This is going to be the first of a number of post relating how the world I call Sharael came into existence, and the changes and alterations – often radical – that became made to it.
Sharael is only the current name for it – there have been other iterations of the world’s name, some best left forgotten. It is also the name the Maedari use – other races and peoples have their own names for it too.
It all really began with just the kernel of an idea, way back in 1986. Yes, that is quite some time ago. In the back yard of the house we lived in back then I had a tree house. Well, sort of a treehouse. It was half an old door lodged in between a fork in the tree and nailed into place. But it was a treehouse to me in my vivid imagination – and I had a good one.
One day, an old friend and myself were playing in it. For whatever reason that I can no longer remember, we came up with a fictitious race of people that we pretended to be, a race called the Tree People. Not, you will admit, the most well thought out of names, but we were only twelve at the time.
These Tree People lived in trees, and ate products from trees and had the names of Trees – we were Ash and Oak. It was a lot of fun, and may have come to nothing, except for an event that occurred the following year.
It was my first year of high school, and for our English class we were set a task or writing a story. At the time I had just finished reading The Hobbit, and my story was called The Battle of Red River Ravine. It drew heavily on The Battle of Five Armies from The Hobbit, plus bits of whatever else I was reading at the time, like Narnia. The main two protagonist of the story were Ash and Oak Sycamore, a pair of Tree People brothers. There was even a map at the back of the story.
From there it sort of gathered pace. The map kept expanding – up to 25 A4 sheets of paper in size and I kept on writing history and adding elements from whatever I was reading at the time – Lord of the Rings, Belgariad, Pern anything and everything. One culture was heavily influenced by the Roman legions, another by the Dragonriders of Pern, and a third was pretty much a clone of the Rohirrim, but with elves and dwarves and gnomes thrown in. There were even genealogies and languages in the works as well.
It was a hopeless mismatch of cultures and histories that made little sense, but it was a beginning.
That was how the world began, but it was soon to change and for the better.
Mist and Shadows 