Balance

The Nature of Balance

I’m gonna take a quick break from the Nation description to explain a very important thing to my stories. Let me grab a lengthy quote from one of my commentators, Stevarious:

As far as the (sort of) dualistic major deities, I really like what you’ve done here. So much of reality is, on the surface, binary – day and night, light and dark, ignorance and knowledge, war and peace – shoot, proton and electrons, matter and energy. Why would there be only one major deity responsible for all these opposites?

Except, if you look deeper, things aren’t really binary – and thus the third godhead. Day, night – twilight. Ignorance, knowledge – the student or the apprentice. War, peace – cold war. Protons, electrons – neutrons.

The third major god is subtle, hard to find, easy to deny even it’s existence as a third option. So many see it as just a halfway measure – but as the atom shows, neutrality is a position all it’s own, with it’s own weight and purpose.

This description is exactly right. The World of Dramoth Gilead is one of balance. Everything has its opposite. The opposite of the city-building, orderly humans are the nomadic, chaotic orcs. The opposite of the down-to-earth, communion with nature elves are the cloud cuckoolander, binding of nature tallis. But for every opposite there is a third thing, a pivot or a fulcrum as you would. The human-orc opposition has the mesan – who are both nomadic and dwell in permanent homes. The elf-tallis opposition has the gnollen – industrious, yet honoring nature.

That’s what’s so intersting about my world. If you look at all my stories it’ll be very difficult to notice, but there’s always a third power engaged there. Something that doesn’t truly help either side, but serving a great importance to the story as a whole. I’ll try to spoiler out the plot of the first novel to show:

So the bad guy is doing bad things while the good guys are trying to stop him from doing these bad things. While good and bad things are happening, there are several minor subplots that shape the story, that certain good guys would not be in the story at all if they didn’t happen, and that if these good guys weren’t in the story, the bad guy would have a different path which may have been unseen.

Those subplots are the agents of Unity. Some of them are really sad, some of them are merely business as usual. If not for these – the story would be missing key individuals who help the story as a whole finish.

That’s balance, that’s the nature of Dramoth Gilead. It’s interweaved throughout the entire lifeblood of the world. Stories, legends, and peoples would be vastly different if not for the third element.