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The east half of the new map may be ready to photograph…when it’s printed, you’ll notice some tributaries you didn’t see before (hadn’t needed them before) and some towns, strongholds, etc. The west half is still being worked on. The southwest corner has acquired another range of mountains.
There are still some problems that some of you are no doubt going to comment on. Well…I’ve gone over to the Dark Side of saying there’s more than one cartographer involved (including Old Blind Joe, who managed to lose the original master map, and Bossyboots, who insisted on using the wrong set of notes at one point, and Silly Lizzy, who keeps wanting to do it in color *right now*. ) Someday, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise, there may be a perfect, definitive, agrees with everything in all the books even when they don’t agree with each other master map, but this is not it. I was hoping it would be, but..no.
Meanwhile, amuse yourselves guessing what goes on in that so-far-unrevealed SW corner. Do you think it might contain any of the following: a secret valley where paladin horses grow up, a cave with a hero’s body in it waiting for a Call, a herd of unicorns, griffons, dragons, some heretofore undescribed magical beast, a Dark Lord, a land connection to Old Aare, robbers’ dens, caravans and caravansaries, magelords, one or more elvenhome kingdoms, one or more domains of rockfolk, horse nomads, relatives of those people Luap met in Kolobia, iynisin, the answer to all mysteries…? Or something else entirely? Who lives there?
I do know, having reached a critical point of Book III, and at the end of Kings you will have met someone from there although he won’t talk about it. Yet. (Actually you have long met someone who’s seen it, but he won’t talk about it. You now know he’s hiding something, but he’s still hiding it from me, too. Stubborn character!)
Comment by Jim DeWitt — June 22, 2010 @ 12:06 pm
I’ll eagerly and gratefully accept any combination of one or more of the above.
Comment by Margaret — June 22, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
ooohhhh, a secret valley of Paladin horses sounds intriguing. Would there be any human caregivers there? Maybe the spirits of paladins past…or perhaps some obscure branch of horse-loving elves??
Maybe its really a secret valley of unicorns, who sometimes produce horn-less offspring …. (amusing myself with the idea of a paladin colt/filly as an ugly duckling)
Comment by APagan — June 23, 2010 @ 6:08 am
So many fascinating possibilities!! Maybe the secret valley is a center of evil and Paks and Co will go in to clean house; thus lessening the power of such evils as Liart and Achrya 🙂 Or it could be the valley of the High Lord, kind of like Mt. Zion, Holy ground where only a chosen few can enter and return… 🙂 Thank you for tidbits that allow the mind to wander 😉
on a bit of an outside question, i was wondering if anyone has considered making the Deed in a movie? part of me would love to see it on the big screen, but the other part cringes when i think about some of the very bad adaptations that have been excreted from the movie biz (Eragon comes to mind as a recent example) i would be okay with it as long as you, Mrs. Moon, had some major say; i know you would keep the sanctity of the story 🙂
Comment by elizabeth — June 23, 2010 @ 8:50 am
It’s been thought of, and optioned, but hasn’t progressed very far. Options often come to nothing, alas.
Where you have enough mountains, you will inevitably have valleys difficult of access–and yet known to a few. One of the delights of the internet (plus PBS at times) is finding new landscapes to match old maps…or maps one has never seen.
As I play with that formerly blank corner of the map, and try to relate it to other areas, I find it “speaking” to me of its history over thousands of years. We aren’t yet to millions…
Comment by elizabeth — June 23, 2010 @ 8:53 am
Oh–the scanning problem has become a little easier, since the one place I knew of has a branch office not that many miles closer, but much easier of access than a left turn into a tiny parking area downtown. YAY! And the branch office also has a large-format scanner (for which my 24 x 36 inch map is small.) YAY again.
Though I shudder to think what the file size of the full-size scan at a print-reproducible pixel depth will be…will I have to buy a new computer to handle it?
Comment by Matthew Walker — June 23, 2010 @ 9:53 am
Intriguing… Someone we’ve already met, eh? With a secret. Hmmm. That doesn’t narrow it down much… I suspect our friendly thief though. Yay for Arvid.
Comment by elizabeth — June 23, 2010 @ 10:39 am
Arvid go over the mountains for anything but Thieves’ Guild business? Well, maybe. But as far as I know (so far, that is) there’s no Thieves’ Guild business in that quarter.
I wouldn’t say “no thieves.”
You’ve met several people who might have. At least one of them has. Your choice to consider whether someone from Fintha (bordering the area on the north) or Aarenis (bordering the area on the east) is more likely to have crossed some considerable mountains to see what was on the other side.
Comment by Adam Baker — June 23, 2010 @ 1:00 pm
Well, I suppose Kieri or Aliam Halveric would both be viable possibilities due to their amount of travel. There’s the as to yet unknown portion of Kieri’s childhood that could have at some point ended up in the southwest. We know very little about Aliams travels, both before, and after Kieri joined him.
It could be Arcolin, as he’s from Aerenis, and except for some minor info, so far is almost as unknown as Kieri’s young years.
Beyond that, there’s a whole slew of characters I could think of. How about the Marshal General? I’d imagine it would be possible that she could have been here. We know even less about her than Arcolin.
Btw, I finished rereading OoF last week, and it was just as good as the first time. I tried to pick up on things that I may have missed the first time, but I just got into reading it, and before I knew it I was done again. I was strongly tempted to flip the book over and start it again, but then I decided to pull out my Vatta’s War books, and re-read those.
Comment by Daniel Glover — June 23, 2010 @ 5:06 pm
My vote is for Master Oakhallow since I’m not hearing many hints from the good author that he’s somehow mixed up with the issues to the north of Lyona he’s way closer to the south anyway.
Comment by elizabeth — June 24, 2010 @ 8:41 am
Adam: the entire unknown part of Kieri’s life was spent across the Easter Ocean (I know I said that *somewhere*) as a captive…he returned to this continent by ship, thanks to the sailors not tossing him overboard when he was discovered. Kieri will be as surprised as everyone else when he finds out what’s going on over there.
Comment by elizabeth — June 24, 2010 @ 8:43 am
Master Oakhallow’s in SE Tsaia…he was expected to show up in a chapter I was working on a few weeks ago, but something else happened instead. He will definitely show up, though. I don’t know where he came from, though, before he got to Brewersbridge…I don’t even know if he was there before the town (hence his Grove being almost “within” it) or if he chose a more populous site.
Comment by Adam Baker — June 24, 2010 @ 10:13 am
I guess I should know that. Its mentioned in OoG that the elves would have sensed his presence if he’d been closer, so it would stand to reason that he wouldnt have been in the southwestern area.