About Valaris

I would like to share with you the homeworld featured in all my Tales from the Path of Shades. Known as Valaris, it begins its journey into the multiverse in Gathering of Rain and continues in House of Valla, Shades of Shadow and The Sunless One. Thereafter (Glittering Darkness onward) Valaris remains the homeworld, but the multiverse expands a fair bit to include other worlds and dimensions. Always Valaris is hearth and home to the characters that populate the Tales.

A small world, in the grand scheme of time and space, but beautiful and benign. There is one continent and a host of islands- a water world, really…although the folk living there are more than a little wary of the great depths of unchartered oceans!

Here are a few descriptions and images:

Drasso’s continuing legacy was a continent divided by the one region that had remained relatively untouched by the battles: the Great Dividing Forest. Valaris was a largely water world- one continent and thousands of unexplored, uninhabited islands, the rest being ocean in every direction. Thus, when one described the continent as divided, one was actually saying a world had been divided and its people also, and most effectively as Kisha and Kylan came to understand.

Back in Valaris’ beginning, once it became a habitable world, there was no sentient life. The humans of today did not evolve here; they came from faraway worlds, much the same as happened elsewhere. One starship came and saw it was good, and then there was another and another, a familiar tale. This was and is a paradise world and the humans who settled were happy, but, being human, being sentient, they were selfish also- another familiar tale- and denied entry to other races. Now, around the time that selfish mind-set began, a space warp materialised in the heavens above that made it impossible to travel the stars again, the same warp still in position today. It also, of course, denied entry to other settlers, and put an end to other races interfering with the humans already here. Thus, without any great effort, the humans got their wish, and the Valarians were born as a people apart.

Valaris went beyond every dream. It was far more than this miserable excuse of a world. Even when the light shone benignly here and the mountains were green and white, rounded and inviting, it could not compare.

Ah, what a kaleidoscope world! Sapphire and emerald, silver and white, gold, crimson, amber and violet! Mountains of infinite variety, fertile valleys, oceans, islands, lakes and rivers! Wondrously growing things! There he could live, BE! He could never return to that innocent young man, but, then, he no longer had interest in recapturing that kind of wonder. He was what he was, and it would bring him what he desired. Beauty. Valaris had beauty. In abundance.

A real world, don't you think? Would love to hear your opinion.