To Make a Kinder Children's Tale

2: Worldbuilding

The city itself was never given a name-not because it was the only city, but because it was all the towns of the kingdom held together by Aelif magic. It had a way of twisting a traveler's innards while moving back and forth throughout the realm.

For instance, a merchant could go from North Horn to Benden's Tears-hundreds of miles distant-by way of The Graceless Street Node. South Graceless was incongruously in North Horn, while Benden's Tears had an East Graceless-that was one seamless intersection. Hale was to the east of the overall city and South Tip to the west, both on Patressin-same name. That made the four towns bound to the single node. In any individual town, when that traveler walked a block or so around the node, they continued on into the rest of their home proper, effectively meaning that just randomly goong north could bring a body through their home town or land them in another area of the kingdom altogether. And the towns didn't have a single node between them, but dozens-not all facing the right directions, either. The Aelif did their best to tie them together in a uniform manner, but the points liked to remain uniform to themselves, not to the landscape. Aelif never found themselves lost because they knew the nodes by instinct. That wasn't so for the rest of the Aelfine.

The Shards were a different matter altogether. Four towns: Dremlich, South Tip, Chelifire, and Thwarposlaw had slums that were not up to Aelfine standards, all tied around a central node called Hades. It was the part of the city that the poorest of Aelfine understood best, although the instability of this particular node caused the directions of the four to flip every few years.

The Kingdom itself was Crystal-South, one of two countries named after a foe they refused to forget. But like the Aelif on bothering with city names, they rarely called their home by it's title-or any other nation by it's designation, either. It was always the kingdom-this kingdom, your kingdom, my kingdom. It drove most other Aelfine mad.

That was another issue. All people were Aelfine. The elite rulers were more often referred to as the Aelfine. Nothing was different about the word other than it's use in conversations. It was a simple world to the Aelif, one that often required paying attention to context.