CURIOUS TALE SATURDAYS: ARCHIVE

The Perse Hollows:

The Curious

Depths of Sele

Part 1: An Introduction to Sele’s Greatest Mystery

Saturday, May 5, 2018

During production of the Prelude, much worldbuilding was done in order to finalize key details about the mysterious City of Sele, the seat of Gala, so that things and people in Sele could have names and locality and tangibility rather than generic designations.

Sele: Perched at the northern rim of the Sourran Landstorm, atop the Cliffs of Raglan, this vast city did not exist when Galavar was a boy. Galavar founded it himself, at the command of the God of Logic and Wisdom, Sourros. Yet by the time of the Prelude the population of Sele has climbed to about eighty thousand people—roughly ten times that of Galavar's hometown, the Village of Ieik—and features entire districts, and an arcology-sized fortress, Galadrim, that itself is home to several thousand.

More than one person who read the Prelude suggested that it stretches belief for so much city to be built so quickly. Reasonable and true: Were it not for divine succor, Sele—an extremely high-altitude city in a deadly and desolate wasteland—could not exist. Yet Sourros only provided the ingredients for a metropolis; it was viutars, led by Galavar, who conceived and built it. Never underestimate people's resourcefulness and adaptability.

But we're not finished yet! Sele has another belief-challenging feature, and this one is even more unbelievable than the city's desolate location, its massive growth, or the architecturally fantastical Galadrim.

I speak of the Perse Hollows.

This week I figured I would talk about them, Sele's greatest mystery of all.

But First! Sele's Plausibility

To address that point of believability about Sele's growth and development: In fact it is plausible for Sele to have grown so quickly. Sourros' most important contribution was the provision of water, food, and, debatably, certain raw resources. The actual population growth and industrial development of Sele is entirely plausible. Since I've never explained that anywhere, why not here?

Like a number of the great cities on Earth, Sele's elapsed time from initial settlement to metropolis status is blazingly fast. There's no arguing otherwise. Initially populated mainly by the Ieikili, the headcount in Sele grew rapidly thanks to the promotion of a high birth rate and, more significantly, a generation spent clandestinely recruiting the best and brightest from across the world. Galavar and his entire Guard, and hundreds of others, took part in traveling across the world and recruiting people from virtually every nation.

For comparison, the Earther city of San Francisco grew from roughly one thousand people to roughly three hundred thousand in just forty years!—and gained another three hundred thousand over the next forty. This is far more radical than Sele's tenfold population growth over a period of roughly twenty-five (tellurian) years. Granted, the economic pressures necessary for this to happen were enormous, but it shows that such growth as we see in Sele is entirely plausible from a logistical standpoint.

Of course, it's not necessarily the growth in numbers that's so stupendous. There's also the matter of the growth of Sele's aedes—the same aedes as those in Gala's formal name: The Aedes of Vardas Gala.

Aedes, a Relancii word (appearing in many languages) that literally means "building"—or "edifice," if you're looking for my etymological inspiration for the word—but has the idiomatic meaning of "the physical manifestation of civilization," are a hallmark on Relance of a society's advancement and sophistication. When I say "aedes" in the context of Sele's growth you should imagine not just the buildings themselves but the economic activity—the agriculture, mining, commerce, banking, and industry—to accompany their construction and utilization.

Sele's enormous quantity of new aedes, and the sophistication and sheer size of many of these aedes, is nevertheless also still plausible. You have to remember, Sele's citizenry comprises some of the most intelligent and creative people in the world, led by Galavar and his visionary government. And of course the whole society is championed by an actual deity, Sourros, who provides enormous aid in the form of raw materials, foodstuffs and the means thereto, and available water in an otherwise highly barren part of the world.

And, on top of all that, there's also the fact of the availability of some advanced and efficient applications of engineering and logistics in Sele thanks to the integration of Relance's "magic" into the work of developing the city.

In San Francisco's case, there were enormous economic pressures at work behind the growth. In Sele's case the development of aedes was first of all top-down, and made possible primarily thanks to the recruiting and Galavar's big-picture vision. That said, it was also derivatively economic as well, a knock-on effect, as you should expect from gathering tens of thousand of the world's best into the empty canvas that is a new city being built from scratch. If I had ten lifetimes to live, I should like to tell many of the stories of the people of this city.

Gala recruited many artificers, and trained many more, to make all of this construction possible. These mates punched above their weight class when it came to developing the aedes of Sele. It was artificers, not the general population, who developed the aedes of the Perse Hollows. The Perse Hollows are an extraordinary accomplishment, and wouldn't have been possible without the artificers' brilliant, historic innovation. This also corresponds to real life, where a handful of resourceful visionaries have tended to be the driving forces behind some of our most significant leaps forward.

