Vael is a world old enough to have forgotten most of its own history — and something ancient is counting on that. Two continents, six nations, and half a dozen peoples share a planet given life by a yellow dwarf star the faithful call Epherion, and what he started, something else has spent four thousand years quietly trying to undo. Wars are its agriculture. The dead are its harvest. And the men and women raised to oppose it have mostly forgotten why they exist.

The Tales

• The Signet is the first serialized novel in the setting.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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Shaetan — The Imprisoned

Shaetan is the very essence of evil. Not a god of a particular dark domain — not merely death or shadow or war — but of evil itself, undifferentiated and total. His goal is not conquest or power or the remaking of the world in his image. His goal is the ending of all things. Not just Vael. Everything.

He was sealed away by the gods of Vael. The specifics of how and at what cost are not fully recorded. He cannot physically manifest in the world — but he can be drawn briefly into it, for at most a minute, if the right incantation is spoken. Those words circulate in Vael as a children’s rhyme. Most people who recite it around a campfire feel a chill they cannot explain. Those who know what it actually does do not recite it at all.

Shaetan is the novel’s deepest background presence, because the Usurper — the primary antagonist of The Signet — is his instrument. His reach into a world he cannot enter. The army of the Unfinished, the stolen lives, the thousands of years of patient cultivation: these are not the Usurper’s goals. They are Shaetan’s. And the Knights Celestial were raised by Epherion specifically to oppose not just the Usurper, but what the Usurper serves.

The war has been going on longer than most nations. It is not over.

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Verna — The Green Mother

Verna is the goddess of harvest, nature, seasons, animals, and the living world in all its immediate, personal forms. Where Epherion is the source of life at the cosmic scale, Verna is the expression of it at the human one — the field that feeds a family, the forest that shelters a village, the turning of seasons that structures a year.

She was not made. She accrued — emerging from the world as it began to grow under Epherion’s gift, the way warmth emerges from fire. Her worship is among the oldest in Vael, predating most formal theology by a significant margin, running beneath other religious practices in many communities without anyone much noticing. Her temples are often gardens. Her clergy are as likely to be found working the land as leading ceremonies. She is the god you encounter most often without naming. The Unfinished — people killed before their time — represent a kind of desecration of her domain that her clergy have not yet fully theologically processed. Neither have I, honestly.

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Tement — The Furious

Tement is the god of war, fury, and elemental violence — present on every side of every battle, answering every invocation equally, indifferent to the cause in whose name he is called. He is not the god of righteous war or holy war. He is simply the god of war, which is to say he was there when your side won and there when you lost, and he would like you to understand that the outcome was yours, not his.

He is neutral, loud, and possesses aspects of all four elements — earth, air, fire, water — which makes him one of the most powerful figures in the pantheon and one of the most theologically uncomfortable. His followers ask him not for victory but for fury: the elemental force to endure and to fight. What happens after that is the soldiers’ responsibility. I find this honest in a way that most gods of war aren’t.

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Paraphim — The Lord of Shadow

Paraphim is the androgynous god of trickery, deception, shadows, and the hidden. Monikers include Lord of Shadow, Master of Thieves, Dealer of Deception, and — among certain adherents — Blade in the Dark. Paraphim’s gender is deliberately and permanently unresolved, and the god has never corrected the one third of followers who use masculine pronouns, the one third who use feminine, or the one third who use something deliberately ambiguous. This is either a theological statement or entirely characteristic of a god of deception. Possibly both.

Paraphim is not evil — deception is a tool, not an alignment — but the proximity to villainy is undeniable. A child hiding a birthday gift and an assassin approaching unseen are both, technically, operating under the same divine canopy. The god’s worship is private by nature, its temples hidden or disguised, its clergy indistinguishable from ordinary people when they choose to be. The most devoted of Paraphim’s followers may be standing next to you right now. They will not confirm this.

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Abba — The Unchanging

Abba is the goddess of fate, and her name is a palindrome — the same forward as backward. This is not accidental. She is the same at the beginning of an age as at its end, the same to a king as to a beggar. She does not decree outcomes. She holds the shape of things.

