Hello it's Cloud.

She/her - secretly a sheep - been writing the same stupid book for 12 years and counting

[cloud9-77]

Re-introducing Myself

Hello! I'm Cloud, and you may know me from my fanfiction writing days that are probably behind me. But I started writing those silly little online stories to improve, and it really helped. Now I've returned to my original aim: my original stories. And that is what I hope to use this Tumblr page for from now on!

Welcome to Lower Earth

The second dimension of Earth lies at the edge of reality, where the peoples of myth and legend still remain. Here we meet our very unwilling protagonist, Gem, a winged girl who is about to enter a school for dangerous magic, just desperately trying to get through the year without killing off the student population. But the death that Gem witnesses isn't your typical explosion or magical mistake, but something much more suspicious.

Whilst Gem searches obsessively for the truth, back in a world you may find more familiar, a human runs for her life - from the very thing that Gem is trying to embrace - magic.

You're welcome to ask me questions! But I'm here mainly to share my art because no one really gets to see it and that's a shame.

[cloud9-77]

Been getting into Lino printing recently! This is a print of a previous drawing I’ve done - my character Chet!

I did a few prints but I honestly like this one the best, with the slightly patchy ink in the middle and a few stray background lines - feels authentic - what’s the point of perfection?

[cloud9-77]

In your last post you said about the string of runes engraved on the axe translating to "beware the thorns", and that's really, really cool - the fact that you've made languages and writing systems is awesome.

With that in mind, what does the lone rune on the handle mean?

- Devine

That is the rune of Acy! A “cy” in Thorne is pronounced like a “sh”, so it is pronounced Ash and that’s exactly what she’s the goddess of - ash and dust. Acy is a minor goddess under Baweni (fire) and Fepan (plant). By using the rune on its own, separate from any sentence, it is invoking the goddess herself rather than spelling anything out.

The reason for this on an axe specifically is two fold. The first is in reference to an historical event that occurred at Keuthorne forest’s edge. Encroaching trees were burned and cut back in mass, hence ash. The other factor is that many trees in this area are in fact ash trees. A local and fast growing town in the area is Ashmorth, either referring to the death of ash, or death by ash.

A Keuthornian axe is obviously going to be used on the dangerous forest itself. By invoking Acy, the wielder is paying respect to the ancient ways of the forest, whilst reminding it that cutting down the trees is not an attack, but a normal defence and a part of nature. Trees must be felled to preserve the health of forests at times, and ash is important for the germination of some plant species. After felling a Keuthornian tree, it is tradition to set the stump alight, and carve Acy’s rune onto its base.

[cloud9-77]

Keunner an dhornens

Beware the Thorns

I have a few fantasy languages within my world. The one in question here is Thorne, written in the Elgmaf runic script. The sentence above is engraved onto the axe. The warning is particularly famous because it is the origin of the forest's name: Keuthorne.

There are 55 runes in Elgmaf, but only 42 are actually used. Each rune represents a deity from the ancient pantheon. There are ten major gods, and a subsequent 45 minor gods. Each minor god serves under two majors, and their rune is a combination of their superiors'. The major gods are Enyfa (Goddess of Fauna), Lauer (Goddess of Darkness), Goswyn (God of the Cold), Medaw (Goddess of Water), Ayr (Goddess of Air), Fepan (Deity of Flora), Helor (God of Light), Narew (God of Lightning), Baweni (Goddess of Fire), and Daresyn (God of Earth). Together, they make ELGMAF(HNBD) - the end is of course unpronounceable and only the beginning is said.

Rather than mention all the minor gods, I thought I'd mention only those 13 whose runes are not used: Lokyn god of salmon, Sawn deity of the deep, Degien goddess of dawn and dusk, Ferthen goddess of fevers, Nivel goddess of mist, Mavi god of lichen, Klorlyn god of warmth and cool, Glaw goddess of rain, Eosil goddess of the willow, Kameyedhu god of the rainbow, Tenaydhu god of the waterfall, Tonre deity of thunder, and Inden goddess of embers.

[cloud9-77]

In the deep, dark forest, there lived a girl. A girl who liked to pretend the only real monster out there, was herself.

If you haven’t met my protagonist before, here she is. She likes being annoying on purpose.

Gem grew up in a place that the rules of magic were specifically invented to protect against. She lives only at the very edge, but the Keuthornian forest doesn’t like to conform to the rules of reality, no matter what part of it you’re in.

As a consequence, Gem is frequently disappointed by said rules, and, for example, fully believes the world should just move around her and put her wherever she wants to be even if she starts walking in completely the wrong direction. This belief is so strong that sometimes, to the bewilderment of everyone around her, it does actually work.

