Nowhere to hide in Vacen Author’s Note

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This poem is from the perspective of a character you’ve never met, in a time long before our heroes venture across the Mountains. He’s a career cat burglar and general thief/conman with a penchant for words, and how they change when you arrange them in piles. An excerpt from his personal journal (kept on his person at all times) reads:

“Poems are like spoils in that way, you see. A bluestone lockbox is a collection of all a person’s valuables. It on its own will sell nicely outside of Vacen, but its contents are why I’d take it. They’re a poem unto themself, ultimately. Inside Vacen, the lockbox gives the poem its shape, its structure. The coin and jewelry within are the words and the stanzas, all piled on top of each other in the most beautiful of ways.

“A pity I’ll be heading west from here. Vacen is a wondrous place, and camping in the Vaç has been divine. Perhaps I’ll summer here once I can retire; for now, it’s time I finally saw that famous diVasian steel at work by their own hand. It should only be a few days to Ors diRoa from here, particularly if I can hitch a ride…”

For those of you just joining us:

Welcome!

Since the beginning of 2020, I’ve been using this blog as the home of my most recent draft of the Longform Fantasy Fiction project I’ve been working on for some years now. This link will take you to the beginning of that story, but know that it’s a work in progress and will definitely be changing in the near- to middle-future—for the better.

Vacen is a city built entirely from stone they’ve quarried from the bottom of the Lake on which the city sits. The buildings therefore retain the smooth, flowing shapes into which the water has carved the lakebed over millennia. The buildings are partitioned within stone husks larger than a single residence, and the blue-grey stone sparkles in the sun. The streets, too, are paved with settstones made from the bluestone, as are the formidable, sparkling walls which surround the city.

Thanks for Reading!

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