Of all the gods in Vael’s pantheon, Abba was the most interesting to write, because she raises an uncomfortable question at the heart of the novel: if she governs fate impartially, what does she make of the Unfinished — people killed before their time, their unlived years stolen? Is an interrupted fate still a fate? Her clergy argue about this in low voices. They have not resolved it. I haven’t either, which feels right.

Her romantic connection to Tement — the god of war and fury — surprises people until they think about it. She values constancy above almost everything. And beneath all of Tement’s fury and noise, he is more constant in his essential nature than most of the pantheon. He is always exactly what he presents himself to be. Abba finds this, in her way, restful.

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Thorm Stormbringer — The Eternal King of the Mountains

Son of Isen and an unnamed astral nymph, Thorm is the god of thunder, lightning, and earthquakes — and one of the few deities worshipped equally by those who live on the surface and those who live beneath it. His domain touches both sky and stone. He appears as a phantasmal colossal figure wielding lightning bolts, and in the Aelvaeni tongues his name translates simply as God of Storms.

The earth Aelvaeni hold him in particular reverence. Earthquakes, after all, move through their element as naturally as lightning moves through air. Thorm is also connected to one of Vael’s great buried secrets — the destruction of the ancient coastal city of Sardis, consumed when the earth aelves of Highhelm dug too deeply toward his inner sanctum. What remains is the Earthmelt: a vast corridor of cooled black rock that forms Thyl’s western border. It is not a natural feature. It is a warning.

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Isen — The Second Moon

Isen is smaller, more distant, and slightly brighter than Ashira — and he lingers in the morning sky just a little longer than she does before yielding to Epherion’s rising. His domains are weather and the seas, and his followers tend to be practical people: sailors, farmers, anyone whose life depends on knowing what the sky intends.

Every three years, Ashira passes before him for three consecutive nights — the Occlusion — during which Isen travels to the astral plane so his son Thorm can visit his mother, an astral nymph who raised the boy on another plane entirely. It is, I admit, a surprisingly tender detail for a god otherwise characterized by cold distance and unpredictable storms. But I think gods should have private lives.

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Ashira — The First Moon

Ashira is the larger of Vael’s two moons, casting warm yellow light across the night sky. She is one of the First Children of Vael — born alongside her twin Isen after Epherion gave Terra the seed of life — and she is the goddess of beauty, stars, and the music of the night.

Her most distinctive observance is the Moment of Mourning: each morning, as Epherion rises and outshines her, her followers wake early to watch her set and weep. It is a grief without tragedy, repeated daily. I love this detail because it captures something true about beauty — that its passing is part of what makes it matter. Whether Ashira and Isen are siblings, lovers, or both depends entirely on who you ask, and where you are in Vael when you ask it.

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Epherion — The Life-Giver

Epherion is, technically speaking, a star. A yellow dwarf, to be precise — the sun around which Vael revolves, the source of all warmth, all light, all life. Whether he is also a being — conscious, purposeful, capable of care — is a question Vael’s philosophers have been arguing about for centuries, and I deliberately left it unresolved when I began the novel. But the novel had other ideas.

What is not in dispute is his primacy. Every living thing on Vael exists because Epherion gave the planet the seed of life. He is worshipped as the god of fire, light, gold, and purity — and by some traditions, of law and order, the principle that the cosmos runs on rules you can trust. He also founded the Knights Celestial as a direct foil to the Usurper, and extends a thread of immunity through the Wentworth bloodline. Whether that constitutes intention or simply the nature of light — that it goes where it goes and illuminates what it illuminates — I’ll let the reader decide.

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Amblefell: A Brief History

Amblefell is one of the oldest cities in Bravia, although most Bravians are not even aware of its existence because it is not populated by Humans or Urukesh.

It is populated by the diminutive and reclusive race known as the Aelvani.

It is a vast settlement carved into and around a subterranean cavern of remarkable scale, tucked into the western reaches of the Dragonspire Mountains. It has stood for longer than most Bravian institutions care to calculate, and its architecture reflects centuries of expansion outward from a single central chamber so large that its earliest inhabitants reportedly spent several weeks simply establishing where its walls were.