[cloud9-77]

Which character(s) were the most fun to design for you? Visually or otherwise 🫶

- pix (with ZERO ulterior motives)

Hello Pix with Zero Ulterior Motives!

I like to think all my characters have fun designs in their own ways! For example, Gem my protagonist has probably one of the simplest designs in contrast to the rest of this funky world. Her hair is flat and straight and white, she’s a little tall and lanky and bored, coloured almost completely black and white - with the personality of some freakish hybrid of a fox and a seagull.

Gem’s story is designed whereby she meets lots of people and friends with their own unique stories that Gem navigates through as she weaves her own. Two characters though that she will return to again and again are Ivy and Kai - who are actually designed with a triadic theme in mind!

Gem is a cool blue, Ivy a bright red-pink, and Kai (although it’s not obvious at first) is a spring-time yellow-green. Gem is sly and brash and menacing - Ivy giggly and sickeningly optimistic - and Kai is a little unsure but fiercely loyal. Each character learns key lessons in life from the other two - the fox the rabbit and the deer. The deer is carnivorous, the fox can read minds and the rabbit can summon lightning but hey.

One final addition to this answer though would be who is visually most interesting and that is probably between Camellia and Chet, who are both very colourful and that’s fun to draw! Camellia has been a staple character of my story for as long as I can remember, and has looked the exact same way the entire time. Chet, by contrast, is relatively new, but the story wouldn’t be the same without them! My previous Tumblr posts have more information on both those characters :D

[cloud9-77]

Is there any character that appeared out of the blue? Like a background character that ended up having a lot more relevance than you originally thought they would have? It's understandable if you can't share a lot bc of spoiler reasons lolol

- Ada

Definitely Ivy.

Ivy started out as a character whose purpose was to just be one of my protagonist’s roommates mostly there for comic relief. She’d show up every now and then as a bystander for us to explain things to and therefore explain to the reader at the same time, and then say something funny and skip away.

She’s a fairy without wings and with rabbit ears instead. She had this feature even before I had developed the lore that made this make sense. She’s named after a beloved rabbit I used to semi-own with a friend!

As the story developed and I grew older, I started to question things I’d added to the world and find reasons for them, and that’s when I realised how interesting of a character Ivy was. How does she feel about being born without wings and having these unusual features instead? What drove her to maintain this happy go lucky disposition? How does the rabbit character reflect my fox-coded protagonist?

My brother was for a long time my only beta reader, and he loved Ivy. With all these factors she started to feature more and more, until she became a staple part of my story, and a secondary protagonist in her own right. Her purpose may have just been to be a friend, but that destiny ended up being far more crucial than I could have ever expected.

[cloud9-77]

What’s your favourite thing about your protagonist(s)?

-Alu

There’s something very satisfying about writing a protagonist who absolutely does not want to be there and is dragging the reader along for the ride just so someone else can share in their frustration :D

[cloud9-77]

Chet: four arms, four fingers, a lot of hair

You might have remembered one of my previous posts about Arkady, the last golem. This is Chet, Arkady’s adopted younger sibling. Go read that post if you want to know more about where they live and how they came to be there, but Chet’s story gives a little more information on top of that.

There is a lot of confusion about Chet in the story. I won’t confirm or deny these facts because that is hugely plot relevant and I can’t say everything. But here are the problems Chet faces:

First of all, how did they end up being raised by the last golems? Golems very much kept to themselves. In fact no one even knew they were still around for the last century at least, they were that good at hiding. So for what reason did the very last group decide to take in Chet, who clearly has no golem ancestry? It couldn’t be to take care of Arkady, because he was a little older. If anything, Chet was a liability to Arkady. They’re always wandering off, wanting to talk to people, and they’re probably one of the most eye catching people you’ve ever seen - so why did this happen?

Secondly, Chet is by no means normal to any race, let alone the golems. They look very nymphoid, but why four arms? One could assume they’re half nymph, half imp. Imps often have bat-like wings, so if Chet had one imp parent, perhaps those wings got confused and ended up as a second pair of arms. It would explain where Chet’s tufted tail comes from too. But four fingers is odd - perhaps just another genetic abnormality. And then you get to the hair and the skin colour - this fantastical gradient of colours is unheard of in a natural sense. Sure you could achieve it with paints or dyes or temporary spells, but this is an inherited trait for Chet - how does that even work? The other, very worrying, possibility, is that Chet is at least partly Paracosmic - as in the extinct, native people of Paracosm. But the three that remain have flat, deer-like noses, and more leaf-shaped ears, with notable spines on their elbows. Despite that, they do have four arms, four fingers, and have the same strange colour patterns. So what is Chet, and if they are somehow paracosmic, how did they end up in this post-apocalyptic prison with the golems?

