into the D

Clara opened her eyes, seeing whatever she could through the chaos and the on-and-off flashing of the beam’s afterimage. A massive hole with a brightly burning rim had been blasted into the canopy above the bleachers at her right. The conflagration at the edge of the whole grew out like acid. With each passing moment, it spread across more and more of the tent. Under the sunlight shining through the hole, the people on the bleachers beneath looked monstrously blackened, as if branded by shadow. Clothing and flesh burned. Through burgeoning walls of smoke and fire, the sun cast a spotlight down upon where the two men stood. All that re