Chapter Twelve has been posted

Chapter Twelve has been posted.

Chapter Thirteen is about one-third paid for.

Chapter Fourteen is written; Chapter Fifteen is this close, but I keep thinking of little bits I want to squeeze in.

There was some good discussion in the comments two posts back. If you missed it, check out under “Chapter Five revised,” though absolutely none of it had anything to do with the revisions to Chapter Five.

23 thoughts on “Chapter Twelve has been posted

  1. I have to admit that Chapter 12 is a little slow for my taste. Its that part of the story where you are waiting for the next big thing to happen.

  2. I was reading one of your older books and in the back you mention the language is all from one original. You also mention it is 500 years old. Has humans only been here for 500 years?

  3. 500? Not 5,000? If it says that it’s gotta be a typo.

    The dates are in Y.S. — “Year of Speech.” As of Chapter Thirteen of The Vondish Ambassador, it’s the year 5224 YS, five thousand, two hundred and twenty-four years since the gods taught the first hundred humans (Ethshar doesn’t have an Adam and Eve; they say there were a hundred) to speak.

    It might be just five hundred years since the Ethsharitic family of languages first began to split into the two hundred and some languages it now includes, but Ethsharites believe people have been in the World for at least 5,224 years. Maybe longer, but before that, having no language, they couldn’t count or record anything.

  4. Okay, I looked it up. What it says is that all the languages spoken in the 53rd century are descended from Old Ethsharitic, and split off within the last five hundred years. This is correct.

    The fifteen other language families formerly spoken in the World are all extinct, wiped out in the Great War; the last of them, Shaslan, died out in the 51st century, when the last survivors of the Northern Empire died. Most of the others had been gone for centuries by then.

  5. I know in a prior post that you said you wouldnt do a story on Fendel, but have you considered doing a story about a new character who is immortal for some reason? You have been building a group of immortal characters like the tavern by the bridge owner and his wife, as well as the flyer and others. It might be interesting to have someone who didnt want to be immortal but had an accident to cause it.

  6. Why would you not want to be immortal?

    There was a scene in Night of Madness with a gathering of immortals; there are several of them out there. Most of them don’t have particularly interesting stories.

  7. While I do not subscribe to the “The Grapes Were Sour” philosophy, it strikes me that the idea that immortality must be a good thing is an example of “The Fallacy of the Unbounded Middle” to use the monkeys terminology . That is, a little is good. More is better. Thus an unlimited amount is great. This turns out to be rarely the case. There is usually a point that is reached where more is no longer better, but worse. The first 100 million is good, but after that is just a burden. All billionaires have fulltime security and can never do the things we take for granted. Think “World of Tiers”. After a few thousand years, it all could get boring.

  8. It looks like there is no actual immortality in Ethshar anyway (maybe Gods?). “Immortal” people can still die. Excluding accidents/murder, they would basically get to pick when they want to die. This would be an improvement, as each person would get to decide when enough is enough for themselves, rather than nature doing it… though I predict that most people would still die to accidents/murder unless the average lifespan was starting to creeping into the multi-millenia range. Also, people who are tired with life might not actually kill themselves, they would merely have to start taking more risks. Even taking risks where there is a 1% per year chance of getting yourself killed would be seen as ‘insane’ risk taking in a society where the average age is measured in millenia.

    In fact, are there spells like “auto-life” from RPGs in Ethshar? These are spells you cast on someone while they are alive, and it brings them back to life if they died. It only works once though, so after the person has revived, it has to be re-cast. This could be a final backup plan for a very powerful wizard. However, it does look like bring people back from the dead is beyond Ethsharic magic. In SF, the equivalent is something like keeping backups, and if you die your most up to date backup is used to revive you.

  9. Well, it’s a matter of scale, at least with respect to intensity. Take Fendel as an example. He didn’t get tired of life, but he did decide that Wizardry research was something he was interested in. Since that is inherently overwhelmingly dangerous, one could easily infer that he was bored with the less risky activities open to him.

    Karanissa is also immortal, and she didn’t get so tired of life during the centuries she was stuck in Derithon’s castle that she decided to end it all. I would think that once the scale was changed that radically, it would take a while to acclimate, but eventually years would go by for immortals pretty much like days do to normal people. Routine takes over and at some point they would be hard pressed to even remember what happened to them in a given year.

    That doesn’t mean that life is boring or tedious any more than last August 8th was for you. Can you recall what you did that day? Odds are you can’t. Does that mean that you hated that day or that it was tedious for you? Likely not, and that’s how I see immortals’ lives. They get on with whatever tickles their fancy just like the rest of us. They just have more time to do it or to wait to do it. Want to visit a particular faraway land but the current government is hostile? Wait a few decades – it might get better. If not, wait a few more decades.

  10. There is no way to bring someone who’s really dead back to life in Ethshar.

    There are ways to communicate with the dead, sometimes — none of them work 100% of the time; some dead people are unreachable — but no way to restore them to life, except in special cases such as magical petrifaction.

    And yes, Ethsharitic immortals can be killed, so if any of them start to find life an intolerable burden, they can find a way out readily enough.

  11. Not so long as the body remains intact.

    In fact, Ethsharites believe that’s true no matter how someone dies, which is why they cremate their dead.

  12. “The fifteen other language families formerly spoken in the World are all extinct, wiped out in the Great War; the last of them, Shaslan, died out in the 51st century, when the last survivors of the Northern Empire died. Most of the others had been gone for centuries by then.”

    So the gods gave mankind all the languages and then the groups all fought it out, with a rather small group remaining. I’d thought the genocidal war was only with the Northern Empire, looks like it was much wider.

    That is interesting.

    So, do all the dead end up in the netherworld, or do some escape to other realms?

  13. No, the gods gave mankind one language, which then fragmented — Ethshar had its equivalent of the Tower of Babel, though I never bothered to work out the details.

    The Northern Empire was an empire, and polyglot — at its peak its people spoke about a hundred languages in fifteen families, most of which died out gradually as their speakers were absorbed by the larger culture. Shaslan was its administrative/military language.

  14. Oh, and no, the dead don’t all wind up in the Nethervoid. There are several afterlives, and no one’s entirely sure what determines which one you wind up in.

  15. It appears that the gods and the codes of conduct they imply don’t have much relationship to things. It hit me that the gods haven’t seemed to have much importance for most of the characters in the books so far, which is interesting.

    Thanks again for all the comments, information and hints.

  16. They don’t have an obvious relationship.

    And no, the gods aren’t all that important for most people — when you have inscrutable gods who tell you flat-out that they don’t want to be worshipped and that they prefer to only listen to prayers from experts, you don’t tend to give them all that much thought.

  17. Does TOuched by the Gods have anything to do with the Ethshar series. It seems like a vastly different world with afew similarities. When I was reading it I wondered if it was a radically different prehistoric Ethshar.

  18. No, there’s no connection with Ethshar at all. Totally different world. The Domdur Empire, Eramma, Ethshar, and the Lands of Man are all completely separate creations.

    I’m not 100% certain that Barokan isn’t on the same world as the Lands of Man, though. Different continent, for sure.

  19. when you have inscrutable gods who tell you flat-out that they don’t want to be worshipped and that they prefer to only listen to prayers from experts, you don’t tend to give them all that much thought.

    Nicely said. And, for once, a reason why in a fantasy world most people wouldn’t have much to do with the gods.

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