#daosa

[saskiavalentineapologist]

20 and 21?

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

ok im going to talk about Sacrament because im obsessed

there's only like....six? named characters in sacrament. one is a god, the rest of them die (including one who is a horse). this initially was something i wobbled back and forth on this for awhile before i realized that there being only four named human characters is the point. it shows how isabella is so painfully isolated. there's no one she can turn to besides dianne, and when you're that isolated any attention (even if it's not genuine) feels like a revelation.

in the first draft of sacrament i included the name of the person who opened the gates for isabella but i took his name out because again, no one else has names and That's The Point. His name used to be Ezekiel, and Mother Dianne yells this and YES it is in reference to the "expert card shuffler teaches you how to shuffle cards" mbmbam asmr bit. im a big fucking nerd

Isabella's visions were so hard to write because along the way Dianne is interpreting them wrong or misinterpreting them and so i had to write a vision that had a correct meaning, but also had ambiguous enough meaning that it could be twisted in a different way. that's why there's only a few in there.

the magpies do mean something. there is a magpie rhyme popularized by a british tv show. they do not correspond with that rhyme. they correspond with the original, older rhyme. "five for heaven, six for hell." they show the best and worst outcomes for isabella

Chapter 3 was the first thing i ever wrote for sacrament and i wrote it in its entirety before i moved on to anything else. that's saying something because ch 3 is the most fucked up out of all of them. oops

several times throughout the piece, dianne makes references to isabella being as malleable as clay and that culminates in ch 10 when isabella is getting her brains fucked out and is talking about how dianne is the potter dusting her sin from her and hollowing her out and pouring her love into her and making her into something new. i go apeshit for that scene tbqh

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

i've thought about this.

daosa, i want as an animated tv show because i think they would stay truer to the designs i have in my head for these characters if it were animated. i would also accept a netflix original show.

sacrament, i want as a h/b/o movie that shows the sex scenes in all their fucked up glory.

thank you!!

[saskiavalentineapologist]

let’s take a look at my top three favorite ocs at this moment in time (it changes)

Jubilee, Reyana, and Teirsym (not necessarily in order)

two of them are powerful women with potent magic and red color schemes who command respect and adoration from the people around them, but are deeply insecure. They both have a family member they would let the world burn for, and they’re deeply loyal to the people they have chosen as “theirs.”

and then we have a gay disaster tiefling lmao

[saskiavalentineapologist]

i am pleased to announce that it is 1 am and i am still up bc im working on daosa again

im in a fiction workshop this semester and there was this one story that was so What Fantasy Should Be that i was inspired to get back into mine, and now there’s 5 more chapters planned to fix the problems it had and everything’s getting rearranged bc i can’t leave the first book be apparently

[saskiavalentineapologist]

oh hey! i'm curious about your in-world legends if you don't mind dropping one 👀

the one i’ve been working on recently is the legend of Arhyana the person and the founding of Arhyana as a country (arhyana is the southernmost kingdom in the Vhiernan Kingdoms, and is primarily desert). it ties in with the religion of Misendo, the chaos god, and also explains the bitter hatred between Aalzho and Arhyana.

it got long oops

so basically, as the creation myth in Misendo worship goes, the god Misendo was born from the darkness, and proceeded to make the world and a whole host of spirits. eventually, he grew bored with the rigid approach of the spirits, and made Man. he eventually grew bored with them too, and altered them so they became more flexible, more easily changed (basically explaining magic and accelerated adaptation, as well as dormant/ascended)

after a time, misendo grew lonely, so he sent his spirits down to find him someone to share eternity with. the spirits found a woman, but her name has been lost to the sands. he appeared to her in a human form, but she wasn’t interested. when he showed his true self, she showed interest, and over the course of a year he managed to woo her. they had a daughter together, and her name was Arhyana. 

(at this time, the southern kingdom was under the control of Aalzho–the eastern kingdom–and was just referred to as “southern Aalzho”)

Misendo went back to his home plane to tend to the world, and Arhyana and her mother lived somewhat normal lives. Arhyana began preaching the word of misendo as soon as she could, and as she grew, that message transformed into rebelling against their Aalzhan overlords. As arhyana grew, she became beloved by the people, for they had been under aalzhan control for a long, long time, and wanted their independence. 

one day, when Arhyana and her mother were traveling between towns, they were ambushed by Aalzhan forces trying to put an end to the treasonous and blasphemous messages Arhyana was spreading. Arhyana’s mother was killed, but Arhyana escaped.

The legend goes that as Arhyana was escaping, she was taken to the chaos plane where her father was furious at the Aalzhans for the death of his love. He was ranting and raging, vowing to wash the world clean in lava and blood. Arhyana talked him down, telling him that their people were good people, and that they didn’t deserve to be destroyed along with the rest of the world.

because of Arhyana’s compassion, Misendo gave her divine knowledge that allowed her to write a book that detailed the rules of the chaos religion (which is basically learning to roll with life’s punches and learning to thrive in the uncertainty), and also laid out plans for temples that–if built in a specific way and were never tainted by blood spilt in anger–would serve as refuges for people when the end times came (after the war, arhyana added on to the book, inserting rules about dueling and feast days, and these additions are called The Mortal Additions).

Arhyana returned to the mortal world, and the people rallied to her side, and so the war for Arhyana’s independence began. 

