A Prologue

Welcome to Mantlemoor! Come and take a seat, there’s plenty of room.

Let’s start with some backstory: a prologue, if you will. I’ve just graduated university, and I’m heading into my first autumn as a fully-fledged grown-up, although I don’t particularly feel like either of those things. I’m far from fledged: after moving house with my family during my first year, after almost two decades sleeping in a glorified closet, I have a rather lovely room all to myself. It's filled with books and plants and fairy lights to meet all my cottagecore needs, and I don't have the heart or the means to leave any time soon. And, despite the fact I’m turning twenty-two in a week or so, I don’t feel particularly grown-up. Three years of plague-disrupted academia has taught me a lot about myself, but I’m still young, and, in true English graduate fashion, have no idea where I’m heading next. I hope that starting a little journal of sorts will keep the intellectual instincts and skills I picked up at university alive and kicking. As a connoisseur of half-maintained hobbies, I know how easy it is to let old skills die.

Mantlemoor, I hope, is going to be a place where I can keep writing thoughtfully about the things I make and enjoy. Among many things, my degree has gifted me with a truly colossal tower of book recommendations, so perhaps some reviews and commentaries might soon be laid on our weathered table. After years of dissecting endless reams of stodgy prose and questionable poetry on classroom desks, I was worried the intensive, whirlwind nature of my course would dampen my love of reading. Fortunately, I was very, very wrong. I didn’t quite realise how hungry I was for new stories until I read three in the first two days of our summer holiday. Relatively small books, I’ll admit, but an encouraging sign nonetheless.

Alongside some bookish thoughts, I hope Mantlemoor might also become a place I can share some of my thoughts and processes for my worldbuilding project. For three years, I’ve been slowly working on writing histories, drawing maps, building mythologies, and creating stories about the folk of a fantasy continent named Nerai. All kinds of creatures and cultures have come and gone from her shores in that time, and it’s gone through more than a handful of different cosmologies and magic systems. However, I think — and hope — that Nerai is almost at the point where I’ve laid enough groundwork for larger fiction projects to safely grow. I have half a dozen ideas slowly stewing in the pot, and I’m very excited to start telling them. Maybe here, one day.

So here's a glimpse of things to come: as of today, I’m making my way through The Lord of the Rings for the first time since I was thirteen, I’m devouring The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One, a Dungeons & Dragons podcast by the unparalleled Worlds Beyond Number, and I’m chipping away at various cultural and historical details that will soon make Nerai a living, breathing place.

Until then, fare well, wherever you fare!

— H