OrphanimSenior Contributor
World and Character building to express oneself: An anecdote!
I am a creative person and have been since I was young, though I only really started exploring it in my late teenage years. I've always enjoyed creating fictional worlds and characters to express myself, and even in the darkest depths of my depression (roughly 2012 through to 2016), I still utilised this ability of mine to express my emotion and my pain in fictional characters and the setting they lived in. This will probably be a huge wall of text, but I have pictures to go with it! It might serve for me to warn that the content is surreal and at times horrific in nature. Being in the depths of depression, I didn't shy away from violent imagery and language.
I have never gotten around to naming the particular world I created during those years: It's a surreal, post-apocalyptic vision of the world when the sheer excess of humanity's population caused a societal, spiritual and social collapse.
A panorama of locations from the world: The city is called the Twilit Gilt, which is shadowed from above by Galactic Guppy, the space fish. In the far distance is the Screaming Hinterlands, a craggy wasteland of wailing figures. In the foreground is the Graveyard Gardens, with two characters I'll introduce later.
In this fictional world, the Sun and the Moon are both living, anthropomorphised creatures who are best friends. They often absentmindedly abandon the world to an eternal twilight while they chase and play with each other, hence the near-universal grey colours I use. There is only one city left in the world, which is called the Twilit Gilt. It is bathed in constant darkness thanks to Galactic Guppy, the space fish, who is floating above it: Guppy is injured and cannot move. The Gilt takes its name from stagnant rivers of loose coinage, mainly pennies, that clog its streets: Now mostly useless.
There are a number of secondary areas surrounding the Gilt: To its north is the Graveyard Gardens, which are rolling hills of grass and the occasional tree, dotted with countless headstones. Further to the north is Cyclopean Highlands, a mountainous region that used to be home to a kingdom of cyclops creatures. Now all that remains there is ruins and the last witch queen of Cyclopea, Quetri, who plots revenge against the giant, infant creature, Spipsy, which destroyed her kingdom. To the east of the Gilt is the Crystalline Lowlands, a formerly subterranean area filled with large outcroppings of quartz. In the centre of the lowlands, a massive, fuming vortex of wind and fog swirls upwards, carrying the land that used to sit atop the quarts on top of it. This floating area of land used to be the coastline, and is covered with skeletons of fish and other sea creatures. Somewhere to the south, there is the Screaming Hinterlands, a place where ear protection is necessary. To the West, there is nothing.
A large part of my fictional world is Imbliss (purgatory, effectively), the land of the dead and spirits. Heaven and Hell either do not exist in this world or no longer exist. It's a surreal place composed of vast, underground car parks, tunnels made of lead with rivers of mercury, and pathways of white light surrounded by an all-consuming black void.
The universe in this fictional world is geocentric, meaning that the Earth is in the very centre of everything. Outside the physical world, which is the Earth and the space around it, is the ethereal realm of Imbliss.
Beyond that is the scattered demon worlds; in this fiction, demons are spirits that exist as a sentient, thinking area of space that can control the laws of the universe within themselves. To simplify this notion, imagine the demon as an amoeba: a shapeless, living blob that can alter its form by flowing like liquid. Within its 'body' it can appear as whatever is appropriate to its nature, such as a grassy plain with a house, and interact with its own self using a physical avatar that communicates its intent and personality. Similarly, demons can interact with the physical realm by pushing out an extension of their bubble until it 'pierces' the through both Imbliss and the physical world, which then allows them to manifest an avatar upon the Earth. This is strenuous, however.
I'm beginning to ramble a little here: Once I start writing, I find it hard to stop.
In my next post, I'm going to talk about the characters that inhabit the world, mortal or otherwise. I'm just going to have some food and rest my hands for a bit first!
