[ART] The Prophet and The Loss (cover image for in progress fanfic)

[Anders48]

Created with GIMP 2 and inkscape from a base image located here. Copyright for base image © 1899 by Baptiste-Paul Grimaud.

Remember that annoying thread I started checks notes two months ago? Welcome to the end result! and by end result I mean half-way result, because at this rate it's probably going to be another two months before I have anything complete to put out there.

Meet Clan Inanna.* They're the clan that didn't so much 'go off the rails' as 'go off the rails and ram into a sheer cliff face at 250 mph'. They made some questionable and frankly baffling decisions during the Dragon-Cubi war; when the consequences of those decisions finally caught up to them, not everyone was sorry to see the clan go.

But as it turned out the clan really did 'go'. Unbeknownst to their fellows, unbeknownst to the dragons, and even unbeknownst to the Phoenix Oracles (at least as far as anyone can tell), some visionaries among them made their way to a world still ruled by humans**. And now, their descendants are coming back.

*Emotions: Joy, Guilt. They were considered something of a 'black sheep' offshoot of the Matrons of Light, back in the days when there were multiple Matrons of Light and the Cubi had the time and energy to care about such things.

**And it's not a backwater universe either, even if the local civilization isn't actually any more advanced than Furrae's. On a good day, it is (was? will be?) as far from that as you can get while still being comprehensible to Furraean natives, or even to the local humans. On a bad day it's much, much farther. Naturally, the people returning to Furrae have lived through more than their fair share of bad days.

[Anders48]

On a less IC note, I'm planning on using this thread for both releasing images that I'll eventually use for the fic (For instance, I'm also working on a map of The League of the Nine Jurisdictions, a country that's as close as you can get to a 'human nation' in a world without humans.) I'll also be posting from my backlog of partial outlines, in universe documents from various sources, notes-to-myself about themes, &c as I try to work out what parts to keep and what parts to drop. Since several aspects of the story are in a state of flux right now, feedback is welcome and highly encouraged.

[Anders48]

To summarize what I have planned in terms of what's going on 'under the hood':

-the central idea I'm loosely going for is interaction between Furrae and 'Earth', which as you might have guessed from the first post ends up being a weird inversion of how otherworld fiction generally goes. Of the two it's ultimately Furrae that comes off as relatively stable and comprehensible in spite of its many faults, while Earth is this place where the relatively rational (if unfair) rules that govern Furrae seem to break down completely, resulting in constant bizarre shifts in the nature of time, history, and even geography. Or possibly that's mainly a side effect of whatever methods are being used to access earth. Or even just the fact that most of the people who go to earth have ample reason to completly distort the truth in order to paint themselves in a better light, while almost everyone who arrives from there ends up being heavily traumatized to the point it threatens their grasp on reality in general.

-building on that, the other loose theme I had was recovery: Whatever it is that happened them, most of Clan Inanna has already hit rock bottom hard by the time they arrive in Furrae (and become properly accessible to the narrative). As a result, in the narrative proper they don't really have anywhere to go but up. It's a long, deeply imperfect process and there's a lot to recover from, but almost all of the clan proper leaves the events of the fic in a better place than they started. Even if that isn't necessarily saying much.