Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.
15 October 1018
17 Rue Thomas, Toulouse
My dearest cousin Armand,
Since I last wrote, Maximilian and I have been pondering our discoveries regarding the ley lines of Cumbria and Provençe. We know that for the route from Yorke to Toulouse, the current correction to the best chart is 1º, 22′ and 27″ to starboard. We know that the ley lines we have surveyed will join perfectly—most of them—if we presume a correction of 9 º, 43′, and 12″.
We have had so many questions!
Our first question was, what has been the rate of change in this correction angle, and given that, how long has it taken the Lands of the Abyss to come to their current positions? It is a tricky question, for we have discovered that the change in the factor is not smoothly in one direction. Over the sixty-some years since MacCauley & Sons published their chart, it has changed by nearly a degree and a half in total, though it has varied somewhat in a two steps forward, one step back kind of fashion. But if we assume the total change over sixty years to be a typical rate, then the ley lines last matched up a little over 500 years ago.
We were nonplussed. The history of that time is reasonably well known; and though many interesting events occurred between, say, six-hundred fifty and five-hundred fifty years ago, nothing particular is recorded regarding the positions of the Old Worlds relative to one another. We must presume, therefore, that whatever event is responsible for the destruction of the nodal formings happened much earlier than that. It is possible that the ley lines did match up neatly at about that time, but if so it would seem to be happenstance.
Our other conclusions to date have, like this one, been every bit as solid as the Abyss; but yesterday Dr. Laguerre asked two questions that should have occurred to us months ago.
Question the first: we know the angle of match-up; but what was the distance when Cumbria and Provençe were last in that attitude? Were they closer together or farther away from each other than they are now?
And question the second: might they have been so close that one could pass between them on foot? Might the distances have been bridgeable, or might they even have been so close as to touch?
Her voice was quiet and sober when she posed these questions; our voices in response were not, for she quite put the cat among the pigeons.
We have now formed two competing conjectures.
First, what if the purpose of the ley lines was to bind the Lands of the Abyss—the Old Worlds, I mean, not more remote Lands like Armorica—into a single Land, thereby encouraging trade in a time when abyssal navigation was much less advanced? Might they have been placed so as to bind the Lands close together? If so, it must have been quite the amazing feat!
Our second is a rather more terrifying prospect. What if, in antiquity when the ley lines and their nodal points were constructed, all the Old Worlds formed a single Land? What if the nodal formings were not destroyed by the hand of man, but failed catastrophically? What if that failure fractured that single Ancient Land into fragments, producing the lands we know now, with who knows what loss of life?
And in that case one must ask, what was the function of the ley lines in that Ancient Land?
Or perhaps there was some as yet unknown catastrophe, of which both the Ancient Land and its ley lines were the victim?
We returned to our lodgings in a state of high excitement, and immediately took the relevant charts from MacCauley & Sons utterly to pieces; yes, and then spent the next several hours assembling them and reassembling them like a jigsaw puzzle.
We cannot be certain, not without continuing our survey along the edges of Cumbria, Provençe, Malague, and so forth. But speaking solely of the edges we have surveyed, it indeed seems possible that they once fit snugly together.
That is, it seems possible that they once fit snugly together if we assume that a certain quantity of land was lost in the catastrophe. And more: when we do so, the ley lines that do not match up intersect in places where, according to this theory, land is missing—that is, in places where there might once have been nodal points.
Oh, Armand! I am all aflutter even writing such words. What calamities I am envisioning! And how far I have come from the simple miss who was sent down to Wickshire because she pushed a suitor into the duck pond. I who most shockingly became a student of wizardry and then a student of cartography must now, it seems, because a student of history as well. I sometimes think my head must burst from it. (Maximilian, for his part, tells me that if that were a danger my head must have burst long since—a proposition with which I fear you and Brother Jack would be only too quick to agree.)
Your curious and inquisitive, not to say peculiar, cousin,
Amelia
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Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash
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