'A fine place to spend a thoughtful morning,’ wrote Master Hall. ‘Seen from the air, it is typical of the quieter, more provincial side of Middle Calais — that great lush belt between Primi Calla and the periphery, where most of the city resides, and most of the produce is grown.’
The flow of water through this area is part natural, part directed. Calais is a honeycombed drainage basin sloping down toward its centre; this provides for some complex and curious terrain when viewed from above.
Just walking the shores of some far green country.
The rear portal to House Erimude is dominated by the small but powerful Taratixia organ. The instrument’s case is a late example of parochial Cering Tass, or ‘free florid sculpture’ — it ‘follows the stone’, as its quasi-Fleurian proponents say, making only desultory attempts at regularity. The madly exuberant, painstakingly crafted exteriors typical of the Cering Tass movement are seldom declared finished. Youthful members of the cams they belong to are often seen chipping at them as a summer craft assignment, and it is not uncommon for whole facades to be torn and melted down three to four generations later, and something entirely new begun in their place.
‘We floated past Plianth haven late last evening — we'd followed the Calle Ceras out on patrol — and I managed to get the tripod out for a quick but fuzzy shot. Morgaff sightings have been intensifying as autumn progresses, but it would seem that at least some boaters will not submit to have their evenings spoilt.
'I've come into possession of some plans for the haven in question (courtesy of the Rooms), and will be occupying myself with my backlog of illustration for much of the week to follow. I shall be glad of it; the nights are quiet and long, and though I never mind being out in Calais, I tire sometimes of the chill that is in the air.’
~ A. HALL.
The ferry Red Puffin rounds a bend on a shakedown cruise. Loheirim is a pretty open country as Calais goes, and is strewn with the remnants of old fortifications. Today, Rosette era towns crust these ruins; a new dome, skylight, and beacon caps the hollowed stone hulk that is now Fost's iconic watchtower.
One of the grand, perennial draws of deep Calais is, that when the mists part you cannot fully know what quaint new wonders might be disclosed. Here we glimpse the edge of Lampenbotania - the cool, damp, rocky underworld that is wherever in the basin Calais farms and gardens by the light of trundling lamps.
HIGH REIUDEN: Excursion ship Calle Qeras issues from the glinting eaves of the Sämerken. Her crew of eight are to take up the mantle of the midnight patrol. As it is each night across the basin, warmly lit facades are making a brave stand against the dark.
The Alte Coer is a large civic sanctuary in the neighbourhood of the Welbern Sinkhole.
The Alte Coer is a large civic sanctuary in the neighbourhood of the Welbern Sinkhole.
The Alte Coer is a large civic sanctuary in the neighbourhood of the Welbern Sinkhole.
Produced for the project’s instagram. A fun side-scroller featuring a slightly monumental but otherwise typical commune in peripheral Middle Calais.
Believe it or not, curatorships of vivariums like this (usually barely filled by volunteers!) became enormously sought after under the isolation orders that accompanied Calais’ last flu scare.
~~
The civic landscape of Calais is full of vivariums of all sizes. The public has a fascination with natural history, and the immense, fog-shrouded forests beleaguering the realm’s rocky perimeter is a source of enduring, titillating fascination. Excursion ships do venture out now and again, and whatever they bring back attracts vigorous study. When the academies have satisfied themselves, the societies take over; they acquire living specimens, and do all that they can to keep them comfortable, that they might perhaps yield more of their secrets.
~~
Architect: Opal Tieda
Believe it or not, curatorships of vivariums like this (usually barely filled by volunteers!) became enormously sought after under the isolation orders that accompanied Calais’ last flu scare.
~~
The civic landscape of Calais is full of vivariums of all sizes. The public has a fascination with natural history, and the immense, fog-shrouded forests beleaguering the realm’s rocky perimeter is a source of enduring, titillating fascination. Excursion ships do venture out now and again, and whatever they bring back attracts vigorous study. When the academies have satisfied themselves, the societies take over; they acquire living specimens, and do all that they can to keep them comfortable, that they might perhaps yield more of their secrets.
~~
Architect: Opal Tieda
Justin: ‘In Finding Calais, I try my best to channel a little of the spirit of the Belle Époque: the ‘beautiful age’. For a few peaceful, touchingly optimistic decades (enough for electric bulbs to replace gas lamps, biplanes and airships to take to the skies, and the first women to get the vote) it seemed to the emerging fellowship of modern states that humanity was finally pulling out of the blinkered tumult of history as dignified, enlightened inheritors of millenia of cumulative development. Fittingly, the architecture of the Belle Époque and the great international expositions that defined it was a triumphant, misty-eyed celebration of the innumerable stories that had led up to it. The discipline and respect that designers and craftsmen of the time put into understanding and learning the traditions of their forebears showed a determination that lessons dearly bought would live on far into the future. For better or worse, modernity and two Great Wars would leave the dreams and ideals of this age in ruin.’
