A Legacy of Ice and Echoes
Concept for Spiresong Manor
When I was younger, I lived on a property with sprawling horse pastures. At one end, there were old, dilapidated holding pens, their wooden fences gray and splintered, slowly being reclaimed by overgrown weeds and wildflowers. To anyone else, they were just ruins, but for me, they were a place of profound quiet and history. I would spend hours there, imagining the lives of the horses that had passed through, feeling like I was standing in a place haunted by beautiful, powerful ghosts.
That feeling, of a place defined by both its former strength and its present-day melancholy, is the very heart of a location central to the heart of my upcoming novel, The Sea Queen's Shadow: Spiresong Manor.
Spiresong is more than just a setting; it’s a character in its own right. It’s a frosted tomb built from a promise , a two-hundred-year vigil given architectural form. Hidden deep within a secluded, snow-covered mountain valley, it was meant to be a sanctuary, a place where the last spark of a powerful magic could be hidden from a world of hunters .
But the manor is not just an island of its own identity; it is a reflection of the land that cradles it. The Aetherian Mountains are a region of soaring, jagged peaks and frozen lakes , where the air is thin and crisp with the scent of pine and snow. The cold here is a character in itself, a deep, insidious chill that settles in the bones and cannot be banished by fire or enchantment. It is a region defined by a sacred, complete silence , a quiet so profound that the local Aelari people practice a "Whispering Vigil" to listen for truths carried on the breeze, what they call 'wind-songs'. And then there is the light. The landscape is dotted with natural crystal spires that refract the twilight, and the sunlight, painting the sky in soft, impossible pastels, shimmering like frozen stars.
The magic of Spiresong is born of this desolate beauty. It’s a place where a child’s imagination can weave ice and snow into a colony of crystalline ravens. More than anything, however, it is a monument to a lost legacy. It is the physical embodiment of a promise made at the fall of a kingdom, a beautiful cage of memory and grief . It is the starting point of our story, the beautiful, tragic home that must be left behind for a new legacy to be forged.
“Her joy rings through the frosted air of the garden, and it’s a pure, crystalline sound that is the only anchor against the crushing weight of my two-hundred-year vigil. The veranda stone is cold beneath my feet, a familiar chill that seeps through my thick leather boots. I don't move, rooted to the spot by a melancholy older than the mountain itself. Two centuries. Sometimes the weight of them feels like it could crush the very stone of this manor, this frosted tomb I built from a promise.”
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This is just a glimpse into one of the many locations in the Atlantis Unbound saga. I can't wait to share more of the world with you.
What's a fictional location from a book or movie that has always felt real to you? Let me know in the comments!
All the best,
T.L. West
