Let’s look at the kingdoms next, starting from the top right, with the violet archipelago.  Yzma is, in fact, a place that we’ve seen some of our characters before.  Rhianna’s April Fools and Halloween stories featuring Edmond and Cassandra take place there (at least in the first story).  As we head west to the orange kingdom of Calcedonia, we find those floating islands, and honestly, the ones we see there practically don’t do it justice.  You’ll love the stories we plan on telling there.  We also know of one city there, but we’ll touch on that in a moment.  Making our way southeast, we have the kingdom of Merrosa, in green.  It’s a swampy area that most people wouldn’t want to spend too much of their time, but the elves of Aeratul are peculiar, so who knows.  Then, in the mustard orange sort of color, we have Brattam.  There’s not too much known about that yet, but Novistrus is the place where The Whispers takes place in (although I’m marginally sure that I also placed it in another continent, so that will be some fun clean-up later).  Finally, in the teal, we have Firth, which is the southernmost kingdom in the world that you can stand in besides the entirety of the Frozen Abyss.  Realistically, a great deal of Aeratul is far to the south, but it does manage to stay mostly temperate.  Also, one other thing: though we don’t see it on this map, there is another kingdom that is either coming to be, or it has fallen apart, and I just wasn’t sure of it yet.  That is the kingdom of Esken, which sort of takes up the space between Firth and Calcedonia.

Now, without the color overlay, Aeratul looks fairly tame.  Yes, there’s the floating islands, and the swamp, and the archipelago, but outside of that, there isn’t too much that is going on by the way of explosive features.  That just means that I have to tell the story within the confines of what we have—for now.

With Aeratul, we have a couple of bits of previews to show you, as there’s been some work put into this continent from a few different avenues.  Obviously we have our first image, with our future characters that we intend on using.  For as far back as we can remember, we’ve had the artwork for Alura done, and we’re looking forward to telling her story when the time is right.  The second image shows where one of our Quantum Quest characters, Alexander Baron, is from.  He features pretty strongly in the Quantum Quest novella, so it’s cool to put a home to his character on the map.  And of course, we see the sigil that aligns with that, the crown of Kingsly.

Now, as I mentioned before, there’s already been a lot of work in Aeratul, thanks to the short stories we told with Edmond and Cassandra, as well as with Declan of The Whispers (who I’m hoping to spend more time with this year).

Now we’ve got just three more weeks before our penultimate continent, so please be on the lookout for that.  After that, we’ll head to the largest continent on Tellest!

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Aeratul also has a fairly varied geography, from floating islands, to archipelagos, to forests and mountains.  It’s also the southernmost continent with the exception of the Frozen Abyss, so there’s some strange happenstances in the country of Firth from time to time.  Once I get a chance to play in Astranus, I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time in it.

There’s a lot to explore in Aeratul, and there is one story—well, two actually—that I’ve left out just because I don’t think I know the details all too concretely, mostly because the stories that took place there were not mine, but Rhianna’s.  You might recall the story Weather Here or There, or On Spectral Tides?  I’m fairly certain that Edmond and Cassandra hailed from one of the islands int he northeastern archipelago.  I’ll have to do some research to confirm!

So, now that we’re at the parchment version, is there something you’re noticing that changed a bit?  Yes, Aeratul is the latest and greatest name changed place in the Tellest universe.  Rhianna wasn’t too keen on having a name that sounded like it had two butts.  Anyway, I feel like Aeratul rolls off the tongue a lot better than Astranus (or my originally proposed name change of Astranaar, before realizing it was a town in Warcraft) does anyway.

We’re down to the final two maps, I believe, with the next one dropping late next month.  Stay tuned, because after that, we loop back in some pretty fun ways!

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