Extract from Chief-Pen Shunnock's closing lecture to the Bastion Grand Society of Cartographers, on the day of their final dissolution and demolition.
Over one-hundred-and-eighty-one years this Society has sought to shine a light on the dark parts of our world, only to be dragged into deeper shadows by the interference of ignorance and bureaucracy.
Yet I wish to end our pathetic history with decisiveness. I declare these five laws of geography to be true, sworn on my own life. Let the end of our institute be the beginning of the peoples' efforts to put this chaos into order.
The First Truth: Bastion is the hub of everything. A pillar of light that the rest of this nonsensical world must be drawn relative to.
The Second Truth: In spite of Bastion being our sole reliable point of reference, the city itself changes at such a rate, and hides so many unseeable parts, as to make any sort of large-scale mapping impractical. This is doubly true when you consider the Underground.
The Third: The Deep Country is an utter waste of time and undeserving of our cartographic efforts. Vast emptiness punctuated by embarrassing shadows of our idiotic past. If you can find a signpost pointing to Bastion, you need know nothing more.
The Fourth: The Golden Lands lie in every direction but North, and the mapping of these lands appear as our best hope to understanding our world.
The Fifth: Sea Travel to the Polar Ocean to the North presents problems that are beyond the realm of cartography, so all maps should be topped with First-Quill Chinler's Border of Uncertainty to best present our knowledge of that area.
This sort of thing is exactly why I use Bastion as I do in my version of the setting. It is a city built just the other side of a portal into fey realms, where human colonists have made a home and then built it out to an unreasonably and impossibly huge city (only possible on the fey side of the divide due to many logistical reasons.)
ReplyDeleteWhen the Gate shut it took two whole generations for people to by and large forget there ever was a Gate. Now the only travel back and forth between Telluria and Bastion is through the secret ways.