The city takes its name from its discoverer: an earth aelf called Amble.

Now, when a city is named after a person, you generally assume that person did something significant. Planted a flag. Drew a map. Gave a rousing speech about destiny and potential. Made some kind of impression on the place, or the place on them.

Amble was walking.

He had been walking for some time — not unusual for an earth aelf of his era, for whom long solitary traversals of underground passages were a perfectly ordinary way to spend an afternoon. What was somewhat less ordinary was that the passage he happened to be traversing ended, without particular warning, in a cavern of truly extraordinary dimensions. High-ceilinged. Naturally ventilated. Threaded with underground rivers. Possessed of a floor space that would, within a few generations, accommodate a city of considerable size and importance.

He discovered all of this on the way down.

It was his relatives, arriving some time later to determine what had become of him, who first properly surveyed the cavern. They named it after Amble. It is not recorded whether they considered this a tribute or simply an accurate description of events.

The city endures regardless.

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Drakkar — The Desert Nation

Drakkar has made a civilization out of scarcity and turned that civilization into something formidable. Its interior is largely desert — hot, dry, and dramatic — but its capital Drakkaris sits on the western coast where sea breeze and trade make life not merely possible but rich. It is almost certainly Estia’s most important southern port, and the great libraries and academies of Drakkaris are among the finest repositories of knowledge in Vael.

Drakkar values learning, hospitality, and the keeping of one’s word with equal seriousness. Scholarship is a mark of status. To harm a guest is one of the gravest social violations the culture recognizes. Its military is fast, disciplined, and shaped by generations of desert warfare — not the largest in Vael, but among the most experienced at sustained operations across vast and unforgiving distances.

The desert interior likely contains ruins of civilizations that did not survive the long patience of the sand. What they knew, and what Drakkar’s scholars have or haven’t found, is a thread I expect to pull on eventually.

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Kirano — The Long View

Kirano has been civilised — in the sense of organised, administered, and culturally sophisticated — for longer than most of Vael can remember. It carries that history with a quiet confidence that other nations sometimes mistake for arrogance. It is not arrogance. It is simply the ease of a people who know who they are.

It also disputes Thyl’s creation claim, and does so with scholarly rigour. In the Kiranoise account, Epherion did not plant a tree — he descended to the Eastern Peaks and set his World Anvil in the deep rock, forging the Aelvaeni deliberately from the elements of Vael itself: earth aelves shaped from stone, fire aelves hammered from heat and bright metal, water aelves drawn from the mineral richness of the deep sea, air aelves blown into being from the breath of the bellows. Creation, in the Kiranoise understanding, is not a matter of where leaves fall. It is an act of craft. Epherion worked.

Chenguer Baojin — one of The Signet‘s supporting characters — is Kiranoise, and he came to Bravia under a custom worth knowing: in Kirano, a young man must go out into the world and earn his fortune before he becomes eligible to marry. He expected to return home. He found Christine LaPointe instead, and that changed the calculation considerably.

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Elindor — The Ancient Forest

Elindor is old in a way its people feel in their bones. The forests here predate the nations, predate the roads, predate almost everything built on top of them — and the Elindori have never quite forgotten that. It is a nation of oral tradition and long memory, of clan structures that have survived every attempt to replace them with something more orderly, and of a relationship with the natural world that sits somewhere between reverence and negotiation.

Of the six nations, Elindor has the closest relationship with the Aelvaeni. Earth aelves, water aelves, air aelves — they have all coexisted with humans here long enough that customs and protocols governing that relationship are simply part of how things work. The oral tradition is vast and carefully maintained, and there is a strong argument that Elindor’s lorekeepers hold knowledge about the world’s deeper history that no written record preserves — including, possibly, things about the Usurper that wiser ages chose to remember in story rather than risk losing to fire.