Arhyana served as one of the chief military generals, leading with divine strategy given to her by her father. the war lasted a long time, and they almost lost when Aalzho was planning a surprise attack, but a spy in the aalzhan forces ran three days and three nights across the sands in order to warn Arhyana herself of the attack, and so they were ready for the attack when it came (this gave birth to the festival in Arhyana called “The Running of the Sands” which is basically a race along the route the spy took)

The war ended when Arhyana and the religious leader of Aalzho at the time dueled to the death in front of their forces. Arhyana won the duel and vanquished the Aalzhan leader, but the Aalzhan forces made to attack her anyway. Her soldiers rallied to her defense, and the Aalzhan forces soon retreated. (Arhyana later had the remains of the Aalzhan leader shipped back to Aalzho so they could be interred with the rest of the leaders of Aalzho, as is their custom)

The war was won, the country was free, and the people named the country after Arhyana in her honor.

Arhyana continued preaching the word of misendo until the day she died, when she was ~45. basically, one day she was preaching, and stopped with an odd look on her face. she thanked the gathered crowd, apologized for the inconvenience, and told them she was to rejoin her father. immediately afterwards, she dropped dead.

Her body was set out for the birds to feast on, as is custom, and when her bones were picked clean, they were dipped in gold and are now the most holy relics in Arhyanian culture. 

Arhyana lived about 75-100 years before the story starts, so a lot of her legend has been exaggerated. for example, some versions of the tale say that she had blood red skin and glowing eyes, but most scholars believe that the red skin is from the red clay that some people in Arhyana put on their skin to protect themselves from the sun.

so!! that’s the southern kingdom’s most famous person. 

Thank you for the ask!!! i really like some of the history of my world, and i’m really proud of this legend

[saskiavalentineapologist]

i found a thing on pinterest and every time i look at it im in awe bc it’s like “ok who looked into my head, got a sense of Reyana as a character, and wrote a poem”

it’s this:

like....yoly shit

[saskiavalentineapologist]

ok ok SO i know you said your languages weren't that developed yet but I would really love to hear about them, do you know basic histories yet? Any real-world inspirations? What's word order look like (or are there inflections so you can move the word order around?) Any other broad-stroke grammar stuff you've got so far?

i will answer this to the best of my abilities!!! as i said, they are under construction but i’ve got some basic stuff done with them

under the cut bc jesus i had more than i thought

vhiernish- i haven’t gotten an alphabet drawn out for it, but i want it to be modeled a bit after the arabic language?? just because that’s what language i’ve taken and i really like it ok it’s cool

so written right to left...as far as sentence structure, adjectives before nouns definitely, i’m still working out some other stuff.

the plural marker is changing the last vowel/s to “AE” which might not be practical but it’s stuck so far?? like... they/them when talking about one person is zhii/zhiiz (zh pronounced like the “S” in “treasure”) and they/them when talking about multiple people is zhae/zhaez

(other pronouns)

it’s a very flowery and drawn out, kind of soft language?? there’s not a lot of hard stops. like....here’s the “letters” (some letters are written differently whether they’re singular or with a friend. like “a” is a letter, and “aa” is a completely different letter)

the letters are totally subject to change tbh

the difference between “rh” and “r” is that “rh” designates a rolled “r” sound. 

but as you can see, there’s no “p” or “b” or a few other letters, but they do have a few sounds we don’t have, like “zh” and stuff.

like one thing that arabic had that i liked was different letters for “th” and “dh” which is basically...”th” is like “tooth” and “dh” is like “they.” both technically “th” sound but marked differently because technically it IS a different sound.

and then the vowels are grouped by what sound they actually make, so singular “e” is “eh” but “ii” is “ee” and so on

i think spelling in this language is pretty easy because it’s spelled exactly like it sounds. the only tricky part is distinguishing between the short “a” and the long “aa”

as for Palish...all i really know about it is that i want it to have TONS of hard stops. i want it to be a harsh language. but that’s about it

[saskiavalentineapologist]

As far as ascended beings in daosa, are they similar to/inspired by Ramtha’s school of enlightenment? In that belief system, there are ascended masters (Ramtha, aristotle, jesus, to name a few) who you can “channel” for guidance about how to reach an enlightened state and ascend to a higher plane of existence

oh domini, i think you vastly overestimate things in regards to the daosa universe

...gosh i actually feel a little embarrassed now. maybe i should change the name?? who knows.

anyway, ascended beings...they’re basically really big monsters who used to once be people?? it’s complicated

basically the magic system has this blip in it where people’s magic is working overtime to keep them alive, and their magic adapts them to the environment around them when the environment is especially harsh. well, ascended beings are when that magic adapts people to magic itself.

those people are called dormant ascended, they absorb any magic they come into contact with, but that magic has no way of being released, so it mutates them and eventually when their own innate magic can’t keep the foreign magic in check any longer it’s released in one painful, violent burst that is referred to as the “ascension process” and it basically turns people into really big really dangerous monsters

(old art, forgive me)

this is the first ascended i ever conceptualized and she’s high on my list of “ascended i would never like to meet”

so yeah!! that’s the ascended beings

[saskiavalentineapologist]

ok so i’m in the mood to talk about some of my daosa characters

send me some asks?? anything, really. ask me anything about the world, the characters, anything

specific stuff you can ask about under the cut:

characters:

Emira

Raz

Faera 

Kelren 

Rilari 

Zara 

Reyana

Myna

Sedira

Tisiri

regions:

golden isles

pale island

mezzon

nordiin

lirhenii

arhyana 

aalzho

religions:

The silver book

the chaos god

the astral pantheon

the refracted ones

languages (warning: underdeveloped but there):

palish

vhiernish

magic:

dormant ascended

ascended beings

the nine schools of magic

misc:

heroes

legends

creation myths

the tea game

currency

the calendar