Imon (or Emin) Hroth is a mid-sized 'blimp' gate in Taide, Calais. It often serves as the finish line for the certification trials of new ships and / or crews. Blimp gates in Calais are not indiscriminately placed — all airships are vulnerable to changes in wind and weather. Even on the calmest days, a low-flying airship always poses a measure of risk to property and people on the ground. The presence of a gate (or series of gates) is an indication to crews that civic authorities have, for whatever combination of reasons, thought it best to mark a route of smoothest, safest passage through a neighbourhood.
Wren Forst’s florid ‘pink gate’ features extensive rose brass ornamentation, the product of a spirited collaboration with apprentice hornmakers. The gate is the centrepiece of the largely naturalistic Taide ‘Mist’ Gardens, which neighbourhood has the distinction of being one of the busiest for aviation in Calais. Airships are constantly passing it on their lazy wind towards Primi Calla, and the challenging, shifting geothermal brume of the lower levels (balanced with the safety of relatively open, even monumental terrain) is put to good use by the largest of the city’s three gyro schools. Nursery lines of the little rotored craft catch the light in flurries of metallic winks as they dart among pillars older than Calais itself.
In Calais, the term ‘steam town’ reveals more about the town's location than its power source. Steam towns are generally located near major fumaroles, springs, and vents, and thus tend to be swathed in warm fog for as long as these geographic features are active. They often grew around machinery used to harness thermal and hydrokinetic power for the civic grid.
If you're wondering what's beneath the rocky shelf the town sits on, those are lampenbotanic caverns with bioluminescent geology!
Quiet mist, cold water, and fantasy architecture.
A quaint outpost built up on the ruins of a fort older than Calais itself, Quet Ilnse features an eclectic mix of vernacular architectures. It is inaccessible even by peripheral standards.
The city of Calais — light of Carentan — has lived out centuries of lonely, cloistered stability. The generations pass here with excruciating clarity: fail to pass the baton, and much of what one knows, loves, and understands will fade ere Aramis returns to bathe the night sky in its scintillating glow. Such continuity has facilitated civic projects that span many hundreds of years, like the safe cultivation of gigantic but slow-growing Cargai trees around vernacular architecture.
‘Quindome sentinels lurk tonight around Caron Octa. They are slow, stable, martial — floating platforms bearing quaint and esoteric weaponry from the forges ‘behind’ Primi Calla. Morgaff are sighted regularly in these parts, especially as temperatures begin their descent toward Calais’ dark and still winters.’
Day render.
‘Infrasound organ pipes are used throughout Calais to deter Morgaff. The effects of infrasound on the average human psyche are still poorly understood, but the city is constantly reviewing its list of best practices as pertains to the weapon's use. The shortest pipe to have a discernible effect against Morgaff is 64 feet (19.5 metres), although this is considered highly inadequate.’
Lowlight render.
‘Infrasound organ pipes are used throughout Calais to deter Morgaff. The effects of infrasound on the average human psyche are still poorly understood, but the city is constantly reviewing its list of best practices as pertains to the weapon's use. The shortest pipe to have a discernible effect against Morgaff is 64 feet (19.5 metres), although this is considered highly inadequate.’
’We’ve drawn away to cool, misty, timeless realms,’ wrote Adrian. ‘I find myself on the canton cars every other day, sipping gratefully at chilled coffee as cloistered vales and fissures slide by. This is the quiet, green heart of Calais. Sheer crags drop away at times, and I am treated to fleeting vistas toward Primi Calla — the ‘Core’ — its monumental edifices pearlescent in gentle sun. I should like to spend a week, if I could, at every station of every line. So, so many possibilities, threads of wonder that tinkle and play in all directions. Yet there is also peace, and rest, and the musick of pipes and water. Peer beyond the curtains, though, perk your ears: there are plaintive notes, whispers from ages lost in time and fog. Calais has never wiped the slate clean. Its ghosts stand fast with its people.’
The relay engines of Ayleward have turned for eight generations. They go largely unnoticed by the station’s residents and staff, who concern themselves mostly with its contribution to the movement and shakedown trials of airships and their crew. Ayleward’s ‘Tern’ Gate is noted for its difficulty, and the crew which puts a ship squarely through it will, in nine of ten cases, gain their license.
Also of note in Ayleward station is its Cara Otalë, which lends its modest, elegant nave to the voices of the small, ascetic, but storied Cade liturgical conservatory.
(Justin, OOC): Just a few sketches of vivarium facades from Finding Calais. I'm trying to have them evoke the horticultural palaces of the grand international expositions of the belle époque. I continue to be deeply attracted to the best parts of that age — how well it balanced optimism and invention with craftsman dignity and a comfortable, respectful acknowledgement of the past and its achievements.
