ok more nuclear lore but this time its way more of a crackpot theory lol
tl;dr, my personal idea is that the books take place in what used to be france/western europe.
now if you look at these two maps provided, you can see there is a slight resemblance to real life IF on the guardians map, north points to the right
its not perfect, but its still interesting. the st aegolius canyons are the swiss alps, the everwinter sea is the english channel, and the beyond the beyond is spain/portugal. the differences in biomes could be explained by nuke-induced climate change.
again. i freely admit this is a stretch based on a reach, but the reason i champion it is that it would place the kingdom of ambala roughly in the same area as Paris. as i said in my original ask, i choose to believe that the reason that ambala had a particular abundance of flecks, and that the owls there suffered birth defects, is that it was ground zero for one of the bombs. if it used to be Paris, that would certainly help back that up. theres also other connections (the castle where trader mags gets her stained glass could be the palace of versailles for example), but theres still holes. like, where did the sea of hoolemere come from? is it actually a water-filled crater from some other impact/calamity? or maybe sea level rise?









