Here we are again. It’s been a few days since I wrote the first part to this lit­tle his­tor­i­cal endeav­our and to be hon­est, I haven’t thought much about Arbi­ture. I kind of needed some time away to re-collect my thoughts before com­ing back — to look upon it with fresh eyes as it were.

So, as last we left this world I was con­sid­er­ing in which way to remove the wings from my peo­ples… that has not become any clearer but when you con­sider this is about ‘world build­ing’, it’s not a pri­or­ity to know the rea­sons to the why. Instead we just want to know where the why is hap­pen­ing — still with me?

Let’s go straight for the jugu­lar: the Year of The Lost.

Basi­cally the Year of The Lost is the begin­ning — the time the first of our Angelic folk loose their heav­enly wings and the world of the Angelus goes severely awry. As said, I’m not sure how this occurs, but it does and it leads to a rip­ple effect. Soci­ety begins to waver a lit­tle at the ‘dif­fer­ence’ they’re sud­denly faced with, and con­sid­er­ing the Angelus came together from two worlds and met in per­fect cohe­sion, ‘dif­fer­ence’ is some­thing not vis­ited before on this large a scale. Divin­ity does not look for wrin­kles, it just accepts it is divine.

We can assume the form of lead­er­ship they have (some secrets are best kept as such) looks unkindly upon this changed being. Dis­si­dence embroils as the peo­ple find them­selves torn. It is at this point I am con­sid­er­ing the two worlds tak­ing a step back from one-another. Some­how their deeply rooted views on their faith comes to light again and it defines the points of view they have and the deci­sions they choose.

This ‘tainted’ Angelus begins to form sup­port on some scale. This may be the peo­ples of it’s own world before the join­ing at Arbi­ture, or in a more rev­o­lu­tion­ary step Angelus who take it’s side and choose to fight for the allowance of dif­fer­ence. This obvi­ously sprawls into some­thing akin to a tri-world cat­a­stro­phe. The Angelus have endured lit­tle but self-gratification and ego­ma­nia and as such, they do not have the patience or notable traits to help heal a rift eas­ily or even accept any­thing less than the sum of their parts.

Falling apart at the seams, soci­ety is shat­tered into two groups; those who stand for the changes they have wit­nessed in the wing­less indi­vid­ual and the accep­tance of it within the bound­aries of their faith, and those who see it as sin, as trav­esty and noth­ing less than a hell­ish turn that needs cleans­ing from their sub­lime being. The Year of The Lost is a title to many things includ­ing, but not exclu­sive to the loss of divin­ity in the eyes of the Angelus, the faith lost in the soci­ety of the Angelus in regard to the Fallen’s point of view, the losses of faith, divin­ity, truth and much more.

The depths of this are echoed in man’s own short fallings: his dis­crim­i­na­tion, his sins, the heights of blind­ness and the ground­ing of true-vision, the fail­ings of oppor­tu­ni­ties to enrich our species and so many more things. I see every­thing the Angelus go through as a mag­ni­fied exam­ple of what has, is and will always hap­pen in our real­ity. On many lev­els, this story is a reflec­tion of ourselves.

The two-sides become the Angelus and the Fallen: you can guess which is which. Soci­ety as they (and we) know it is dec­i­mated and left to ruins, the two worlds retract into them­selves and the fight­ing con­tin­ues for a cen­tury, per­haps mil­len­nia. This is where we pick up the short-story, the Fallen.

Above you may agree, as do I, is a very brief expla­na­tion of what hap­pens but it’s all rel­a­tive to the point of the mat­ter. This is about world build­ing, not story detail­ing. I may have given some strong details away, but that’s all stage work. The story as it unfolds is set in a time far beyond the Year of The Lost. It’s about blood, sweat and tears — not how the world/s came to be.

Would you read it? I’d hope so, but there is plenty more to inves­ti­gate; to solid­ify. This is frame­work right? It would be nice if that frame was built upon and some­thing strong enough to with­stand a pow­er­ful wind took root.

Next time, I don’t know… any suggestions?