So What Are the Perse Hollows?

In Gala, "Perse Hollows" can refer to either the natural setting itself—the system of caverns beneath Sele—or the aedes therein. I'll talk about the former first.

Despite their status as a low-key world wonder, you may never have heard of the Perse Hollows. They were only mentioned twice in the Prelude (including once only as "the Hollows"). Blink and you'd have missed it. I know I've mentioned them oftentimes elsewhere, in Curious Tale Saturdays and in my journal over the years, but I don't think anyone (other than me!) reads 100 percent of that supplementary Curious Tale writing.

Here's the short description: The Perse Hollows are a massive system of caverns beneath Sele, spanning farther than the city's borders and plunging more than two miles in vertical coverage beneath it—meaning they are deeper than the entire height of the Cliffs of Ragan, and terminate below the ground level of the Sodaplains at that location.

The Perse Hollows have only two openings to the outside world: one at the top, in the City of Sele, in a large depression called the Butter Bowl, south of Swan Ridge and slightly west of the city's longitudinal meridian; and another, a truly massive opening at the surface level of the Sodaplains, all the way down at the bottom of the Cliffs.

Essentially, then, if you imagine the Cliffs of Raglan as a massive wall of rock running west to east and spanning roughly eleven thousand feet in height, the Perse Hollows are a massive network of caverns situated a good ways behind the cliffs, and they serve to extend Sele into three dimensions, causing the city to span roughly as far up and down as it does west-east and south-north.

Their geology is still a work in progress (in terms of my worldbuilding), but, in terms of their origins, most of the caverns in the Perse Hollows were either naturally formed or created by Sourros, though a great many of the smaller ones and connecting tunnels were excavated by Galans.

The Perse Hollows are named for their predominant color, and a candidate for my favorite color that you've never heard of: perse, a gray-blue-purple color that isn't commonly spoken of. (Though it should be!, as it almost perfectly matches the color of the overhead gloaming sky once all the reds and oranges are gone.)

The Perse Hollows are renowned, and named, for their perse-colored shine: There is a great deal of luminescent stone, iorila—a fictitious stone you won't find here on Earth; its pronunciation is almost entirely in the back of the tongue; it sounds roughly like "EEL-ee-yuh"; a little bit like the name Celia without the C; more precisely it's the EO diphthong followed by a mid-tongue R followed by IA—also called persestone, present in the rock that forms the Perse Hollows. Iorila glows softly when exposed to oxygen, in the color of perse. The Hollows as a whole therefore glow with the ambient light equivalent to slightly brighter than a moonless, clear night here on Earth—far too dark for most structured activities, but bright enough to navigate by, once your eyes are adjusted.

At medium range the caverns themselves look somewhat like a starfield, with millions of tiny points of light where the luminous stone meets the air, set against the blackness of the rest of the rock. In the large caverns, across long distances, these points of light are mostly lost in the distance, blending into a soft glow, except for the very biggest exposed veins. Up close, meanwhile, an exposed vein of luminous stone can be quite bright, equivalent to our typical light bulbs and sometimes even brighter than that if the vein is particularly large.

Obviously I am speaking in averages; there are some areas of the Hollows that have higher concentrations of iorila and thus are slightly brighter, and some that have lower concentrations.

The Perse Hollows are generally dry (with a few exceptions), and, while they have ample breathable air near the entrances, ventilation systems are used throughout most of the Hollows, owing to the amount of people breathing air in these spaces, and the amount of industrial emissions produced.

The largest individual caverns are almost all situated near the two entrances, especially the lower entrance. Deeper inside the system, there are still some good mid-sized caverns, but for the most part they get a lot smaller and more isolated from one another.

The network has never been fully catalogued, as there are thousands of narrow passages that would be very time-consuming to individually explore and document, especially since many of them will lead to dead-ends, or are so constricted that excavation would be required for a person to actually pass through.

The caverns have no unifying orientation. Some are longer, others are taller, and many are oriented on an incline. Most are relatively ellipsoidal (in a very coarse sense), but others are kidney-shaped, prismatic, or planar.

There is no present-day geothermal activity, and no seismic instability at least on the short timescale that the Hollows have been inhabited by Gala. The temperature patterns inside are rather complicated, so I won't get into them in detail here, but a generally accurate description is "very cool."

We Haven't Even Scratched the Surface

That's all for this week, yet we haven't even scratched the surface. Join me next week when I talk about the upper and lower entrances to the Hollows, give a brief anthropological history of the Hollows, and talk about the purpose of Galan development in the Hollows.

Until then, may your own underworld be a pleasant one.

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