Setting the Stage


Setting the Stage

Faeolian

A moonless night is a night that all wise men ought to fear. Teccam nails it to the wall and Felurian echoes his words so that Kvothe cannot help but hear, ‘a wise man views a moonless night with fear’. She also tells us that this is the time most acceptable for the fae to pay a visit to mortal for the night…and so maybe, just maybe, some of them walk among us tonight! Bast does have a ‘lovely’ pair of boots, or does he? He is a fae in mortal so perhaps other fae are similarly disguised nearby, dressed in traditional tinkers robes perhaps, or more fully glamoured and wearing dresses fit for a queen, and all the time knowing enough not to be seen. It is nice to think that perhaps one or two or even three of the occasional visiting fae are going to be music lovers, like Felurian is partial to a song or two herself, and maybe one or two of them might be found among the audience tonight? Lured across the divide by the promise of fine faerie song… Perhaps Kvothe isn’t the only one in the room that has ‘a bit of fae about him…’ it might even be ‘faedies’ night!

Pat is nothing but exact when setting a scene, he has done so before. There is a floorplan for the waystone Inn for you to draw off in Pub Crawl, and the Aeolian is equally well described, or well enough for us to make a few rough etches of it at least. And what we see is quite revealing. ;o)

First of all, to discover how they might arrive remember that there is the greystone by Stonebridge and there is much evidence of the fae using such stones to come and go, as Felurian and Kvothe passed greystones when crossing between the two worlds. We should also mention the statue and the fountain in the square outside which is a very pagan scene of a satyr and nymph’s, the faen folk in their more natural form dancing and cavorting and ting. It’s as good as a signpost that shows the Eolian to be in a rather enlightened neighbourhood to erect such a pagan landmark since Imre is a town where folk frown upon the warlocks meddling with dark powers across the river, yet are happy with such a classical pagan fountain. The church may well have had something to say about that, but the commonwealth church is strongest in Tarbean and Imre has a much more Bohemian atmosphere, until someone starts summoning demons on the cobbles that is, But that’s when they call upon the Iron Law of the Commonwealth instead of that of the Tehlin Church.

A Game of Corners

Passing Deoch a jot at the door, we step into the auditorium and can see the stage opposite. But we want to be taking in an architects view of the room, an overhead shot, and so a compass rose should be used to navigate the page. Draw one in the far corner of your paper. The stage is going to be imagined as being against the Western wall because tonight Kvothe has chosen to turn his back to the University and focus on his musi The Easterly side of the room puts us high up in the Gods, which will be found at the furthest and therefore the highest point from the stage that there is, up on high where one can more privately observe everything that occurs below . At the Eolian this is the third seating level and it is described as being a crescent shape hugging three walls so draw such a shape on your paper in the form of a thick backward Ͻ. Don’t worry about scale as it just needs to touch three outside walls and so the cresent shold run in a thick curve from the North, down and round through East and on to the South. It is not very deep but it provides a counter stage for Denna to sing from, as her and Sovoy had their table here on the top floor.

The second floor is larger, a converted balcony with the rows of seats ripped out to be replaced by tables. It is certainly jutting further out into the room than the crescent but not more than halfway across the room so as not to obstruct the eyeline view of the stage from the seats above. Halfway is an appropriate enough number for us to use to use to divide the room in two for our two performers to sing their duet. For individual floor plans we might want to use a new sheet of paper, but for now we want to see an overhead view and so you should draw a D shape superimposed above our crescent using the same three exterior walls for sizing.

Deoch’s door is across the ground floor across from the stage. Let’s say the south east corner, and so Stanchion sits at the opposite north west corner, between the stage and the bar. The room is dominated by the curving mahogany bar, which is 50 ft long and follows the curve of the North wall as if bends away from the stage. This is the only real measurement we get, but since the walls and stage are being dictated from above the shape that will fit best here is a rainbow to run across the top of our map for 50ft. Stanchion sits on his stool at the far end like a Leprachaun guarding the stairs to the stage itself, which also curves, but back out into the room making it look like a bite out of an apple, or maybe a lemon. Of course the curving wall will continue to curl around behind him whilst he plays until it rejoins the room and is therefore seen to be ellipse lying flush with the curving Eastern wall.

