World of TEOTE #4: Environmental Storytelling
Welcome to World of The Essence of the Equinox, a series exploring the worldbuilding, influences and ideas behind my completed gothic fantasy trilogy.
In this fourth instalment, I’d like to talk about the ways in which I use the environment in the series as a narrative device.
Life and Death: Building Soleterea and Mortos
This most recent essay is coming to you by a post on Tumblr that sparked the thought in my mind. Nature is fundamentally important to crafting the appropriate setting and atmosphere for each novel in The Essence of the Equinox. Some of it is indulgence—I will never deny myself an unnecessarily elaborate description of a beautiful dinner—but much of it is doing narrative work.
Mainly, to strengthen the dichotomy between solarite vs occassi. Soleterea vs Mortos. By directly contrasting what they’re like as countries. The sorts of environments that would give birth to such creatures and allow them to thrive. Of course, I could simply tell you what an awful horror-show Mortos is and how idyllic and heavenly Soleterea is—but I’m not confident it would land the same as if I’d shown you through the weather, the food, the flora and fauna.
For instance, compare and contrast this:
The lemon grove was warm and honey-soaked in the late evening sun as partygoers danced in swishing skirts of silks and chiffon. The grounds were bedecked with enchanted white chocolate canaries that flitted from table to table to escape the delighted squeals of hunting children. Strings of ætherald crystal lights hung from citrus trees, and a sprite ensemble played melodies for the masses who paid attention to nothing else.
With this:
Dominus escorted her through the ossified frames of coniferous trees into the thick of the taiga. The air was stiff as a corpse. No traces of wildlife remained beyond the lumps of dead animals that had struggled and lost against the snowfall, frozen in their final fleeing pose.
To me, the images conjured are very stark. Soleterea, teeming with life and sunlight and the squealing laughter of children hunting down enchanted chocolate canaries—to Mortos, silent as the grave, stiffened from winter chill, smothered beneath the funereal sheet of snow.
In this, you can observe that these are very different areas of the world and know what to anticipate from them. When Laila leaves Soleterea to travel to Mortos, you can tell how far she is from home and how out of her element she is. Contrast this with Dominus who, too, cannot stand much of the heat and the noise—it’s incompatible with him. And that further strengthens their incompatibility with each other. Particularly, when juxtaposed to the far more chameleonic Darius.
When Geography Creates Politics
Equally, the usage of food is vitally important, since Mortos’s scarcity and Soleterea’s abundance forms the central conflict between their two nations. Soleterea’s food is luxurious, made with an assortment of herbs, spices and edible flowers:
She kept passing him dishes in apology as they came: small towers of saffron risotto, figs wrapped in cured ham, heavenly cheesecakes topped with red berries and pansy flowers.
Whereas Mortos’s food is mainly offal or seafood with a much more limited range of ingredients that all need to be pickled and preserved for unnatural periods to stave off mass starvation:
However, winter had dwindled them down to a more modest offering: hot blood soup served with onion and flecks of putrid cheese, marrow roasted soft in its bone and smeared with chive butter and a dollop of caviar.
Soleterea’s abundance makes possible its luxury, technological development and relative stability, whereas Mortos’s scarcity encourages preservation, competition and eventually covetousness. When Mortos looks south, it doesn’t simply see a foreign country. It also sees resources to extract.
Environment therefore becomes one of the engines of the central conflict. The landscape isn’t scenery surrounding the politics. It helps produce the politics.
When the Landscape Mirrors the Characters
It’s for this reason I also chose a more panoramic filter with the omniscient perspective. One that is highly concerned with not just the characters but what’s surrounding the characters. The fact that Laila is asleep in the Citadel in a white nightgown might seem inconsequential until you realise it’s a set-up for her being encroached by the spectres residing in the walls, trying to warn her of the dangers she is blind to.
Gothic fiction has a long tradition of allowing the natural world to reflect psychological and emotional states—a form of pathetic fallacy that I use throughout the trilogy. Hence, you get the heavy snowfall trapping Laila and Dominus in enclosed space and forcing their bond to deepen
The skies were lined with snowflakes large as coins in the coming days, leaving increasingly bounteous piles on the ground below. Dominus spent two weeks nursing Laila back to full health under her instruction by keeping her wrapped up from the cold, placing her by the window at dusk to soak up twilight, and catching morning dew in bowls, which he heated to her liking.
And then them drifting apart the more spring and summer break through that glacial imprisonment.
Only when she saw the moss-bearded remnants of the lodge in the distance did she realise: this was the forest she began in. This was the same forest trail, the same unfathomable trees. How alien it looked to her now it had shed its white winter coat.
This lends very striking visual imagery to the particularly imaginative readers who become immersed by detail. It can also be fun for them to look back on if they’re the type to re-read books to absorb further meaning from them, to catch things they might have missed the first time round.
Ultimately, I don’t think of setting as the space in which the story happens. In The Essence of the Equinox, setting is one of the ways the story speaks. The imagery is just another device I can utilise to convey expectations, but also play with and subvert them. Soleterea is a particularly good setting for this, because it lures you into a false sense of security with its beauty and fair weather. So you don’t quite expect anything truly wrong to happen here. Not the way you might with Mortos.
The world isn’t a backdrop to The Essence of the Equinox. It’s another character telling you what to expect—and occasionally lying to you about it.
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When the Stars Alight is the first novel in The Essence of the Equinox, my completed gothic fantasy trilogy about a star-born princess, the future king of demons and a love affair that collides with politics, power and the fate of their worlds.
Start with When the Stars Alight →
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Previous: #3 — What Would Female Freedom Look Like? Creating the Solarites
Next: #5 — Upcoming
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