intricate fantasy worlds | Stephanie Flint

I’m finally getting around to repurposing some of my older newsletter sneak peeks and behind the scenes notes into blog posts!

To start with, we’ll delve into the lore of the Wishing Blade Universe…

I have a lot of fun when working on the world of the Wishing Blade, both with Cirena, and with the Cantingen Islands. While Cirena is the mainland, the Cantingen Islands are to its southeastern shore, though more distant than my map would suggest.

A grayscale fantasy map primarily focused on Cirena. — This is an older version of the map, but not the earliest version of the map.

First, Cirena does tend to be a bit Cirena-centric.

Second, my sense of scale when I originally designed the map was not great. But I was thirteen… so… yeah… Later map designs have gotten considerably more realistic.

Third, I already published it so I’m going to role with my mistakes and, despite Cirena being roughly the size of Missouri and still having a large degree of biome diversity, it’s totally fine because there are mythological reasons that I will eventually get to in later stories and that I’ve already started hinting at in the Legends of Cirena stories.

Speaking of which, one of the aspects I find so enjoyable when writing fantasy is the magic systems, and today, I’m going to focus on word magic. Mostly because word magic means I get to create a language. (For better or worse, because I probably should be writing when I’m busy translating in-world poetry into Cantingen. You get to see the results of that in Wind and Words.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to examine a few tidbits regarding the Cantingen language.

Let’s look at Madia… the goddess of the dead. In Cirena, they call her Madiya… slight pronunciation difference due to regional separation.

But in the Cantingen language, madi is a verb that means “to plan,” “to set a course,” or “to plot.”

Conjugated, it looks something like this:

Madia – I plan

Madiat – You plan (a human “you”)

Madian – You plan (imperative, used for word magic purposes)

Madion – He plans

Madiol – She plans

…and there’s actually several other conjugated forms, but for now I’ll spare you the details.

So, Madia’s name literally translates to “I plan.”

Is it any wonder, then, that everyone from the Cantingen Islands is always going on about her plans?

* * *

A spell to infuriate the goddess of the dead…

Read more about Madia and word magic in the Stone and String series: