Maps

The world of Aerwiar began with two very confused people waking up. They were fully clothed, able to speak, and were instantly fond of one another. One was a man, the other was a woman. Their names were Dwayne and Gladys, probably because the Maker liked the way the letter “Y” made their names look a little exotic on paper even as they sounded a little silly.

They looked at one another and said, “Here we are.” Those were the first words ever spoken in this clean new world. Later, they would remember it and laugh at how funny the words sounded, how surprised they were to find that they had anything at all to say, since they were only a few seconds old. The story of “Here we are” was repeated over dinner tables and in the fields for hundreds of years, until those first three words morphed into one: “Aerwiar.”

It was the Hollish historian and inventor Shaybus O’Pally who pieced together the writings of the First Books with the folk tales and rediscovered the forgotten origin of the word “Aerwiar,” at last convincing the academic community of his time that his hypothesis was true. (O’Pally’s credibility was in question because of a number of failed inventions in which he tried to combine food with more practical devices, such as oars.)

Shaybus O'Pally with his famously flawed "Giant Candy Clock"

I digress. The point is, Aerwiar is a vast and mysterious world, and has yet to have been fully explored. The places beyond the edges of the known maps are called “The Places Beyond the Maps”, and are viewed with an ache for adventure by some and fear by others.

In the following pages you’ll find several hand-drawn maps, produced by an unknown and less-than-amateur cartographer. He is clearly unable to depict the sweeps of this great land with his pencil and/or ink. Still, these maps were the best we could find.