Now. Spiralling is a useful word for Pat to use to describe the staircases as it relies upon them following a rising curve around the edges of our room to reach the balcony on the second floor above . Since this is an overhead view we are sketching we can clearly see that our room is going to be circular in it’s footprint for it to accommodate these several staircases and so we can confidently finish the curving outline with symmetrical assurance with a matching rainbow to run back around past the doorman and until it reaches the start of the curving mahogany bar again.

The eOlian is clearly a cylindrical building with a circular overall footprint and we can complete out floor-plan with a large O encompassing both of the other two floors.

When viewed like this, stacked ‘one a’top t’other’ the room turns into something vaguely resembling the cross section of an eyeball. Where the door is the optic nerve and the stage is the pupil, the place where Kvothe will stand and be judged, a bit like when he was brought up on the horns.

OCD

A better observation can be made from drawing these three floor shapes side by side for comparison, where we can now see that they have translated themselves into a different but still recognizable pattern which if we are observant we will remember seeing somewhere else in these books. The three floors of the eOlian are shaped as the runes O D Ͻ and are therefore also shaped like the phases of the moon.

Full Moon, Half moon, Sliver moon. ODϽ just like we see painted above Haliax on the Mauthern pot.

Popular posts from this blog

Pub Crawl

PubCrawl The Rising Sun. On the wall in Pat’s office there must be a map of the Waystone Inn since all of the individual mentions of the pubs layout correlate perfectly with each other and thus to this master architects blueprint. It is a device used by the writer so that he doesn’t get confused one day and accidently have someone go through a door that isn’t there or have the sun rising in the West. The Sun of Temerant rises in the East, just like in our world, although that was a very small crumb to finally track down in a very big book. But find it I did and that gives us a place to start our pub crawl and to see if we cannot recreate Pat’s clever map for ourselves. Long after I had first fallen down the rabbit hole, and my re-reads were somewhere in double figures, I started to collect notes for easy reference, I can barely make sense of my own scrawl now but they aren’t that important really once you learn your way around. It was during one of these re-reads that I jotted down all...
Read more

Act 1 Scene 1

It wasn't much of a church to begin with, but then Newarre wasn't much of a town. It didn't take long to burn down and It was already a lost cause before the first of the townsfolk arrived on the scene "It were Blue, I tell you." Insisted Old Cob, " "Blue! and it lit up the sky like a beacon for miles around. Everyone must have seen it! I saw it meself with my own eyes from Shep's front porch. ." "Now Really, Cob" said Hap shovelling another shovelfful of dirt towards the edge of the flames, "This hain't a time to be spinning yarn. 'how much did you drink at the wake last night? "  "You tell him Jake, tell him what we saw."  Jake looked uncomfortable. Staring daggers at his friend. "Aye, " Jake admitted "it did look a bit Blue at first, but after that lightning struck it were just normal fire again." "After? I thought it were the lightning what started it" "Well I only saw ...
Read more

Dictum

Dictum Tangles Dictum ‘Seven. You can hold to that with some certainty. It’s part of their name, actually. Chaen means Seven. Chaen-dian means “Seven of them”.Chandrian. Now Ben is university educated, and that is where he has learned a bit of ancient Temic, a language that predates ‘the old Tema that only priests know’ by a thousand years. But we should also remember that the university is Amyr run, and that they are at least as old as Thelu’s first priests and would also speak the old language of the world. Furthermore, nothing Amyr influenced should be taken at face value in these books, or indeed in their own books, and Dian is not Drian just as Chaen is not Chan. Inconsistancies indicate errors and given that Pat has stated that he poured an awful lot of time and thought into creating names for this language, and since Names Are Important, it is only fair that I do the same in order to decipher it back again, and I would expect things to be error free. The Chaendrian are a groupe ...
Read more