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Corvaire — The Merchant Aristocracy

Corvaire is loud, warm, and intensely focused on reputation — family honour, commercial standing, and the careful management of both. It sits on Oestia’s southern coast, its capital Carathel built at the mouth of a great river where jungle waterways meet the open sea. It is almost certainly Oestia’s busiest port, a city where goods from across Vael pass through many hands before moving on.

Where Thyl looks inward to its forests and courts, Corvaire looks outward to the water. It is a nation of merchants, sailors, artists, and great families who have been arguing with each other about money and honour for generations. Governance here is distributed among those great families and trading houses rather than concentrated in a single crown — which makes it politically distinctive and perpetually interesting. The feuds between houses are cultural institutions. So are the marriages that end them, temporarily.

The jungle interior is largely unmapped beyond the river corridors that serve as Corvaire’s highways. What the deep jungle holds is, as yet, anyone’s guess.

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Thyl — The Cultivated Heart

If Bravia is blunt, Thyl is precise. Sitting at the geographic centre of the western continent, it is Oestia’s most cultivated nation — deep deciduous forests, river-fed farmland, a court culture that prizes refinement and ceremony and the art of statecraft as much as the art of war. Where Bravia remembers, Thyl records.

Thyl also carries a cosmological claim it defends with considerable cultural investment: that Epherion planted the World Tree at the heart of their oldest forest, and from its falling leaves the Aelvaeni were born — earth aelves from fertile ground, air aelves caught by the wind, water aelves carried to the river’s edge, fire aelves landed near ancient flame. The tree still stands, they say. Too deep in the forest to find, too sacred to look for. The Aelvaeni themselves have not settled the argument. Thyl does not particularly care.

Thyl’s western border is defined by the Earthmelt — a vast corridor of cooled black volcanic rock left behind when the ancient city of Sardis was consumed. It is not a natural feature. It is a consequence, and one that certain parties would prefer not to discuss too loudly.

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Bravia — The Home Nation

Bravia is where The Signet is set, and it has the character of a place that has been through things. Cold, frequently overcast, prone to hard winters and long memories — it is a nation of old titles, entrenched hierarchies, and the particular stubbornness of a people shaped by difficult weather and difficult history. Its institutions are ancient. Its capacity for injustice, as the Wentworth family knows intimately, is well established.

It is also capable of correction. That tension — between a system that grinds people down and a system that can, when pressed, acknowledge its own wrongs — is part of what makes Bravia interesting to write in. The Dragonspire Mountains mark its eastern border, separating it from Thyl and providing the backdrop for Philip’s campaign. Stormrest, the northern capital, sits in their shadow. It is a fortress city that has been guarding mountain passes for centuries, and it looks it.

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One of the quieter pleasures of building a fantasy world is deciding what kind of people it produces. Geography shapes culture. Climate shapes character. The same human impulses — toward beauty, toward power, toward belonging — express themselves differently depending on whether you grew up in a frozen highland or a coastal jungle or a city older than most nations.

Vael has six human nations, split across two continents. Here’s what you need to know about each of them — and a little about the world they share.

• The Kingdom of Bravia

• The Thyl Oligarchy

• The Corvaire Aristocracy

• The Kingdom of Elindor

• The Kirano Dynasty

• The Principality of Drakkar

A Note on the Aelvani

The six human nations share Vael with several other peoples, including the Aelvaeni. They appear in The Signet in ways I won’t entirely spoil here — but the two first encountered on the eastern road early in Scarlet’s journey are among the novel’s first clear signals that something older and more dangerous than a land dispute is at work in the world.

What was done to them, and by what, is not a question with a comfortable answer. The war has deeper roots than anyone currently fighting it understands.

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Every fantasy world has a pantheon. When I built Vael’s pantheon, I started with a single principle: the divine should feel as old and indifferent as the cosmos, and yet somehow, quietly, personal.

Here’s who’s watching.

• Abba

• Ashira

• Epherion

• Isen

• Paraphim

• Shaetan

• Tement

• Thorm Stormbringer

• Verna

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The Galactic Essence and the Birth of the Cosmos

The Primordial Beginning

Everything begins with the Galactic Essence — a primordial collection of energy from which all things emerged. What the Galactic Essence is, where it came from, and whether it was itself created are questions that have occupied philosophers across Vael for as long as philosophy has existed.

