(this is a photo of the original I printed out, annotated, then scanned. It is a storied document.)We drew this when Jon, Van, and I had a dispute about how big Elothnin was. Apparently, in that historic prologue, Jon had assumed it was rather small - maybe the size of Wales. The kind of place where battles happen between armies of tens of people. And I thought it was roughly the size of China. So, kind of a gap there. Van mediated us into settling on something about the size of the American West roughly the shape of the Indian subcontinent. The really lovely thing about this map, though, is that it gave us a chance to nail down the surrounding areas, those places outside of Jarthen and the Border Wars that had to exist (since it's not like Elothnin was a damn planet or anything) but hadn't really been discussed. Fun fact about this map: the provinces of Elothnin are outlined up there, but all the names we came up with (besides the Fethil, which was well established by that point) were so shitty that none of us wrote them down.
This is the most recent map. Partly I drew it because I firmly believe that despite what Jarthen and Queen Lilhelndine and Jon would have you beleive, Elothnin is not a goddamn empire. But the Elvo-Felintark Empire, is. And is totally sprawling and shit. But this really got drawn because I have a character that ends up traveling through it a good deal (starts in the City of Mages, hops down to Elothnin for a bit, then over to Shalakesh, then up to Shangri, then he runs around a bit in the Elvish Grasslands for awhile before making the long walk back to the City of Mages) and I literally just needed places for him to go. Period. Becuase even though I wrote a novel that is set in the Empire here for the first third of it and it is the only really nation besides Elothnin that we've developed I had no idea what was actually in it. Or how big it was. Or what (if anything) lay beyond it. I rather like the way it turned out -- especially Sparky the Sea Monster.
This, though, this is a beauty. This is a map of the City of Mages, probably my favorite spot we've written about. It's a bizarre place, built by a race of hermits who no longer live there, abandoned and repopulated with a whole mess of races that have turned it into the most cosmopolitan place in the Jarventherse. It's a place full of culture clashes and weird little cultures of its own, a great place to explore identity issues for sure.
And until I drew this map, I had no idea what it looked like. I've been filling it in as I go, noting who lives where, how far this shop is from that one, and so forth. Some of the dots up there have popped up over and over and over (Moshel's apartment, for example, is a point of interest in the book about the gay elves, shows up in the first City of Mages book and a scene or two in the still very unformed and amoeba-like scenes of the second City of Mages book, a novella about satyrs, and will likely at least be referenced in the second or third Jarthen book. It's a happening place. Not really, it's actually full of clocks and books and grumpy gay elves, but whatever.) and some of the dots I thought would appear but never did (Theo's apartment, I'm looking at you.). It's got multiple generations overlapping in it - for example, one character has lived in four different places labeled up there across hi life span. This map is basically always out when I'm working on the City of Mages stuff. This map is canon, I'd live and die by this map. Go, CoM map, go.
Maps that will likely be drawn at some point: Susselfen, Neerhemhind (with special attention to Elftown and Captfael Castle), Opleneer pre and post war, Tarquintia, possibly Norsa, the T'Langan archipelago in greater detail (and possibly full scope. I wonder what's east of the Erkenheld Forest?), and some continent on the other side of the world. Oh, we have plans for that. Oh yes. They involve black elves and slave traders, woot.
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