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Description

'Glasstown itself was not named for its glassworks, nor even its many and beautiful glass windows, though it has since acquired these things, and exulted in their aptness, but for the river Glass, at which the earliest settlers had marvelled for its clarity and purity. Today the Glass is hidden beneath stone and brickwork throughout almost the whole city, and a good thing too as it has been fouled by the effluence of a city of three million souls, and now flows no more than a trickle.'

Put this together to help me flesh out the world of Chambers, a setting I'm writing some shorts in with an eye to expanding them into a longer work. The elevator pitch is 'fantasy war of 1812'. Set in a USA-like former colonial nation on an as-yet incompletely explored continent, Chambers is based around the exploits of Gren Leanwood, a lawyer in the city of Glasstown, as tensions rise with the old country and new technology - specifically, 'rotary pistols' - rubs up against existing laws and interests.

The setting attempts to combine alternate history and metafictional influences - specifically, the juvenalia of the Brontë sisters, which furnished the names of the Glasstown Confederacy, the *Atlantic islands, and Angria, the dominant part of the Angoran Empire. In line with secondary world low fantasy like the work of KJ Parker, magic may have taken place in this world long ago but there's very little trace of it in the present day.

Some notes:

- Unlike our USA, the Confederacy has here effectively reached its maximum possible size; bounded by muscular tribal confederacies to the West, the Westron Bay Company lands to the North, and the Culman Gap, a near-impassable area of dense forest and mangroves, to the south. As the Algoran Empire has continued to grow, former trading partners have been swallowed up or strongarmed into exclusivity with the Empire, imperiling Confederate trade. Lanches (think French-Spanish Lancaster) is happy to support the thorn in its rival's side, but can only safely do so via its possession of Gondal; thousands of miles from Glasstown across the Angoran-controlled Camelian.

- Some hundred years or so prior to the current day, Angria invaded and divided its neighbour Alcona with other regional powers, shipping its populace West to slave in the colonies. Slavery has since been outlawed but the Alconan population of the Westrons remains in many cases as bondsmen in various coercive contracts.

- Glasstown, despite its separation from the Angoran Empire, retains most of its legal system including Algoran common law, a sprawling and near-incomprehensible knot of case law and precedents which the civic legislature can shape but not entirely overrule. Lawyers generally belong to companies called chambers, agreeing to share the profits of cases in return for the chamber assuming responsibility in the case of malpractice. Chambers' dues can be hefty and practicing solo varies from complicated to actually illegal state-to-state. As such, one's position in a chamber strongly determines how much money you can cream off. In theory, Confederate chambers continue to pay dues to their parent chambers in Eastrick, but given the political situation have in some cases been withholding dues for sixty years and are in arrears to many times the size of their net worth. After all, what are the Angorans going to do, reconquer the entire Confederacy?

