Shale Cliff

A painting of a shale cliff in the Alps.
Click the picture for a larger image!

The photo underlying this picture was taken somewhere in the Alps of Switzerland. I’m blanking on its name just now, but the cliff overlooked a popular campsite. The cliff was hundreds of feet high and had several waterfalls pouring down it. I’m told the sheer sides were cut by a glacier passing through the valley in ages past.

In Talmenor, this most closely matches what the Gryphon’s Aerie region of Tarith might look like.

Saint Bernard Pass

A painting of the dam near the top of the Saint Bernard Pass in the Alps.

The photo underlying this painting I took myself while I was traveling through the Alps in Europe. It shows the dam near the top of the Saint Bernard Pass. I edited this slightly to cover up the evidence of modern day: the paved road, a building, and an antenna tower are gone, and the dam now resembles what could be a wall or a bridge, part of one medieval fortress or another.

The color blotches of this picture had a habit of disappearing into each other until I added the sketch lines that picked out the rocks, snow, and ice. The ice is still done pretty lazily, and if I were to paint this again, I would probably outline each sheet instead of scribbling madly over them.

The Burn Scar

A painting of the Waldo Canyon burn scar, as seen from the top of Blodgett Peak, in Colorado, USA.
Click on the picture for a bigger image.

About 7 years before the writing of this post, the Waldo Canyon Wildfire raged barely a couple of miles from my childhood home. My family had to evacuate the house. My mother described the fire coming over across the top of the mountains as “hellish”, saying the fire lit up the sky in orange, like it was sunset. Continue reading “The Burn Scar”

Seeing Keelath

“You’re not so different from your brother, you know,” she told him. “You’ve both made the same crazy choice for the people you care about.”

I’ve got to find a way to better format letters… Some of the punctuation is also messed up here as I wrote half of this in WordPress, and half in Google Docs. Who knew that Google Docs doesn’t use standard hyphens and quotation marks?

Author’s Note

Dear Keelath,

I’d like to visit you, and know you are no longer in Newhome. Where might I find you these days?

Love,

Mirium

***

Dear Mirium,

At the Crossroads, in the Barrens… Continue reading “Seeing Keelath”