[cloud9-77]

The element of light

When I was very young, before I started writing the story, it was still developing in my head. When I decided I wanted to write it down, I reckoned that I needed to make a new protagonist, inspired by my many old ones, to front the actual story. But then I needed to choose what type of magic she had:

There are ten elements of magic in the story, and everyone has two elements each, one major and one minor. It is a magic system designed to incorporate all types of power, and all types of people. I knew I wanted my protagonist to be an animal element, key in transformation abilities, but I still needed a second power, and i had never had a protagonist with the element of light.

Why? Because I thought it was boring. Pretty glowy lights and colours and the occasional laser - boring! Not when there’s so much more drama in fire and water, and inventiveness in dark and cold. So why did I actually choose light in the end?

Well other than the fact that I just wanted something slightly different, I did quickly see the appeal of the unwilling, sarcastic narrator who hates everything, blessed with the pretty glowy magic.

[cloud9-77]

The Call to Adventure

I realised I hadn’t posted in a while, yet I still have some cool drawings that I could show off!

This is the pinnacle scene of chapter 1 of my story (see the rest of my account for more details). Here my two protagonists, one from Lower Earth and one from Upper Earth (our human dimension) accidentally encounter each other in the reflection of a puddle-portal. They don’t see each other again until near the very end of the book.

[cloud9-77]

Camellia, head of the Indigo Council, soldier of a fallen kingdom

It has been nearly two thousand years since the fall of the Kingdom of Alstreomeria to its rival, the Kingdom of Kalmia. Little did they know, but one soldier in their midst had found a powerful artefact, one which fused with her soul and rendered her immortal. So even when Alstroemeria was dead and buried, one part of it remained, hidden for centuries.

One of the greatest turning points in the history of Lower Earth was their equivalent of a world war, known to them as the War of the Demons. It was not so much fought between feuding peoples, but against a disease-like curse which rendered a certain people under the complete control of a being who originated from a place far from either dimension of Earth. He was looking for exactly what Camellia held, a piece of pure crystalline power known as the Amarack. But he did not expect it to be held by such a competent individual who had lived for quite so long. Camellia (which most suspect was not her birth name) had lived countless lives in countless places before revealing herself to the world in the War of the Demons. With great effort the war came to an end, and cursed individuals banished from the dimension along with their leader. Camellia went on to form the Indigo Council, a collection of individuals whose power surpassed all others, to help guide and maintain the balance of this world.

But this did little to eradicate Camellia’s history, and her origins from the very first life she led. Although Alstroemeria, its culture and history, was long gone, the Kingdom of Kalmia has stood remarkably well to the test of time. For centuries now, Camellia has been sewing the seeds of its destruction, and it’s about time she saw her plans bloom into action.

[cloud9-77]

Arkady Endling, the last golem in the known universe.

If you thought this lore was constrained to one planet, then you are unfortunately incorrect. To explain even a little about Arkady I need to introduce you to Planet Paracosm.

See, Earth has two dimensions because the existence of life in Upper Earth (reality dimension) caused the formation of the lower world (fantasy dimension). Any planet with complex life can do this, and the only known example is of Paracosm. However, Paracosm completely collapsed a few thousand years ago. Being another, isolated planet from Earth, their beliefs and therefore their magic system evolved differently. In their society, it was possible to remove someone’s ability to use their power, and this resulted in a class system that only allowed those of ‘royal’ bloodline to use their magic at all. Obviously this couldn’t last forever and society completely fell apart. Long story short Lower Paracosm completely imploded, leaving only the smallest handful of individuals left with all the power in their world.

Having that much power eventually led them to Earth, and with a bit of a god complex they started to oversee Lower Earth’s development. They called themselves the Moirai, the fates. What they didn’t like, is when one race, the golems, started to invent magical weapons that, to their predictions, would have led Earth down the exact same route as Paracosm. Not wanting this, they took the few thousand citizens that remained in the wake of the violence amongst themselves and deposited them in the ruins of Lower Paracosm, a land re-named Asphodel.

Most of the golems would have starved, but they did manage to cling on for about 700 years until the Moirai started to deposit other creatures and monsters in Asphodel, and the already dwindling population was utterly demolished. Out of desperation as their numbers fell, the last golems re-created one of the dangerous weapons they were sent to Asphodel because of in the first place, a sword with the ability to cut through magic. But still, one by one, the golems disappeared. To all outside knowledge, there are none left.

Except of course, there is One.

[cloud9-77]

Talia, the human mage - the only known human in Lower Earth

The first book of my series switches between two perspectives. A majority of the story is told by my primary protagonist, Gemma, who is a girl from Lower Earth. The secondary protagonist is Talia, a human from our world, Upper Earth. But unlike us, Talia can use magic.

