There is a moment, early in A World Reborn, the first book of the epic fantasy series The Hearthlight Cycle, where a being called Maax looks up at the night sky and listens.
The stars are murmuring amongst themselves, as they do in Aestraea. He hears a word in the sound of them, and that word becomes the name of everything.
That is how this world begins. A crash landing. A conversation in the dark between a god-like being born of ash and fire and a Dragonkin who very badly does not want to be held responsible for what just happened. And a name, spoken by starlight, given to a world that did not exist until the moment it needed one.
Aestraea is the world at the heart of The Hearthlight Cycle. It has two great regions in A World Reborn. Druth Cael, the older land, carries a caldera called Cael’Ithryn at its centre, a permanent scar from a cataclysm so ancient that no one living remembers its cause. The capital city, Ithrynvael, is a thriving mecca for arts, trade, and architecture, built in the long shadow of something no one can explain. And then there is Kairavija: vast, forested, mountainous. The Taleshar Steppes stretch to the north. The Drushelka Forest pushes east toward the Karshev Ridge. The Aestryn River runs until it runs out of land and becomes the Aestryn Falls. Between the two regions sits the Veil, and at the very edge of the known world, where the parchment runs out, sits the Tavern at Map’s Edge.
Marleigh l’Mer put it on the map herself.
The peoples of Aestraea carry the world’s origin in their bodies. The Starbound, the first people, were summoned from the willing essence of individual stars. The Fíochmhuime who called them into being performed a ritual that was sacred in the truest sense: they were asking a star to give itself so that life could exist. That is the recorded history of this world. It happened, in these pages, and the people who live in the world of Aestraea carry it forward, through generations, sometimes without knowing the weight of what they bear.
The world also has its own calendar, built in tendays rather than weeks. It has its own language, Pyraeic, which carries the cadence of something older than any of its speakers. The Dragonkin came from Thal’Pyrae, a place referenced in the manuscript, the way you reference somewhere you had to leave.
What kind of world is Aestraea? It is the kind of world where the landscape has a long memory, where a tavern at the edge of everything turns out to be the centre of everything, and where the question of what happened before you arrived has an answer far longer and stranger than anyone expected. It is the setting for an epic fantasy ensemble story about found family, about cycles of birth and death and rebirth, and about the idea that what a person considers the least remarkable thing about themselves may turn out to be the greatest feat anyone has ever witnessed.
A World Reborn is the beginning. There is a Kickstarter running through the end of June for readers who want to be part of how this book comes into the world physically, as a special edition. The link is in my profile.
Aestraea has been waiting, and it is very glad you are here.
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