- Native states of the Hespereides have adapted to varying degrees to Anemoidean weaponry - most prominently the Tashwehr (think Prussian Aztecs) and the Sattanack. The Hatten consider themselves a step above other tribal groups by virtue of having their own legends about coming from a continent across the waters. While there isn't much to separate them physically or culturally from the other peoples of the Hactrean grasslands, Angoran anthropologists argue that 'Hatten' is cognate to 'Hetchak', and darkly prophesy a similar fate for the Glasstowners who they see as similarly having 'gone native'.
- The dominant religion of the western Anamoides is Elamotism. The Cantish Kirk (Church of the Creed) is very roughly Protestant while the Nominae Kirk (Church of the Name) is approximately Catholic. Both agree on the broad outlines: About 1800 years ago, the whole world was ruled by the Sak Eleam* ('sack ee-LAY-am'), a sort of Greek-Roman-Hebrew hybrid. This included, according to the Kirk if not the historical record, the land currently called Angria. There, God (Elamot - 'EE-lam-ott') became flesh (think Gnostic emanations rather than full incarnation) in the form of Patherick of Netheres, who led a revolt against the Sak Eleam, driving them from the temple at Beam with a shillelagh. The Sak Eleam returned in force, captured Patherick, and hanged him. At this point, Elamotists believe, Elamot intervened by turning Patherick into a tree, and two trees twisted together has become a key symbol of the faith. The Sak Eleam attempted to cut down the tree, but everyone who tried found his eyes fell out of his head. At this point they found a blind man and tricked him into cutting down the tree, whereupon a flood of blood sap emitted from the tree and swept the Sak Eleam out of Angria. It probably didn't happen quite this way. In any case, since the Sak Eleam were the rulers of the world, their sin transferred to everyone alive and was passed down to their offspring - the only way to not be judged guilty of murder when you die is to submit to the authority of Elamot.
- The Nominae Kirk further argues you must be subject to the authority of the Hipparch, today based in Vallisclausa in Lanches, who has inherited the spiritual kingship from Rader, leader of Patherick's apostles. The Cantish Kirk says only Rader held spiritual authority and it died with him; Rader sits at the right hand of Sacred Patherick in heaven, with Samkar, the first Elamotish king of Angria, at his left. The king of Angria is considered to be the spiritual head of the people as well as the secular, boosted by his possession of the Knot, the largest surviving piece of the True Tree, now worn smooth by millions of pilgrims touching it and built into the base of his throne. The king of Lanches had a whole branch of the True Tree but he chopped it up and sold the pieces to raise funds for a war and now only has some crumbling pieces of bark. Objects made from the Tree occupy a strange place in the religion; simultaneously sacred and sinful, they are believed to be able to do miracles but their creation was theoretically blasphemy. There are also various alleged vials of the sap/dried blood and the most devoted and/or idiotic occasionally try to ingest some.

- Several hundred years ago, the Grand Heresiarch Sperser, who is sort of Calvin crossed with Marcion crossed with Satan, attempted and failed at a Reformation, which argued that there was only one tree; Elamot merged Patherick with the tree and his spirit left it when it was felled, so there is no such thing as relics; all men are not imputed with the sin of deicide but fall based on their own free will; Elamot predestines all men to eternal life or damnation as a simple consequence of his omniscience (the Cantish Kirk position is that the saved are predestined to life but the damned had a legitimate choice; the Nominae position that some are hellbound from birth but everyone else has free will to accept or reject Elamot). Being accused of being a Sperserite is essentially to be accused of atheism.

- Sefia Ma and its nearby states, including the self-governing holy city of Qard, follow Tal Suk, a prophet-led desert religion very useful to Glasstown since it holds that Trade is sacred, since it represents trust between men to give and receive, and is a model of the divine relationship; you sacrifice to Temos and he is always faithful to give something back, even if you don't recognise it. Hospitality is also sacred; the traveller in the desert is a type of Temos - will you let him in? - but also a type of the individual walking through the world. You must be Temos to the traveller and the traveller must be Temos to you, which is also trade.

- Ashura, a sprawling, divided continent being nibbled away at by various colonial powers, is the setting of the second story I'm working on in the universe, Stumps. Despite ending up on opposite sides of the world-island, the Ashuran and Angrian peoples ultimately derive from the same long-vanished empire of Angusha, whose capitol city was laid waste by precursors to the modern Hetchaks as they expanded from the steppe. This event has been preserved in the diaspora's cultural memory long after the city itself was forgotten in the form of the game of Cricket, or Kariket, where teams take turns symbolically undoing history by trying to save the city from destruction. To this day the Mahantrasja of the Ras Ashura's government is known as the Wicket (what can I say, I said I was dabbling in metafiction here). The old god of Angusha, Zeyis Pater, who seemingly turned against his people when Kariket burned, has been forgotten in Ashura and literally demonised in the West as the imp Zwee Peter, who is reduced to putting a burning ember in the socks of wicked children.

- For all that they have virtually become the mythical embodiment of ancient evil in Elamotism, the Sak Eleam are still just about going; they're just called the Rab Harut now and are clinging on to a little peninsula on the Eastern end of the Carnelian.

* Even though it's quite offensively clear that the Sak Eleam were completely into Elamot (their name meaning the, er, Empire of Elamot), official Elamotish cant is that the Sak Eleam worshipped false gods. There is no evidence that the Sak Eleam's empire ever reached Angria, let alone the Hesperides, being almost completely confined to a ring around the Carnelian (despite Fomenko-esque charlatan historians arguing that actually it ringed the 'Camelian' sea, which is taken to be the entire *Atlantic).

