The Stonewater Kingdom

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Let's get into The Name of the Moon.

Let's go over some places old and new.

We have Castle Ulrich in the Stonewater Kingdom.

Crazy that when we first heard about this castle, I made a Knight's Tale joke because of Ulrichstein.

into a sprite? Well, that would be interesting.

The Stonewater Kingdom shall end as it began, fractured, bloody.

I guess we just don't really know how it began.

We don't really know the beginning of the Stonewater Kingdom.

I'm curious how she's going to wrap this up in a book.

A short book at that.

Knave and

the Moon, second book in the Stonewater Kingdom.

Yeah.

Love a duology.

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It's only available while we're covering the series, so be sure to grab yours before our time in the Stonewater Kingdom has come to an end.

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Okay.

The second book in the Stonewater Kingdom duology.

So the first one was The Night in the Moth.

We did an episode on that one.

The first book is kind of about the stories that exist in the world and how those stories can sometimes be used for propaganda, can be used by systems of power.

Ashen Cathedral is like the hierarchy of power in the Stonewater Kingdom and how the story the abbess tells about the gods, the omens, is quite harmful in the grand scheme of things.

And so the night in the moth ends and this sort of system is reduced to ruins in a lot of ways.

And so now the question is, well, what now? What story do we tell ourselves? How do we rebuild something that's completely utterly crumbled? And so I think I just think a lot about hope in this story.

However, that is something I don't write off the seat of my pants.

For the Shepard King duology, I kind of wrote out the Old Book of Alders for myself, wrote out each card, what they look like, what they do, the price of using them, all that stuff.

And then the same for the stone objects in the Stonewater Kingdom.

And I will say the thing that I really like about physical objects is that Anyone can use them.

much larger history as a genre definer than me, but I will say there are tenets of gothic that I engage in, which is like... being haunted, not only just by one's environment, but by, like, a past thing.

So for the Shepard King duology being this sort of, like, entity that we discuss, or even for the Stonewater Kingdom with the omens, like, the feel that there are eyes and, like, a past and a haunting presence is essential.

And also just...

Mist and all those things like a world that's unsettling and that feels like it could be dangerous is essential as well.

And I also love that your settings, like in Shepherd King duology, we see kind of a much smaller setting.

They really kind of stay in their town.

And then in the Stonewater Kingdom, we get this expansive travel, the different hamlets.

What goes into building those worlds? Like how do you get these ideas and piece them together?