The Ildin Saga

This is a new topic for my Celestiar series set on Ildin. I don’t know how many books this will be, because I’ve only been working on the first one. Again, as with the Adonial Saga, “the Ildin Saga” is a working name, but not the final one.

I’m switching my attention from the Adonial Saga to this one. I have a couple reasons why. First of all, I’ve kind of stalled on the Adonial Saga. It’s the story I’ve been working on for the longest, and I want to get it right, so I decided I should write something else first. I’m also just having trouble figuring out the plot and stuff. Secondly, I’m finding myself more interested in Ildin right now, and I think that in general I will have an easier time plotting and writing this. I haven’t started writing it yet, because I have to finish plotting and a few other things before I begin.

Let me do some tags:

@highscribeofaetherium @thearcaneaxiom @savannah_grace2009 @rae @grcr @anyone else (I just tagged everyone who was subscribed to the Adonial Saga topic.)

To start off, I’ll give a summary of what this series is about, since some of you might not be too familiar with this one.

Ildin is a frozen planet with a superheated core. The surface is too cold for anything to survive there, but the core warms the interior of the planet, making it habitable. Thus, all civilization is underground. This should cause a bunch of strange worldbuilding quirks, some of which I haven’t worked out yet. For one thing, their time telling system would be completely separate from the actual rotation and orbit of the planet, and they wouldn’t be able to invent the sundial even. The only other pre-clock time-telling device I know of is the hourglass, (and there’s also something very similar that uses water instead.) There are also probably a lot of natural resources they wouldn’t have. There are subterranean plants, so they do have access to some wood, although the main building material is stone. You would expect the caves to be dark, but they are actually quite well lit, thanks to a variety of bioluminescent plants, and especially to crystals, which capture Resonance (a magic energy that emanates from the planet’s core) and reemit it as light.

The story will be set in a time period where Ildin is pretty technologically advanced. I haven’t yet decided exactly what sorts of technologies they will have. They will have basic knowledge of electricity, but they don’t need it for too much. They won’t have guns, because they won’t have access to gunpowder (I’m actually not sure where gunpowder comes from. Hopefully it doesn’t come from any common source that they would have.) I’m also thinking of making the wood they have not work well for bow and arrows so that they’re limited to melee combat. There might be some sort of trains, but I’ll have to look at what sorts of technologies they would need for that. Steam should be something they can do. If anyone want to help me work out this worldbuilding stuff, they’re welcome to, but I will probably figure this out eventually.

At the beginning of the story, they will have just discovered Resonance Crystals, which only grow in the Abyss, a seemingly bottomless shaft with side tunnels. These crystals are visually distinct from the other crystals that grow higher up because they don’t emit much light, but glow intensely. They begin experimenting with these crystals and discover that many of them exhibit unique effects when electricity is applied to them. There are a total of 18 types of crystals, and to be honest, I could use some help figuring out what colors to make them. I wouldn’t have thought that would be one of my biggest issues, but it is. 18 is a lot to have each one be a different color. Each crystal type has a different power, called a Resonance. (Pictures don’t appear to be working, so I’ll give you a link to where I posted the chart earlier: https://kingdompen.org/forums/topic/magic-systems-2/page/9/#post-171006 This chart is accurate, except that the Resonance of Age has been changed to the Resonance of Destiny. You don’t need to worry about what the Resonances do at this point.)

So, colors… I have a few that I know what I’m doing for them. Fusion will be a pastel green, Destruction will be a vibrant red, Consciousness will be a yellow-orange, Dynamism will be bright yellow, and Teleportation will be cyan. Other than that, here are some colors I was thinking of using. White, royal blue, pure orange, pastel red, vibrant green, yellow-green, pastel blue, purple, lavender, neon pink, teal… and then I get stuck. I just need two more, so if you have any suggestions, that would be great.

Okay, so anyway, on to the actual story summary.

I have three main characters planned: Vlydia, Nedan, and Krenna.

Some of you have met Vlydia in the school RP, although she hasn’t done much there. Vlydia is a scientist working on the Resonance Crystals. She gets very excited about her work and can be annoying that way. She’s a bit stereotypical so far. She’s one of several characters that need some added depth. Speaking of which…

There’s a reason Nedan hasn’t shown up in any RPs yet. He is very underdeveloped so far, and quite boring. He is a miner working in the Abyss collecting Resonance Crystals. I seriously can’t really say anything about his personality. I feel like he is necessary to the story, but I don’t know how to make him more interesting.

Some of you have also seen Krenna in the Dark Castle RP. She is part of a thieving crew. She’s in general a pretty nasty person. Rude, brash, aggressive… She is a bit flat as well, but not nearly as much as Nedan.