Description

'Glasstown itself was not named for its glassworks, nor even its many and beautiful glass windows, though it has since acquired these things, and exulted in their aptness, but for the river Glass, at which the earliest settlers had marvelled for its clarity and purity. Today the Glass is hidden beneath stone and brickwork throughout almost the whole city, and a good thing too as it has been fouled by the effluence of a city of three million souls, and now flows no more than a trickle.'

Put this together to help me flesh out the world of Chambers, a setting I'm writing some shorts in with an eye to expanding them into a longer work. The elevator pitch is 'fantasy war of 1812'. Set in a USA-like former colonial nation on an as-yet incompletely explored continent, Chambers is based around the exploits of Gren Leanwood, a lawyer in the city of Glasstown, as tensions rise with the old country and new technology - specifically, 'rotary pistols' - rubs up against existing laws and interests.

The setting attempts to combine alternate history and metafictional influences - specifically, the juvenalia of the Brontë sisters, which furnished the names of the Glasstown Confederacy, the *Atlantic islands, and Angria, the dominant part of the Angoran Empire. In line with secondary world low fantasy like the work of KJ Parker, magic may have taken place in this world long ago but there's very little trace of it in the present day.

Some notes:

- Unlike our USA, the Confederacy has here effectively reached its maximum possible size; bounded by muscular tribal confederacies to the West, the Westron Bay Company lands to the North, and the Culman Gap, a near-impassable area of dense forest and mangroves, to the south. As the Algoran Empire has continued to grow, former trading partners have been swallowed up or strongarmed into exclusivity with the Empire, imperiling Confederate trade. Lanches (think French-Spanish Lancaster) is happy to support the thorn in its rival's side, but can only safely do so via its possession of Gondal; thousands of miles from Glasstown across the Angoran-controlled Camelian.

- Some hundred years or so prior to the current day, Angria invaded and divided its neighbour Alcona with other regional powers, shipping its populace West to slave in the colonies. Slavery has since been outlawed but the Alconan population of the Westrons remains in many cases as bondsmen in various coercive contracts.

- Glasstown, despite its separation from the Angoran Empire, retains most of its legal system including Algoran common law, a sprawling and near-incomprehensible knot of case law and precedents which the civic legislature can shape but not entirely overrule. Lawyers generally belong to companies called chambers, agreeing to share the profits of cases in return for the chamber assuming responsibility in the case of malpractice. Chambers' dues can be hefty and practicing solo varies from complicated to actually illegal state-to-state. As such, one's position in a chamber strongly determines how much money you can cream off. In theory, Confederate chambers continue to pay dues to their parent chambers in Eastrick, but given the political situation have in some cases been withholding dues for sixty years and are in arrears to many times the size of their net worth. After all, what are the Angorans going to do, reconquer the entire Confederacy?

