Earth

The world the saga happens on, found by a ghost in year 3X and worth staying for.

What is on it

Two kinds of thinking being sharing one world, which is the thing Blook had never seen anywhere else in the cosmos.

Humans build with the land: stone temples, wooden houses, towers that track stars, open spaces for sharing stories. Monsters come in every shape. Fire creatures work forges inside mountains. Serpentine beings with jewel-like scales guard rivers. Walking skeletons with glowing eyes keep libraries carved into cliffs (ch. 3).

They trade in the same markets. A human child plays a flute while a monster of flickering flame dances in time. A water monster becomes the irrigation channel for human fields. Midwives of both kinds welcome babies with the same songs, and the dead of both kinds are buried in the same groves with equal respect.

What it is not

Technological. "These people haven't built a world of machines and technology. Instead, they've grown in spirit and magic" (ch. 3).

Why Blook stayed

One word, and he uses it twice.

"They've done what so many worlds never manage. Balance." (ch. 3)

The first of the Fourteen is the Virtue of Balance. See ../characters/aquila.md.

Dating

The story counts in a way Blook finds funny, because it tries to measure endless time.

• Year 3X, he arrives.
• Year 24X, two hundred years after Vazroth, the world has farms, libraries, and quiet breakfasts.
• Years 31X to 34X, the Thirteen die across four decades.
• The New Era begins the day after, and the calendars restart. See ../events/the-ascension-of-the-thirteen.md.

Is this Point-Null

Almost certainly. Blook says the galaxies that grew after Zero's sacrifice each carry "a tiny piece of the being who saved everything" (ch. 3), and Earth is in one of them.

The text does not join the two explicitly and this entry does not either. See point-null.md.

Later

By Arthur's era it is a world of seven provinces called Maeris, and none of the chapters read so far bridge the gap. When and how Earth becomes Maeris is open.

Open questions

• Whether Maeris is on this planet or is what this planet came to be called.
• What the monstertribe villages of ch. 5 become by Arthur's time, when monsterkind and humans are heading toward a war.