@Sneaks, water is fluid and shifting, and the ocean in particular is terrifying, untameable, in constant motion. Like Golgot said, creation is often portrayed as a process of bringing structure to the primordial chaos-ocean. Especially in the ancient Near East, the king-god (Marduk, Baal, YHWH) killing the evil chaos-monster from the sea (Tiamat, Rahab, Levyatan) is a common myth, and the Great Flood is a common horror story where creation nearly gets swallowed up in water again. So land comes to be associated with order, creation, and life, water with chaos, unmaking, and death. Rituals of total bodily immersion in water are a symbolic death or burial – being pushed down into the flux and then raised up, a new creation from the chaos-ocean.
See here for an example of a modern devotional writer (one of my favorite religious bloggers) drawing out the resonances of the old water myths for our contemporary chaos.
@Wonderboy, as it happens, I’ve just been writing dialogue about Shayard before the Hegemony. To sum it up a bit more dryly: 300 years ago Shayard was the region’s growing empire. Its conqueror kings and queens had knit together all the continent’s richest farmland under a single crown, and gone on to assimilate more marginal regions like the mountainous Rim and Reach. They were also culturally dominant, with the fastest-growing religion, the veneration of the Angels of Xthonos. Its canonical texts hail from different bits of the hill range that spans contemporary north Shayard, Karagon, and west Erezza, but many of the key ones were from Shayard (hence today’s heresy of the Shayardene Codex, which denigrates the Karagond texts, especially the later ones).
The Shayardene monarchy might well have incorporated the Wiends – then entirely fragmented into mountain tribes – or the rival civilization of Erezza, had not the desert backwater of Karagon to the north discovered Theurgy. Hera the Thaumatarch conquered Erezza, then turned to Shayard, and the rest is history.
The Xaos-storms from the far west started during the wars of conquest, and the first Wards were created to fend them off. You’ve heard stories about the soulless folk of those lands whose evil consumed them, taking the form of great vortices of Xaotic power that utterly wracked their land and would have destroyed the others too had it not been for the Thaumatarchy. (Last week, I wrote an eyewitness account of a Xaos-storm for Ch 3; so that’s something you’ll get more info on in the next update).
The stories suggest that the storms would have spread everywhere. However, there’s some sort of land corridor connecting the Xaos-lands to the Abhuman Federation down south, and the Abhumans don’t seem to have been destroyed. So there’s clearly some geographic limit to the storms.
That said, the storms aren’t the only things the Wards keep out. In the East, the elites value their protection from Halassurqs and Corsairs, and the Nyr are quite happy not to have to contend with the Unquiet Dead of the Ice-lands.
