The Grand Illusion
I’ve been rereading both Heritage and the Kharl books, along with watching shows on Pompeii, and got me thinking; What condition is the Palace of Light in? Is it in relatively preserved shape like Pompeii is or is it barely recognizable ruins? When the folks of Southwind eventually excavate, what do they find in your mind? Will they find Kiedral’s poetry books?
Kiedral’s poetry books accompanied the Empress Mairena to Cigoerne. Whatever is left of Cyad is offshore and buried deeply. There are traces of Cyador here and there, such as the house that Nylan encounters.
Where was Cyad ? It has always annoyed me that this important location was never identified on any of the maps in any of the books. It’s perhaps excusable in the later volumes where Cyad has long been destroyed, but less so in the early tales involving Cyad itself. You mention your maps in another answer, if they can’t be published in a book, how about just take a picture of them and post thst on the site.
I have taken pictures of them. Unfortunately, it takes eight photos to get all the maps, and the pictures don’t reproduce well, even full-scale. If I reduce them, more detail is lost. I can’t “update” the original maps because I don’t have the copyright, and because Tor long ago lost the map masters, and Tor doesn’t feel that sales levels warrant commissioning new maps. And since I’m no longer a spring chicken, I prefer to spend time writing, rather than mapmaking.
Southport is roughly where Cyad was.
There’s plenty of internet geniuses who would be able to spruce up whatever pictures you have. If you just post your raw originals, we can run them through Gimp or Adobe or any of a thousand other image editors to produce some really nice maps for you. We just need the base pictures. I really hope you’ll post them, I can’t be the only one who would like some nice maps, and we’ll happily do the work for you.
I meant to add that if you don’t want to go through the trouble of putting the maps up on the website, you could either email them to me or someone you know who is interested, and let them do all the work offline. I’d mail you back a set of maps, and I wouldn’t release them publicly either. Of course you wouldn’t know if I was a dog, but I’ve held commercial source code privately for over 40 years, so I’m pretty sure I can keep a secret.
Unfortunately, copyright remains a problem.
I don’t think that can be right, it has to be much farther south, say to the west of the ‘the’ of the empty lands, on the coast. In Magi, Lorn goes north from Cyad to the transfer station, then presumably far to the east to Syadtar, from whence it says he goes northwest to Isahl. Originally I thought it had to be down by Diehl, but the mention of ocean touching the Sw side of Candar made me believe it had to be on the west coast, midpoint or just south. It sure can’t be Southport, that’s just way too far north.
I would say the author of the actual work telling you it’s Southport is very unlikely to be incorrect.
You have to remember, when Cyador was there Naclos was significantly smaller, the Empty Lands were likely terraformed for crops and various places that are listed as their own thing were part of Cyador.
Lorn’s post at Isahl was likely close to where the word Cerlyn appears on the map.
His Great Forest Post was probably close to the top of the river in what is the middle of Naclos on the official map.