Worlds Within Worlds
I don’t do a lot of out-of-book explaining about the lore of my books; I prefer to let the stories speak for themselves, and let readers piece together the details. That said, occasional loreposting is fun, today I’ve been pulling together a veritable fistful of note cards, scraps and scribbled receipts to get my personal “story bible” in order, and I figured it might be interesting to share a bit. Today’s topic: in the First Story universe, which parallel worlds do we actually know about?
Parallel Three is the biggie, the hub of the First Story as we know it; this is the world of Daniel Faust and Harmony Black, and the battlefield for the current impending showdown between the Paladin and the Enemy. You probably live here. This is also the setting of the upcoming Neon Meridian series from Aethon Books, albeit seventy-odd years in the future.
Parallel Five will appear in Rats, the upcoming third novel in the Castaways series. It’s a yellow-class deathworld “rendered inviable due to Enemy/Paladin conflict” with a global human population of around 150 people. Something else lives there, too. Something very large and very hungry.
Parallel Seven is nice. That’s all anyone has to say about it. It’s nice.
Parallel Twelve is the homeworld of Vail Curran, from Castaways. Best known for harsh winters and Puckslam, a hockey variant involving barbed wire and explosives.
Parallel Seventeen is the site of Nalajara, City of a Thousand Princes, an advanced techno-occult civilization where magical duels are a favorite national sport. Home to both Professor Abraham Chalk and Gecka Xaro from Castaways, and it’ll be a pivotal part of book three.
Parallel Nineteen is mostly notable for the locals having two hearts. They want to know why you only have one. Is that even allowed?
Parallel Twenty-Two is Overlord Earth, featured in the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy. A particularly brutal incarnation of the Witch and her Knight conquered the planet in an attempt to stave off their scheduled doom. The plan only half worked. Now P-22 is a cyberpunk dystopia policed by valkyries in power armor; as Dalton from Castaways puts it, it’s not a nice place to visit and you don’t want to live here. We might be making a return trip very soon.
Parallel Twenty-Six is home to the War-Dancers of Orinoco, pioneers of battle magic, but we don’t know much beyond that.
Parallel Thirty-One produced both Jellica Barnes and Elmer Donaghy. It’s a yellow-class deathworld ravaged by “necro-bombs,” occult warfare, and herds of the hungry dead. The Network likes recruiting here, because if you can survive P-31 you can survive anything (and you’re probably desperate to get off the planet, so you’ll take a bad deal.)
Parallel Forty-Four, setting of the recently-completed story Black Roses (on my Patreon), is unusually magic-rich; many pulp horror writers, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, dreamed of this place and wrote their visions as stories. Operatives from Praeda (established as a new threat in the Harmony Black novel Snake Oil Bullet) have been spotted here posing as real estate developers, trying to acquire land where the dimensional veil is particularly thin.
Parallel Fifty-Nine is on the red-list, danger rising, but it’s also the only place to get “butterscotch cinnamon babies” so the Sept of Coins is going to keep raiding the place as long as they can get away with it. They’re just that tasty.
Parallel Sixty-Two is the world of the Revanche Cycle. Most noted for being the home of the Sisterhood of the Noose, and we all wish they’d go back there.
Parallel-TANGENT One is an artificial world created by unknown precursors. It’s a vast water-world infested by enormous, nightmare leviathans, the apparent source of mermaids along with countless other aquatic horrors, first introduced in the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy (Talon Worldwide, using their own nomenclature, called this world “Deep Six.”) The founders of the Saunders Academy took over the one piece of surface land in the entire world, christening it Firebreak Island, and built their school there.
Parallel-TANGENT Eight is Noir York City, a pocket dimension accidentally created by a massively psychic child fueled on a diet of superhero comics and pulp crime novels. Originally glimpsed in The Locust Job and then later explored in The Midnight Jury, reality here operates according to the rules of comic-book logic. We’ll be going back here soon.
Of course, this list is far from exhaustive and I’m sure as soon as I hit post I’ll find a handful more to add, but it covers the ones that have been specifically numbered and called out at one point or another. Just some fun facts for your Tuesday!
