Worn

     It didn't look like much. Dark metal, plain wood, obscenely unadorned. It was made well enough, but there were times when people offered him better. 

     He came to realize quite quickly that the beauty wasn't in the appearance it showed, instead it was in the songs it sung.

     The song it sung of wood that would keep him warm, in the cold company of pines. The song sung of food soon made ready.

     But the sweetest of all was the one sung just as men died, so that he might survive.

First attempt at a food chain

I'll preface this by saying everything I say here is up in the air, so if you read this and think "yeah... but what about <some shit>?" feel free to lemme know.

Alright, so I'm trying to start by figuring out what this world/area/province's ecosystem looks like. In particular, the food chain. Right up at the top, apex predator, captain of the football team, homecoming king and queen, is the giant tortoise that I've yet to name. Yeah after a lot of thinking about whether they'd be carnivorous or herbivorous, I decided to go with carnivorous. 

The way I see it, is that if I'm going to fashion a whole world, I want it to not be complete bullshit. I guess that's not super groundbreaking but what I mean is that while I don't hope to create a flawless world, I at least want to make a tangible world, with enough integrity to stand up to a little prodding.

So if I'm sticking to my guns about the almost entirely (entirely?) desert world, how on earth could I hope to feed a tortoise big enough to carry a village on its back? The answer I'm most interested in right now, is basically "more giant animals". So I'm sort of creating a food chain rife with mega fauna. This also helps to contribute to why these people live the way they do. Wanna not get eaten by big animals? Live on the back of the biggest/baddest one.

So my tortoises will draw heavily from alligator snapping turtles. If you're not familiar give yourself a treat and go google those bad boys.

At this point, I'm thinking about probably including three secondary predators. One would be a carrion feeding avian, the next an animal which lives and hunts in packs, and the last a solitary animal. No 'for sures' but the pack animal will probably be a big ol' hyena, and the solitary predator might be an insect? We'll see. 

So what do all these lovely predators hunt? You ask.

Not sure.

At this point I'm planning on having four major herbivores, all of which will be mega fauna. But before I can commit to that I need to address how they survive. I'll go into that in another post so that this doesn't ramble on forever.

Let's make a place

So for years now, since grade eight I believe, I've had this world in my head.

I used to sit through social studies, talking about it with Aaron. We would bounce ideas back and forth, best of all was that he could draw. Shit was cash.

Anyway. The gist of it was that this was a world at war, with four major nations. Each nation had a religion built around a particular element (earth, wind, fire or water). Quick point here, this was before Avatar: The Last Airbender. 

But, now that show is very much a real thing, so that world feels like it would never really feel original or authentic. That being said I could never get over one aspect of the world we created. We had this nation of desert faring bad asses, who built all of their cities on the backs of enormous tortoises. 

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the concept giant people-toting terrapins is one of the coolest ideas to have ever graced the minds of human beings. So I'm going to take another crack at the whole "World Building" thing, see if I'm better than my juvenile self at it. So far I've decided that this world, name pending, will be sandy and bad ass.

Score one up for grade eight Sasha.

So what else, the idea I'm kicking around right now is a world almost entirely (maybe entirely) covered in barren deserts. Every large civilization will be, you guessed it, on the back of their own giant tortoise. 

These cities will all be autonomous, each living in an at least somewhat unique manner.

Maybe some cities let the tortoise decide where to go and when to go there, while others use brutal methods to dictate the direction of their home.

Aw shit... Am I coming up with Mortal Engines? Dammit, why you gotta screw me like that Phillip Reeve?

Okay, I'm gonna stop here for now, that's disheartening. I'll keep thinking about this.

I'll label all these posts as "World Building", or maybe "Phillip Reeve get fucked". 

Rock the Casbah

     It was better, he thought.

     It was better, to do it here and do it now on this rude and barren spit of land. That feeling, stirred inside, putting it off wouldn't work anymore. Had it ever really worked?

     He let his legs put him down, Gods know he loved to sit. Though he had stopped, they continued. Growing closer so that the sounds were there, if you strained to hear them. What shocked him, was that he wasn't afraid. In truth, the only sadness he felt was that there would be some, who for a time, might be upset at his absence. But beyond that, he was completely unafraid.

     It was better that way.