Location Post - Eyra

A Location Post, the first of it's kind.
Sorry, it's Hannah. Hi. It's also my second post today, but the other one was short, so, oh well.

So, anyway, a Location Post. It's like a Character Post, but describing a fictional Location in any of our books, such as a country in general, or maybe something more specific, like a camp, a town, or a village.

Eyra

(Ai-rah)

Known as the home of the elves

Resides in the Seventh dimension

Now, Eyra is basically a medieval country, so as you can imagine, helicopters aren't very common. So I haven't been able to get a good picture of the entire landscape, though I'm working on it.  For now, you'll have to settle for a map that some kind elf sketched out for me. She told me to please realize that not everything is to scale, and this is only a section of the northwest coast. However, that is the part we'll be using most is the northwest coast, so it ought to work.

I've made it large scale so that you can see it better:

This map has a lot of history.
 

Silennoe Palace

The Silennoe [SYE-len-no] mountain range, for instance, has been the long-time home of royalty. The castle (wittily named Silennoe Palace) is in the foothills, on the actual Mt. Silennoe. This mountain is not the tallest of the mountain range, since life on an elvish Mt. Kilimanjaro would be pretty difficult, even if you're an elf. If not for the altitude, the cold, and the thin oxygen, there would be the journey up and down the steep slope, made worse by the fact that there is snow everywhere.

Silennoe Palace is rather like a community. Although the currently-reigning monarchs do reside there, there is also several hundred servants and soldiers. Soldiers' families are also welcome to stay, which adds to the head count by a large quantity.

Darkvale - your typical enter-at-your-own-peril forest. Every good fantasy story needs one. Though a path has been cleared through the woods to the peninsula on the other side, it is still not advised for travellers to take a shortcut through the, excuse the overused dramatic description, treacherous woods. You see, there's a terrible infestation of snakes in the forest. Not like a big pit of snakes, or knots of vipers scattered all along the path. And no, the ground is not just one heaving mass of serpents. Actually, the snakes average ten to fifteen feet tall, and are around seven feet in circumference. They are big (understatement) and lethal, and Darkvale is their favorite breeding ground. 

It is highly recommended for any visitors to instead go around Darkvale, following a path along the ocean, in order to get to the peninsula, if they really want to get there that badly. Really, the peninsula is just a small, inhospitable, rocky, deserted chunk of land that's about forty feet long or so.

In the experience of those of us who have ignored the warning, the journey through Darkvale on horseback will take two to three days, allowing for night stops, and assuming you don't have to backtrack or escape very large serpents.

A lot more cheerful in comparison to Darkvale.

Merewoods: this area is unlabeled, but if you look at the area around Darkvale, you'll see a bunch little things that look like tents. I'll get to those in a minute. Around the tents, in a cresent shape, is a bunch of woods, thinner than the rest of Darkvale. This is the Merewoods. 

It's a lot more cheerful in comparison to Darkvale.

Also, the wide clearing between Merewoods and Darkvale is a common campground for Aiken's Gang (which explains the tents).

Aesselve and Faeles: The sea to the left and the ocean to the right, respectively (provided I haven't mixed up my lefts and rights again). I have no picture of these, besides the map.

Across the Aesselve sea, you may find a country called Ente, the land of the dwarves. But that's another long, long story, another book actually, so wait on that one. There have been no new countries or major continents discovered in the Faeles Ocean to date. If there are, I'll let you know. 

Now onto the two major cities in the northwest coast, apart from Silennoe...

Undunah: a well-off city, in which resides several lords, ladies, and other well-known elvish "celebrities". It was one of the first cities settled in upper Eyra. It has a fortress that has been built in case of an attack against Undunah, in the event of which the citizens of the city will have a place in which to barricade themselves.

Timarae: this city is not as posh as Undunah. It's a bit more rural, and there are fewer famous or important elves that reside there. Timarae is a bit like Bree from Lord of the Rings. The building are small, slap-together shacks, and the fortress and outer wall are less durable than Undunah's. However, that doesn't make it any worse of a city. Several good elves have come out of Timarae. It was Aiken's hometown, for example, and Lina was raised there for a time.

Silola River. It's a river. There isn't much of a history on Silola, though I'll see what I can find.

The Armoury: an armory is a building specially used to house weapons and armor of different kinds. This armory is a favorite place of Lina's, for sentimental reasons, among others. This was the place she got her first real sword. I'm getting a bit tired of saying it, but that's a long story too. Suffice it to say that The Armoury is an iconic place for my characters.

I may have to make another post later concerning all of these things, making information updates, and adding anything I may have missed. Please remember that I know next to nothing about geography, and for all I know the map could be incorrect and it's actually impossible for a mountian range to be next to a beach. I suppose for now I'll just trust the artist and say that this is how things look in upper Eyra. All this information has been collected from various sources around Eyra, and I assume that the information is reliable.

Left-over little tidbits of minor interest:

*The current rulers of Eyra are King Aleron and Queen Cyra. Their children are Prince Laserian, Princess Adhara, Princess Sundeep, Princess Nyree, and Princess Fern. 

*Above Ente, to the left of Eyra, is a country called Orphna, in which live humans in medieval times. Some of these humans are unaware of the existence of an elvish country.

*Aesselve and Faeles can be unscrambled to read elves sea and elf sea respectively.

*The name of the elf artist who drew this map can be translated as Ohana Lost-tide.

Feedback is welcome. If you would like to know more about Eyra, or an elvish city in particular, just leave a comment. If you would like to tell me that this was just way too long and boring... well, I guess I can take it, so, again, go ahead and say something.

And to Trinity: Four posts in a row! Booyah!