Some hold that the Galactic Essence was a seed planted in our singleverse by an original creator — a being or force beyond the cosmos itself, whose nature cannot be known from within the thing it made. Some extend this further, arguing that the original creator planted multiple seeds, and that beyond our own singleverse there exist other galaxies, other verses, other worlds entirely — a multiverse of parallel creations. Some go further still, positing infinite seeds spawning an infinite number of galaxies without beginning or end.

These questions are, as the philosopher Tynes argued, both unknown and unknowable. No person has ever seen another verse. No instrument has measured one. The discussion of other verses is a subject of speculative philosophy, and while worth considering in the right setting, the domain of natural philosophy — the things that can be seen, felt, heard, sensed, or known — begins here, with what we have.

The Celestials

In the ancient cosmos before time began, when matter was first birthed by the Galactic Essence, it appeared first as celestials — sent out with great haste from the centre of the galaxy to take positions in the night sky. The celestials came in three primary forms.

The first were the Astrals — great blue wanderers, sent to mark the signs and seasons. They are the largest and most ancient of the celestials, their light the oldest light in the sky.

The second were the Sentinels — lesser celestials, white and numerous, forming the constellations that watch over the world below. Their purpose is to advise, to teach, to offer wisdom and knowledge to those with eyes to read them. The great constellations are not decorative. They are instructional.

The third were the Watchers — yellow and red dwarves in comparison to the Astrals and Sentinels, least of the three types in size and power, sprinkled across the singleverse in great numbers. But the Watchers carried something the others did not: a unique power called life.

A fourth type emerged later. These were the planets — without form and powerless, but numerous. They fled the galactic centre and each found a companion celestial, settling into orbit around it and drawing warmth and energy from their host. Some planets settled around Astrals. Some around Sentinels. But most settled around Watchers. And some planets, selected by their Watcher, received the gift of life.

Epherion and Vael

Epherion is a Watcher — a yellow dwarf star, one of countless thousands scattered across the singleverse, each carrying the seed of life within them.

Vael is our planet. When Vael came out of the Galactic Essence, she settled around Epherion, drawn to his warmth. He gave her the seed of life. She received it, and in time she first birthed the moons Ashira and Isen — and later, all the other creatures of the world.

This is the foundation beneath every creation myth in Vael. When the Thylians speak of Epherion planting the World Tree, they are speaking of a star’s light falling on a living world. When the Kiranoise speak of Epherion setting his anvil beneath the Eastern Peaks, they are speaking of the heat of a sun made manifest in stone. The myths disagree on method and location. They agree, in their deepest grammar, on this: that life came from above, from a light that chose this world, and that what we are began with what Epherion gave Vael, and what Vael made of it.

The Creation of the Aelvaeni

The World Tree and the World Anvil

Two nations claim to be the cradle of life. Two myths explain how the Aelvaeni — the first created people of Vael — came into being. Both centre on Epherion. Both claim the Aelvaeni as his first and finest work. And both cannot be true.

This has not stopped anyone from believing them.

The Thylian Myth — The World Tree

In the beginning, Epherion looked upon Vael and found it without voice. The land had form and the sea had motion, but nothing lived, and a world without life was a world without meaning. So Epherion took a seed from his own light — the same light that had given Vael life — and pressed it into the earth at the heart of what would become Thyl.

From that seed grew the World Tree: vast beyond measure, its roots threading through the stone of the world itself, its canopy touching the lower reaches of the sky. As it grew, it shed. Leaves fell from its highest branches and drifted to the ground, and where each leaf landed, an Aelvaeni stirred into life — small and bright and new, shaped by the element of the ground that received them. Those that fell on fertile earth became earth aelvs. Those caught by the wind before they landed became air aelvs. Those that drifted to the water’s edge became water aelves. And those that fell near the the ancient fires of Elduros, became fire aelves.

The tree still stands, the Thylians say, at the deep heart of their oldest forest — too far in to find, too sacred to look for. It is still shedding. New Aelvaeni are still being born from its falling leaves.