- Native states of the Hespereides have adapted to varying degrees to Anemoidean weaponry - most prominently the Tashwehr (think Prussian Aztecs) and the Sattanack. The Hatten consider themselves a step above other tribal groups by virtue of having their own legends about coming from a continent across the waters. While there isn't much to separate them physically or culturally from the other peoples of the Hactrean grasslands, Angoran anthropologists argue that 'Hatten' is cognate to 'Hetchak', and darkly prophesy a similar fate for the Glasstowners who they see as similarly having 'gone native'.
- The dominant religion of the western Anamoides is Elamotism. The Cantish Kirk (Church of the Creed) is very roughly Protestant while the Nominae Kirk (Church of the Name) is approximately Catholic. Both agree on the broad outlines: About 1800 years ago, the whole world was ruled by the Sak Eleam* ('sack ee-LAY-am'), a sort of Greek-Roman-Hebrew hybrid. This included, according to the Kirk if not the historical record, the land currently called Angria. There, God (Elamot - 'EE-lam-ott') became flesh (think Gnostic emanations rather than full incarnation) in the form of Patherick of Netheres, who led a revolt against the Sak Eleam, driving them from the temple at Beam with a shillelagh. The Sak Eleam returned in force, captured Patherick, and hanged him. At this point, Elamotists believe, Elamot intervened by turning Patherick into a tree, and two trees twisted together has become a key symbol of the faith. The Sak Eleam attempted to cut down the tree, but everyone who tried found his eyes fell out of his head. At this point they found a blind man and tricked him into cutting down the tree, whereupon a flood of blood sap emitted from the tree and swept the Sak Eleam out of Angria. It probably didn't happen quite this way. In any case, since the Sak Eleam were the rulers of the world, their sin transferred to everyone alive and was passed down to their offspring - the only way to not be judged guilty of murder when you die is to submit to the authority of Elamot.
- The Nominae Kirk further argues you must be subject to the authority of the Hipparch, today based in Vallisclausa in Lanches, who has inherited the spiritual kingship from Rader, leader of Patherick's apostles. The Cantish Kirk says only Rader held spiritual authority and it died with him; Rader sits at the right hand of Sacred Patherick in heaven, with Samkar, the first Elamotish king of Angria, at his left. The king of Angria is considered to be the spiritual head of the people as well as the secular, boosted by his possession of the Knot, the largest surviving piece of the True Tree, now worn smooth by millions of pilgrims touching it and built into the base of his throne. The king of Lanches had a whole branch of the True Tree but he chopped it up and sold the pieces to raise funds for a war and now only has some crumbling pieces of bark. Objects made from the Tree occupy a strange place in the religion; simultaneously sacred and sinful, they are believed to be able to do miracles but their creation was theoretically blasphemy. There are also various alleged vials of the sap/dried blood and the most devoted and/or idiotic occasionally try to ingest some.

- Several hundred years ago, the Grand Heresiarch Sperser, who is sort of Calvin crossed with Marcion crossed with Satan, attempted and failed at a Reformation, which argued that there was only one tree; Elamot merged Patherick with the tree and his spirit left it when it was felled, so there is no such thing as relics; all men are not imputed with the sin of deicide but fall based on their own free will; Elamot predestines all men to eternal life or damnation as a simple consequence of his omniscience (the Cantish Kirk position is that the saved are predestined to life but the damned had a legitimate choice; the Nominae position that some are hellbound from birth but everyone else has free will to accept or reject Elamot). Being accused of being a Sperserite is essentially to be accused of atheism.

- Sefia Ma and its nearby states, including the self-governing holy city of Qard, follow Tal Suk, a prophet-led desert religion very useful to Glasstown since it holds that Trade is sacred, since it represents trust between men to give and receive, and is a model of the divine relationship; you sacrifice to Temos and he is always faithful to give something back, even if you don't recognise it. Hospitality is also sacred; the traveller in the desert is a type of Temos - will you let him in? - but also a type of the individual walking through the world. You must be Temos to the traveller and the traveller must be Temos to you, which is also trade.

- Ashura, a sprawling, divided continent being nibbled away at by various colonial powers, is the setting of the second story I'm working on in the universe, Stumps. Despite ending up on opposite sides of the world-island, the Ashuran and Angrian peoples ultimately derive from the same long-vanished empire of Angusha, whose capitol city was laid waste by precursors to the modern Hetchaks as they expanded from the steppe. This event has been preserved in the diaspora's cultural memory long after the city itself was forgotten in the form of the game of Cricket, or Kariket, where teams take turns symbolically undoing history by trying to save the city from destruction. To this day the Mahantrasja of the Ras Ashura's government is known as the Wicket (what can I say, I said I was dabbling in metafiction here). The old god of Angusha, Zeyis Pater, who seemingly turned against his people when Kariket burned, has been forgotten in Ashura and literally demonised in the West as the imp Zwee Peter, who is reduced to putting a burning ember in the socks of wicked children.

- For all that they have virtually become the mythical embodiment of ancient evil in Elamotism, the Sak Eleam are still just about going; they're just called the Rab Harut now and are clinging on to a little peninsula on the Eastern end of the Carnelian.

* Even though it's quite offensively clear that the Sak Eleam were completely into Elamot (their name meaning the, er, Empire of Elamot), official Elamotish cant is that the Sak Eleam worshipped false gods. There is no evidence that the Sak Eleam's empire ever reached Angria, let alone the Hesperides, being almost completely confined to a ring around the Carnelian (despite Fomenko-esque charlatan historians arguing that actually it ringed the 'Camelian' sea, which is taken to be the entire *Atlantic).