‘Plakats are built around a bow gun typical for ships over twice their size. Since the Bluecastle Treaties many have been withdrawn from service and sold as sojourners, upon which they may be heavily modified to suit a client’s needs.’
Therin Proving Circle (‘an overgrown chicken run’, grouched Maurice Mandrake, ship’s doctor) makes a pleasant — though occasionally alarming — morning stroll. Small to midsize airships enter its imposing gate, and spend up to an hour each careening uncomfortably low to the ground, as untried crew match their instincts with the vessel’s reflexes.
Patrol ship Calle Splenden passes her movement trials, barrelling through Tiyora Gate in a light scatter of steam and Cargai terns.
The Gate is a grim, martial hulk in Reiuden (not too far from the Fort Bomm and its Water Gate), its similarly Thomasian ornamentation declining to hide its utilitarian lines. It is equal parts shelter and sentry tower, capable of sheltering a small village for months on end if the need arises.
In this drawing, the Bowen Saga is conducting parcel manoeuvres on one of the ‘steps’ to Calenbar, the great steep-sided prow of rock upon which the union city Malendar perches.
A drawing of one of the ancient stone halls that stand unflappable above the fissures of Minden, Calais. They offer hushed, cavernous indoor spaces for dining, shelter, rest, and the general conducting of business. The people of this ward have never deserted these edifices, and each generation leaves tinkering but respectful marks of their own behind.
Depicted here is a facility for receiving mailships. Beacon, prow, winch, and the beginnings of a town perched downhill from it.
A little natural history drawing from the cache of the airship Hollander. ‘Plumb’ trees (their trunks are shaped like lead weights) are not uncommon throughout the civic landscape of Calais. They grow relatively straight and true, with roots tending not to crack pavement, and their spreading canopies offer winsome shade in summer. Their thick trunks branch at middle height; there the bark is riddled with seed-retaining crevices and pores excreting nourishing compounds. In plumb tree forests, the result is a false undergrowth layer fifty feet in the air, over a lightless abyss devoid of competing plant life. There the tree roots reap the benefits of all the organic detritus that drifts down through the layers of forest. In civic gardening, however, plumb trees are typically kept apart, with the trunks of each tree often hosting appealing assortments of symbionts picked by horticulturists.
This civic sanctuary hugs a rock outcrop with a celebrated past. The walls of the sanctuary protect the ancient writing on its surface from erosion. The compound’s tower offers genial views of the Nareton Fissures, and doubles as an aviation beacon.
Dim afternoon, deep in the hidden world that is Calais. Fumarole steam mixes with fog drifting in from the periphery, together making the truly sunny day relatively uncommon for much of the year.
The Calais 'littoral' refers to the bodies of water in the city's geographical basin where streams draining in from the periphery meet tidal waters from porous regions of the planet's crust. For several hours each tidal cycle, water is 'coming up the sink', if you will — pooling up from the netherworld — and so the littoral floods, and is relatively still. Stygofauna, of course, present in cacophonous abundance; places in the basin teem with spawning, grazing, hunting, basking life. Some form delicate but profitable symbiotic relationships with species from the surface.
In this little diorama we see some of the features that typify the darker, quieter side of Calais: a dim underworld of tidal pools, bottomless sinkholes, porous rock, architectural detritus, half-forgotten engines gently, silently turning — in places teeming with life drawn up from Tethys. ‘These depths,’ wrote Adrian, ‘they stand outside of time. They decline to be surveyed or understood. The city does not try, it is but grateful for the measure of sustenance they provide.’
In the world of Finding Calais, a great seabird (or, in exotic circumstances, a hornbill) bonds with an excursion airship for life, coming and going as it pleases but rarely disappearing for more than a few days at a time. Voyaging in the aether is a risky business, and risky businesses have their eccentricities. It is not unheard of for a docked crew to delay their departure in order to wait for the ship's 'sprite' (Archaic: A spirit, specter, or ghost.) to return.
Gates of rock stand where the Tivur Arca - the 'stream' of Arcina - begins its relatively steep descent from the periphery into Middle Calais. Ships pass through them on their way home, as the light begins to fade and the call of great pipes floats over the chill air. Follow the water, the beacons, the musick.. and they'll find themselves at the threshold of Primi Calla before the skies have deepened intirely to blue.
This supply ship trades freight palettes with a monastic community once a week. They get sundry provisions, and hand over woodwind instruments they manufacture for sale.
When I think of airships, I think freedom, and hope, and wonder at something so large so defying the trammels of gravity that it pulls and tugs at the ropes to return to the sky.
Cold, gusty morning. This piece began as a study but I took too many liberties. I was thinking a little of Canada’s grand railway hotels.
Plein sketch paint thing with some liberties, based on photographic reference. The world continues to be as curious and beautiful as it has always been. Let us look forward; let us keep hoping and dreaming.