For Thyl, this myth is territorial and cultural claim. If Epherion’s seed was pressed into Thylian earth, then Thyl is the axis of the world. Their forests are sacred. Their nation is the world’s first nation. The myth suits the Thylian character: organic, hierarchical, rooted. Creation here is a matter of grace — of landing in the right place at the right moment.

The Kiranoan Myth — The World Anvil

In the beginning, Epherion looked upon Vael and found it unfinished. A craftsman does not leave work half-done. So Epherion descended to the heart of Estia — to the place beneath the Eastern Peaks where the rock was oldest and the heat of Vael’s core was closest to the surface — and there he set his anvil.

He worked. The World Anvil rang with each stroke, and the sound of it moved through the stone of the world in every direction. From the material of Vael itself — earth and fire and water and air, taken in measure and beaten together — Epherion forged the Aelvaeni. Each subtype was a distinct making: the earth aelf shaped from stone and deep earth, solid and patient; the fire aelf hammered from heat and bright metal, quick and fierce; the water aelf drawn from water and the mineral richness of the deep sea, fluid and knowing; the air aelf blown into being from the breath of the bellows, light and far-ranging.

The World Anvil remains beneath the Eastern Peaks — buried under millennia of stone, but present, and warm to the touch if you know where to press your hand against the mountain.

For Kirano, this myth speaks to its values: creation is not passive, not a matter of where leaves fall. Epherion works. He shapes. The Aelvaeni are intentional, individually crafted, each subtype a deliberate design. The Eastern Peaks are not merely mountains. They are the walls of the world’s first workshop.

Part Three: The Aelvaeni — A People Divided

The Aelvaeni themselves have not resolved the question of their own origin, and different subtypes have landed on different answers.

Earth aelves favour the World Tree. The image of an Aelvaeni stirring to life from a fallen leaf settling into fertile soil speaks to something central in their self-understanding. They were made by landing. They belong to the ground they landed on.

Air aelves are divided, and noisily so. The World Tree gives them romance — the leaf caught by the wind, becoming something aerial in the moment of its suspension. But the World Anvil’s image of Epherion breathing life through the bellows has its own appeal. Air aelf arguments about creation tend to be long and enjoyable for everyone involved except those who wanted a straight answer.

Fire aelves overwhelmingly favour the World Anvil. Fire and the forge are their element — the idea of being hammered into existence at a divine smithy is not merely plausible to them but almost self-evident.

Water aelves lean toward the World Tree, though with reservations. Their hesitation comes from the leaf-landing imagery — they were carried to the water’s edge, which suggests they were not quite intended for it, merely deposited there. Some water aelves find this undignified. The World Anvil at least gives them a deliberate making.

Part Four: What Neither Myth Addresses

Both myths agree that Epherion made the Aelvaeni first, and that he made them from the elements of Vael. Everything else is contested.

What neither myth addresses is the Usurper — the thing that came after creation and set itself against everything Epherion had made. Whether the World Tree or the World Anvil account is true, something emerged to prey upon the life that had been given. The creation myths are stories of beginning. The Usurper is the reason beginnings are not enough.

The Knights Celestial were raised by Epherion as a foil to the Usurper — which means the same star that gave Vael life, that grew the World Tree or set the World Anvil, also looked upon what threatened his creation and responded. Whether he acts through the order still, and whether his protection of the Wentworth bloodline is part of the same long purpose, is a question the stories hold open.

Notes

• Epherion is a yellow dwarf star — the source of all life on Vael, and the power behind both creation myths

• Terra is the planet; Ashira and Isen are its two moons

• The World Tree’s location is unknown — said to be in Thyl’s deep forest, unfindable

• The World Anvil is beneath the Eastern Peaks — buried but possibly accessible

• Tynes is a named philosopher whose work on speculative versus natural philosophy is referenced in the cosmological tradition

• Elindor’s oral tradition may contain a third account, older than both, that neither Thyl nor Kirano acknowledges

• The Usurper’s origin relative to the Aelvaeni’s creation remains an open question

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