Shadows of Erevan — Visual Storyboard

Canon photography from the project reference library. Painted scenes appear only where no canon image exists yet.

Northern Realm · Mountain City

Ironfeld

Twin snow-capped peaks cradle the walled city. A river cuts through its heart toward the flat farmland below.

Accord Citadel lies south

Western Erevan · Coastal Moorland

The West Coast

Ancient moorland that simply ends at the sea. A lone needle of rock older than any name.

Bren’s road home

Underground · Gallantria

The Bioluminescent Tunnels

The light comes from the life itself — a glowing canopy beneath the earth.

Light source · origin unknown

Subterranean

The North Tunnels

Dressed stone one side, raw volcanic rock the other. Light only comes from ahead.

Single file · no torches

The Holds · Cliff Face

Gallantria — The Entrance

Carved into living rock, invisible unless you know where to look. The secret library within.

Petra · Bible lock

The Holds · Interior

Gallantria — The Deep Halls

Architecture cut downward into the earth. The master book waits — a door without its key.

Kailasa · master book

The River Country

Ancient Ruins — The Watching Face

A face so large it became geography. In the underlay the buildings are whole and alive.

Dual-alphabet everywhere

The River Country

Ancient Ruins — The Carved Halls

Every surface worked in the ancient script — the same letters as the trophy, the stone, and Eiram’s marks.

Banteay Srei · Bible lock

The Eastern Reaches

Aveland

Terraces holding the light, channels sequenced so the reflection is never the same twice. Home of the Fallomur.

The jacket · emiat ej

Beneath the Greymere Strait

Myrethis

South of Ledland, below the sea. Living light breathing with the tide. Thessaly’s four centuries.

Founding stone origin

The Coast

The Tideborn Kingdom

Nari’s people — the ocean realm blamed for a staged incident, carrying manufactured grievance.

Nari’s home waters

The River Country

The Falls

The thousand-cascade curtain hiding the tunnel entrance and the glowing key stone.

Tumpak Sewu · Bible lock

The Western Reaches

The Mirewood Approach

The shore where Omendris told Solen the quest — the book is a door, and a door is not enough.

Book Three waits here

The Deep West

The Ashwastes

The red desert at the western edge. The machine’s reach thins here — and older things remain.

Wadi Rum · Bible lock

Above the Eastern Void

The Floating Reaches

Fragments suspended at various heights. The dragons stopped. The air relic waits. The child will be born here.

Air relic within

The Void Boundary

Eiram at the Reaches

Standing where a dragon chose not to continue. She calculated both outcomes and chose not to defer.

Vel ren dorn ei sol

The Dragon Peaks · Three Zones

From Blue Cold to Red Fire

Cold blue mist at the entrance. The Hall of Torches and the emptied fire relic altar. Beyond — something vast breathes in the dark. The farthest peak holds the only mortal passage to the Floating Reaches.

Entrance · Hall of Torches · Nari’s last ascent

Objects & Interiors

Behind The Falls

The Secret Key

The green glowing stone existing in both world layers at once. The Glanqueen assesses all who enter by it.

Both layers · Glanqueen’s ward

Omendris’s Keeping

The Codex

Not a book — a sealed ornate cylinder, blue-lit. Carried thirty years.

Sealed · thirty years

Gallantria’s Deepest Level

The Chamber of the Four Foundations

Circular cracked platform, four inward-facing lecterns, the bottomless pit at centre.

Solen stumbles here · Bk1

First Age

The Ancient Relic Currency

Continuous interlace, rotational symmetry — the design basis for all six First Age relics.

Six relics · never sold, only passed

The descent of power in Erevan — from the gods, through the five original warlocks, to every tradition, older power, and people of the realm — converging, at the last, on one girl.

The Descent of Power

From the Choosing to the current age’s traditions.

