Book Two, page 6

bravo1102 on Nov. 23, 2017

Elves have telescopes. The grinding of lenses is very old and possibly goes back to the Egyptians. But there is no record of them being used for magnification. But then most of the scientific records of the ancient world are lost. More than enough room for someone, somewhere to have made all kinds of telescopes and observed the heavens and kept the methods of their magical observations secret.


The framing of the first panel is specific in including the Sword of Kings off to one side. Enlandom is a republic as it made sense to me that a community of miners would be more likely to develop unions and guilds and elected leadership as opposed to hereditary nobility and maybe even community ownership. The dwarfs are commies!

Eslan is the kingdom of the Elves with an elected queen. The queens are elected every few years and are more like a prime minister. They lose their quorum they have to request an election. The Elvish kingdom has its capitol in Eslan but actually rules all the elves in Narthatheia and on the Continent with the exception of an independent enclave in the forest of Azure. But that's not important to this story. Elvish governments are a maze of family connections and political coalitions. And they learned to grind lenses because that ancestry of Ice Age hunting left them with a tendency towards farsightedness and the need for eyeglasses.

In case it matters my elves use Celtic names. Gwalchmai is the original Celtic name of the hero who would become Gawain in the legends of Arthur.

Elves and dwarfs in my world are two offshoots of one common species. They can interbreed. Elves are in fact descended from Ice Age hunters with much of their physiology and culture deriving from that origin. The ancestors of the dwarfs chose to go underground to survive the worst aspects of the Ice Age. Both pre-date humans and their root species still exists as the brutish skags. More on that as it becomes relevant.

I hope the expressions in the last panel indicate that Falkimir may be looking through the wrong end on purpose.

And Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers.

Thanks to all the great readers out there. There's at least one page ready for next week and the first draft of the re-write of Book 2 is done.