My new moto: celebrate ever success. In moderation of course. every project isn’t 5 star dinner worthy. Every project is worth stopping and taking a moment to feel the win, however. This is a stop and celebrate the win moment for me.

I wrote recently about a new project being born– Redd: Scion of Rhayander. This win is not related to that project. After some assessment, I am still not quite ready to write the world of Baimiya. The scope of magic is so big. There is more world building to be done. But since I am still itching to write something, I went back through my old stories to see if something inspired me.

I found The Path to You, a piece of collaboration work done by my high school best girl friend (Not quite BFF since that has turned out to be my love, the Wizard Lionheart, but the three of us were quite a close little cohort. In my current poly relationship Lady Lionheart has filled the place of this friend). Up until finishing A Renaissance of Self: Escape, I had not finished anything except for this story and one other and both of these were high school efforts.

The Path to You has always had a place in my heart for the ‘romance’ it had in it. Unfortunately time marches on and that story isn’t so romantic anymore. In fact it is downright problematic. The story is set in a fictionalization of Medieval England during the crusade and the reign of King Richard the Lionheart. (Hmm… the association with Lionheart goes back that far… Interesting observation…) This setting is kind of ideal to translate over to Terra, the world in my universe that has the most in common with our world.

If you haven’t heard the basic premise of the Universe of Aiyon yet, it is the next iteration of the universe. It is pulled from the Vedic/ Hindu/ Buddhist idea of repeated kalpas (in Greek it is a aeon which gives us our modern word eon). The Universe of Aiyon was born from the idea of what if the next time around the plan for the Universe is fantasy style magic. From that idea came 12 major galaxies named for their creative deity, their Gaia. The Gaia takes primary residence in a single planet within their galaxy, the prime world of the galaxy even though many, main other planets may exist with a gaiatte managing the lesser world in a mirror of what the Gaia does for the prime world. The twelve Gaias are grouped into threes as little family units. These units share a magical style and a similar proximity to the source of all magic, Aiyon itself. Terra is in the last unit and is the last planet of the twelve. When Terra created her planet, she modeled it after Earth in the old universe. Many key places and historic events are shared between the two but people have free will and there is real magic and ancient races so things change from Earth history.

This leads to my win. After MUCH research into old names for regions in England, the various nations that were conquered and folded together to become the United Kingdom eventually, and just a big brush up on history from William the Conqueror in 1066 to the start of the War of the Roses: I have created my Terran nation of Brittanee and created its history and maps of the current Dutchies, Earldoms, and Baronies for the setting in the year 1311.

The specific celebration of today is the creation of the maps. Creating maps not just a list of places straightened things out for me greatly. I found I had used names for the same region twice in the same list or used the smaller name for the larger area type when making a list. I had also be arbitrarily limiting numbers of places based on even divisions of each of the four countries in the isles but truthfully Wales does not need as many divisions are England as it is 1/3rd the size or a bit less. Scotland too is at least 3x the size of Wales. [I double checked my visual estimates and learned that in terms of actual km²; England is 6x larger than Wales, Scotland is a little less than 4x the size of Wales, and Ireland is a little more than 3x the size.] By going to the map and trying to estimate similarly sized areas based on old and current divisions of each country, I feel very pleased with the results.

I’m going to attach my maps here. I will also write an explainer of the maps and an article on the history of the country, named Brittanee for my lovely Lady Lionheart who was in turn named for the Britain, on my Aiyon site: www.theuniverseofaiyon.wordpress.com.