All living creatures (for the most part, they have to be multicellular for one) have a soul. A soul broadly described as power gathered from Beyond the universe, energy summoned by abstract thought, memory and emotion. However, the nature of tether of that soul to the existing body determines whether or not that energy can be used. Creatures born to the lower dimension are closer to the edge of the universe (think of it as a 4D step away from reality) and that makes their ‘tether’ stronger - less like a string to a balloon and more like a tube that lets air in and out. Using magic, in that way, is like breathing. Let out all your ‘air’ and you die. Humans, being born in the upper dimension, can’t use the ‘lungs’ of their soul. So, you could have the most amazing soul, with more power than you could ever dream, but you can’t use it.

Talia, for reasons unknown, is an exception. One of many, as it turns out, as people like Talia have been hidden from society in attempts to “cure” them. See they may be able to use their magic but it is grossly unstable - like a clogged pipe ready to explode and take out any number of people around them.

Desperate for her freedom, Talia manages to escape the people who kept her captive, and stumbles quite unexpectedly into Gemma’s story.

[cloud9-77]

Emiya Acacia, as swift as can be

In my world, someone who has inherited bird wings is known as an encharmi. Due to the way of genetics, a vast majority of encharmi do not have the wings of a specific bird. You can look at someone’s wings and give an estimate of who their ancestors were from though, for example, judging from waterproofing and shape and colours.

This is Emi, who is a bit of a rarity among the encharmi, for she has very specific wings. Although Emi, as part of a royal household, is very strongly connected to her Kalmian heritage, her mother comes from the realm of Ghendra, to the east. Her mother’s people were historically known to migrate from Ghendra in the south and Equimid in the north, just like the migratory birds their wings are descended from - most notably swifts. This makes Emi very fast and agile in the air, and stellar at long distance flight, a very dangerous sport as players are known to vanish.

But Kalmia is not hugely accepting of outsiders, and the pressures and expectations of her Kalmian heritage leaves Emi very disconnected from her swift-like wings. All that is left for her is this sport - and also maybe the pretty athlete from the Western Kingdom who definitely isn’t her girlfriend what are you talking about.

[cloud9-77]

When you’re the short one in the friendship group

Our protagonist, Gem, in the middle here attends a school for those with dangerous and unpredictable powers. Different magics attend different classes, and since everyone has two magics each (one major and one minor) people find themselves in two regular class-sets. These three characters are all minor light elements, which is a rather common second power, resulting in a very chaotic and overcrowded classroom.

Brooke (on the left) and Samuel (on the right) are Gem’s two light elemental classroom friends. Samuel is a bit monotoned and consistently tired, whilst Brooke has a tendency to greet everyone with the energy of a long awaited reunion every morning.

Nymphs like Brooke and Samuel are much taller than humanoids like Gemma. I like to think that Nymph boys pretend they’re 7ft in the same way human boys pretend they’re 6ft. Brooke is a little tall for a female nymph, and if you include the height of her horns, she’s over 2m high. Samuel meanwhile, is a little short for a nymph, at a mediocre 6’4”

[cloud9-77]

This is the Princess Dahlia of Kalmia. Chay kay cha Quyllur’p’Sonkisa Acoctili.

Lower Earth is a parallel world to our own known world, Upper Earth. As a result there are countless cultures and peoples inspired by those that truly exist in reality, and their folklore and mythology - important word there is inspired. Whilst my protagonist and her culture stems from folklore of the British Isles (because that is where I am from and so can best represent it in a culturally sensitive and relevant way), we also encounter plenty of other peoples throughout the story.

A majority of the more distant friends and fiends we encounter come from the great realm of Kalmia. Kalmia spans across the Middle Continent, stretching from an Upper Earth equivalent of west Africa (the furthest being countries such as western Nigeria and northern Cameroon) right over South/Central-America (as south as Bolivia, as north as Puerto Rico, and as west as the Galapagos). It is said that Kalmia was once two great empires, ruled by the King of the Sands (the east) and the King of the Mountains (the west). Their union formed a realm which in modern day is called the Kingdom of Kalmia. Their law states that only the original Kings have the right to rule this empire, but that they reincarnate down the generations of their family.

Depicted, as said before, is Dahlia. She is supposedly the reincarnation of the King of the Sands. Everyone knows that reincarnation, whilst maybe possible, does not work in the way the royal family say it does, and Dahila is just a descendent of monarchs. But tradition dictates she will be the future ruler of Kalmia. If her furious people don’t kill her first.

Above, I also introduced Dahlia in Eremi, one of the many native languages of Kalmia, and the one most frequently used. Eremi is a fictional language I invented, and has roots in a number of American languages, from Spanish and Portuguese, to Quechuan, Aymara and Nahuatl. Inspired by quipu recording on string, Eremi script is written in long lines, with many letters being 2D representations of physical knots.