As an update to progress, I plan completion of Draványa phonetics some time later this week. Vowels are done in draft but require revision, and consonants are mapped out but not yet written up. One consequence of this effort will be that Ytherra itself will finally be restored to its original home in Draványa.

I’m also re-reading The Lord of the Rings, in bits and pieces, this time in an attempt to dissect certain aspects of Tolkien’s approach to presenting his world. Along with that is a bit of light research on the subject of mythopoeia, which is one aspect of Ytherra as an ongoing project. However, the framework around which Ytherra is built is primarily naturalistic, rather than mythological as was Tolkien’s. One might draw a closer comparison with M. A. R. Barker’s Tékumel, but again, I have striven to present a more familiar and less alien environment than that brilliant creation.

The subject of literary and historical “influences” on Ytherra is a subject that it worth exploring, in fact. And I’ll probably do it at greater length once I’m able to present it in a less inchoate form. It’s fair to say, though, that Ytherra did not arise in a vacuum, and so many works and events have made their mark on it. One can see, for example, a certain Roman Empire influence in Arál Draván, although there’s really just as much from pre-industrial China and ancient Egypt, along with a healthy dose of various fantasy empires. Too, many themes explored after Ytherra’s inception have never been properly stated in print.

Arál Draván is the last, and also the oldest, of the three great empires of Ytherra’s history. One, the Selurean Kingdom, fell to plague, war and perhaps unnameable forces, while the other, Imperial Mánthezar, was cast down in a cataclysm of its own making. Shreds remain of both, but their glories are gone – only Arál Draván, seemingly eternal, remains. One theme, thus, is the facade of immortality found in every culture by those who are in it. Yet another is that of progress, and how it cannot be stopped, only delayed.

Ytherra’s history is long, and much of it is preserved in at least fragmentary writings from the earliest times, for Man is not native to Ytherra and was introduced by external forces that gave it a technological boost here and there. But with ten millennia of human history one might assume a certain cultural conservatism… which would be accurate for a variety of reasons. Even so, there is progress and evolution, and no time in which those things stood utterly still. Arál Draván did not spring forth ex nihilo, and so too the modern nation little resembles the union of cities under Zhómach the Founder. What has endured is the Dravánin cultural identity, and this is where Arál Draván resembles China far more than it does Imperial Rome. Dravánin culture changes, yes, sometimes only slowly but occasionally in spasms of evolution and even in violence, but Dravánin identity endures through Emperors that are autocrats or figureheads, despite temples and faiths that wax and wane in power, or even vanish entirely into the mists of history, and in the face of the technological vicissitudes of four millennia.

A major part of Ytherra’s development, then, is to chart and map those changes. There is no stasis. All is in motion… and as we join the story, some forces have been in motion longer than man’s reign on that world.