And then there’s Riina who was not supposed to be a main character, and I’m still debating where to put her in the story. Any of you in the school RP have also seen her. She is feisty, flamboyant, and mischievous. She’s honestly the most interesting character I’ve created for this story. I have her backstory fleshed out fairly well, but I won’t say anything about it, because I want there to be some surprises for you guys when I get to the actual writing part. Anyway, I would really like to focus on her more, but I don’t think that her place in the story will really allow it, at least not in this first book. She will still be a major character, and I will probably do some viewpoint chapters for her, but she just doesn’t fit alongside the other three in the cast of protagonists.

The last character is Vilsayor, who is supposed to be the antagonist. Like Nedan, he is hopelessly flat. I don’t want him to be a pure-evil villain, since I’m already doing one of those in my other project, but right now, he has essentially no personality whatsoever.

Okay, so plot summary. Vlydia, Nedan, and Krenna independently consume Resonance Crystals (either by accident or intentionally) and become Resonators. For Vlydia, I’m thinking that maybe I could have her intentionally do it as an experiment, but she would have to have some reason to think something would happen, so I’m not completely sure how that will work out. Nedan will probably just accidentally bring one home with him and get it in his food somehow. Krenna’s thieving crew will be trying to steal Resonance Crystals. Krenna will hide one in her mouth to escape notice, and inadvertently swallow it…or some variation of that scenario. I don’t want this to seem too contrived, but it probably will feel that way at least a little. Who’s going to just eat a crystal?

Anyway, this will give Vlydia some things to work on researching. Nedan will train himself to use his Resonance. Krenna will use her powers to take over her crew.

Meanwhile, Vilsayor is part of a plot to unleash an evil force that has been sealed away. (I haven’t exactly decided what this will be or how it will work, because it plays into larger Celestiar things that aren’t fully developed yet. For this summary, it shouldn’t matter too much.) Vilsayor steals large amounts of Resonance Crystals to empower his followers.

Eventually, Vlydia catches on to some of this plot and starts working to stop him. She discovers Nedan and recruits him to help her, although the two of them do not get along. Eventually, they also recruit Riina (who has actually been a Resonator for longer than either of them) and later, Krenna.

That’s about how far I’ve gotten in how this plot will go. I’ll be working on plotting the rest.

So that about does it for the overview. There are a few things I could use help on. You don’t have to have comments for all (or any) of them, but these are the things:

• As mentioned above, I need to work out some worldbuilding kinks.
• Also as mentioned above, I need to fill out the remaining colors for the Resonance Crystals.
• Does anyone have any tips for developing characters? (We could do this under a different topic perhaps.) Usually, I either have a fairly complete idea for a character from the start, or I just gradually figure out who the character is over time, but I want to speed up the process, because the flatness of some of these characters will be an obstacle to writing this story.
• Lastly, this is a bit of a bonus one. It’s not too important, but I’ve been thinking about how to do it for a while. (It’s a bit technical, so you can skip this one if you want.) One thing I like about this magic system is that the characters will be discovering it in the story. I’ve been wondering how I should go about that. There’s an order to the powers that people would notice, but I don’t want to have all the powers be discovered/revealed at once. I want them to notice a bit of a pattern so that they can begin to figure things out though. There are a few powers that will definitely be known, because characters will have them. Vlydia, Nedan, Krenna, and Riina will have the Resonances of Fusion, Dynamism, Consciousness, and Teleportation respectively. There is no pattern to these that they could really figure out. One is a material power, one is energetic, one is mental, and the last is spatial. Vilsayor will have the Resonance of Empathy (which is not nice like it sounds. It sucks out thoughts, emotions, and memories.) He’s going to cause a lot of chaos and confusion with this power, and I want the main characters (Vlydia specifically) to figure out that this power exists simply based on the pattern present. For this to happen, she would probably, for one thing, need to connect it to Nedan’s Resonance of Dynamism, which works on similar principles, but effects energy instead of the mind. Then she would need knowledge that connects the energetic powers to the mental powers. Krenna has a mental power. But there is one problem, except for Dynamism and Empathy, the energetic and mental powers don’t have any similar powers. I’m thinking that this might require Vlydia to know about at least two energetic powers (to realize that energy is one group) and some of a group that has powers more similar to the mental powers. (For reference, the mental power other than Consciousness and Empathy is Conjunction, which creates a mental link between people.) Possibly it would work if she knew about Mutation, Destruction, and either Escalation or Reduction. That way, she could recognize that Energy is one group (because she knows about Dynamism and one other) and that Material is another (because she knows about all three: Fusion, Mutation, and Destruction.) Then she could relate the way that Destruction separates matter to the way that Consciousness separates your mental essence and reason that there were two more Mental powers. Based on the events that have been happening, she could deduce that there might be a power that absorbs things from the mind the same way that Dynamism absorbs energy. I do feel that is a bit of a stretch, and I was kind of wanting to save Destruction to be revealed later, since it’s so dramatic. Idk. Does anyone have any thoughts about another way I could do this? (If you need to know what the powers do to help with this, follow the link to find that topic.)

I think that’s all. Thanks for reading all of this. And take your time getting back to me–I know this is quite a lot!