The GodsThe Choosing
Never seen — only felt in what they set in motion. They chose the site for a new world, and sent their most powerful beings to raise it.
- The Five Original WarlocksThe Makers
  Makers of the first craft, who built Erevan as an experiment in perfection — and kept their five stones together in the White Hall of Gallantria. Scattered since the Old War: in fire, in earth, in deep water, in the broken sky — and the keystone, answering only to one true blood.
  - DravethThe Proudest Work
    Not born greater — given more: the best student the world ever produced, taught openly by every tradition until he held every source and concluded he should be the architect. His body was killed at the Old War’s end; what wore it was banished beneath the floor of the world — where it leans on the realm still.
  - WizardsStudy
    Enter the shadow world only through sleep, and are pushed back out after hours.
  - SorcerersBloodline
    Inherited shadow-world connection.
    - Solen’s LineThe Bloodline
      Sorcerer-blood — but her constant, passive, always-on underlay sight is unique even among sorcerers. No living practitioner sees both layers simultaneously as she does.
  - WarlocksPact
    Access the dark channel through bargain. The Gallantria warlock inner circle, tied to the Glanqueen across generations.
  - WitchesOld Wisdom
    The old wisdom of the first teaching, kept adjacent to the pact tradition ever since.

The Older Powers

Predating the three-source division.

Eiram’s Void-CurrentHer Own Category
Power drawn from holding the boundary itself — a category entirely her own.
The ScarioniFirst Age
Undivided First Age access; magic from before the sources were ever split apart.
The Ancient CivilisationThe Dual Alphabet
The dual-alphabet script, root of every magical language since — the way Latin roots the Romance tongues.
- OmendrisReader · Full
  Full literacy — one of two.
- Orin DuskmantleReader · Partial
  Partial literacy — nine years of Pale Archive study.
- SolenReader · Fragments
  Fragments through the underlay — she reads meaning before language.
- Advanced PractitionersRecognition Only
  Any source, recognition only — like a Spanish speaker squinting at Portuguese.

Species & Peoples

The realm’s kinds, and what each carries.

The AransiThreadweavers
Eight-limbed, pale in the real world, vivid gold in the underlay. Walk on water; hydrophobic silk forming a web network through the whole tunnel system.
- The GlanqueenThe Web Conscious
  Not an individual Aransi but the web itself grown conscious: generations of weaving become a self-aware system that thinks slowly, in patterns, across millennia. The tunnels are her body. She spoke once with the ancient civilisation and has waited ever since for someone who can read both layers again — Solen.
The River PeopleRiver-Knowledge
Two or more per generation carry river-knowledge: an adjacent, cultivated shadow-sight of the river’s underlay — considered a skill, not a power. Peaks source water is their meaningful currency.
The TidebornSea-Craft
The ocean kingdom’s people; sea-craft and terrain-reading as lived mastery. Nari is the type specimen: no magic at all — which becomes the trilogy’s decisive talent.
The MyretheansLiving Water
The deep-kingdom inhabitants under Thessaly; four centuries of life inside living water.
The Stonheld ClansEarth Keepers
Keepers of the earth relic and vault.
DragonsSophonts — Some
Those that have achieved the specific awareness making them participants in history are sophonts; the rest are not.
Elowen the RootkeeperThe Deep Wood
Tending the Deep Wood since before the Accord; the one place Draveth cannot touch — she manages its rate of dying.
WraithsUnresolved
The Mirewood’s broken-promise dead; whether one still qualifies as a sophont is deliberately unresolved.

The Converging Lines

Solen — The Converging Lines

The known descent: Serath Vale → Maren → the unnamed grandmother → Aelindri → Solen. Sorcerer blood entering through the unnamed fathers of each generation — four generations compounding into the concentration point. Bloodline guarantees access, not power; concentration produces what the shadow world has not met since the First Age.

The hidden inheritance: during Draveth’s surrogate control of Serath, the dark channel itself passed into the line — the warlock inheritance, transmitted without a pact, the only time in any age. Her orphaned kin knew only sorcerer lore; everyone assumes she carries Serath’s genes, not Draveth’s channel. Untaught and untrained, it wakes in Gallantria — and grows.

Open canon, preserved: whether Solen is Deren’s granddaughter — the searching line converging with the violated line — and whether her deepest ancestry runs to the ruin-builders who saw as she sees.

Three threads that begin apart and end as one thing. The reader always knows more than any character — the gap is where every scene lives.