Flight Rising Discussion

I've been thinking about prehistoric Sornieth and very slowly drawing concepts of it in Krita, so streams of ideas are hitting me hard like a train wreck every few hours, so I'm gonna... UNLOAD everything into one post.

All of these are based after the pillar shattered, so basically the veryyyy beginning of the Fourth Age when the Shade returned and the ancients were just barely being created and forming their own societies.

Unfortunately, no art because everything looks like super bright red, cyan, lime green squiggly lines over the world map.

But for a read, it's a long list:

1. Ancient Sornieth was an apocalypse. The Shade just returned to the planet, all pollution from it is fresh. All ancients had to deal with that. All of them. Even the tiny Veilspun.
   
2. Ice was the most infested. If the icefield was bigger in the past, with its maximum possible size being half the planet, then that means it would've had the most Shadebeasts and the Gaolers had to clean almost two continents' worth of horrors to get rid of the Shade.
   
3. Prehistoric water was extremely polluted. Plaguebringer and Gladekeeper were fighting alone for an entire era, and then the Shade came back. That ocean should be filled with shadebeasts, algae, aquatic plants, diseases, and contagions. Heck, maybe the wandering contagion had MEAT islands in there.
   
   So when Tidelord came out of the pillar, his main priority would've involved not only reclaiming his home but also purifying it.
   
   In other words, no matter how cool or amazing the water ancient could look like, just remember that its first job in life was to roleplay as an algae eater fish inside a giant aquarium...
   
   except the aquarium is an entire ocean.
   
4. No Twisting Crescendo. We don't actually know when this hurricane was created, but the story events of BOTE show us that the Windswept Plateau is actually a windless region without it. There was a full month without wind, to the point where dragons had to re-activate the Aergate to get around.
   
   But if the Aergate exists, that means the plateau was also windless during the age of the sky dinosaurs.
   
   Maybe the only reason it was "wind" territory because the wind ancients built wind machines or tornados/twisters inside it? It does have a lot of open space. Don't tell me there's not at least one wind tunnel somewhere.
   
5. Wind ancients look like jets in the sky. Despite everything looking like the apocalypse, travelers would've regularly seen wind ancients clearing the dark skies, which likely would've caused a visual effect similar to how we see planes split clouds.
   
   The Windsinger DID create the first wind dragons to cleanse the Shade-infested skies, and said they would be "painting" them.
   
   Given how the Shade is described to leave dark blots in the sky, so every time a wind dragon would destroy it, it should look like they're leaving a path of clear sky and color - as if they're painting.
   
6. Hewn City and the Tangled Wood ruins were not covered in shadow yet. The World Map says the ruins existed before the land was covered by shadow, meaning that they would've looked mostly intact and unobscured up until Shadowbinder returned from the pillar, and whatever catastrophe happened at Hewn City.
   
7. Hewn City had Sornieth's "second sun". This was pointed out by a previous *thread in 2021, but generally speaking, Hewn City has a lot of Shadow-like traits like sunken ground, mixed yellow/purple grass patterns, etc. And based on its proximity to the portal, it likely was a sun-worshipping structure - the opposite to the moon one in Shadow flight.
   
   Though I don't think anyone figured out what it actually looked like yet.
   
   Here's the thing: All concentrations of light are orbs, not liquid like shadow, so there shouldn't be a glowing sun symbol carved into the ground.
   
   Instead, there would've been a HUGE orb of light in Hewn City, which might've been able to shine light through the portal. Possibly atop of the well-like structure at its center?

edit: Using an edited image instead of the map to explain what I mean. re-doing art. Map for now.


There's more ideas/guesses. Banescales probably lived in a much taller volcano (before erosion eroded it down), lower ocean levels (icefield that hasn't shrunk yet) might've meant Earth and Arcane flights had connecting land, etc.

So I'm going nuts with what prehistoric Sornieth could look like. Anyone else ever think about it?

*Also, on the other theory thread: Does anyone remember the discussion thread where people noticed Hewn City looked a LOT more like Tangled Wood (same cloudy effects, etc.) after the world map update? There was a theory where it was very likely shadow flight (veilspuns) intentionally blasted shadow goop all over the city and that's why the portals were shut down? Because I'm noticing some more evidence for that theory and I really want to re-read some things.

Wind was created to get some air flowing, so everyone could breathe. Move the smoke from fire, move oxygen from Nature etc. Gotta circulate!

[quote name="@SCB" date="2022-11-06 16:29:35" ] Wind was created to get some air flowing, so everyone could breathe. Move the smoke from fire, move oxygen from Nature etc. Gotta circulate! [/quote] Windsinger creates some sort of giant air bag to constantly blow wind in a particular direction. If Flamecaller has the planet's "heart" (lava), then Windsinger got dibs on its lungs.

I love posts like these.

Wind ancients are gonna be giant paint brushes, got it

Ooog love these [quote name="KitalphaHart" date="2022-11-06 23:29:03" ] Wind ancients are gonna be giant paint brushes, got it [/quote] And water ancients catfish

[quote name="DoubleO" date="2022-11-06 18:19:25" ] [quote name="@SCB" date="2022-11-06 16:29:35" ] Wind was created to get some air flowing, so everyone could breathe. Move the smoke from fire, move oxygen from Nature etc. Gotta circulate! [/quote] Windsinger creates some sort of giant air bag to constantly blow wind in a particular direction. If Flamecaller has the planet's "heart" (lava), then Windsinger got dibs on its lungs. [/quote] So Earthshaker has the body/muscle and Tidelord has the blood? I like this

tossing in a Hewn City edit because my Shade-infested sky pic didn't pan out well this morning, so... *yeets* [quote name="@KitalphaHart" date="2022-11-06 23:29:03" ] Wind ancients are gonna be giant paint brushes, got it [/quote] yes specifically the paintbrushes with those murderously-sharp, dry bristles gotta paint away the Shade somehow [quote name="@Hippogaia" date="2022-11-06 21:21:54" ] Hmm I wonder what the Windswept plateau was like the last time the Aergate was used... Maybe not windless but instead very gusty, sporadic wind with long periods of lulls. Maybe there were all sorts of aergate-like structures all over the Ancient Windswept Plateau. I would love to see that discovered in a story like Dustcarve Dig! [s]Also when will we get answers on Dustcarve Dig's weird subterranean structures and that pulsing crystal???[/s] [/quote] Thank you for reminding me about the Dustcarve Dig stuff because I 100% forgot about it. I definitely need like... one piece of info on those things, because the best theory I can come up with last night was "parasitic zombie crystals" and I'm half-sure that's not what's going on with prehistoric Earth. ...I refuse to provide context. Back to Wind though, I do agree there were probably multiple structures to generate stronger winds. [quote name="@Pastie" date="2022-11-07 05:06:08" ] I wonder if ancient Wind had the same type of climate as Light does now? Both of them are high lying lands with plenty of plains and sporadic forests. The large canyons carved out by the rivers in light would also likely be less obvious, leaving it more of a wetland. Perhaps it was tidal marshes in the old days. [/quote] Maybe? That would make sense since Shadow is a swampy area and Light does share a lot of traits with it. And Wind does have frog statues. Frogs do like to live in marshy environments, so you're probably not that far off.