The world of Everfall has other major continents besides Telos, and they are inhabited by either other stock fantasy races or Starfish Aliens
The reason none were mentioned when Daylen looked over the edge near the beginning is because, like in our world, each one is too far away to be visible to the naked and un-lightbound eye (although not neccisarily as far away as planets are in our world). Perhaps the existence of these other continents haven't even been discovered yet. I have several other WMGs based on this idea, which I will post below. The climate of each continent varies based on its proximity to the sun.
Continent Alice, for example, is more "inward" than Telos and so receives more direct sunlight, and as such is covered in desserts and jungles, populated by individuals who cover a bit more skin than the average Tuerasian. meanwhile continent Bob is "further out" than Telos, and as such is basically Hoth minus the robots and blasters. The population of one continent will have converted the entire freaking landmass into a darkstone-driver-powered airship
Maybe they're pirates, maybe they're Shade. Who knows? Maybe they're benevolent. Either way, they're probably going to be visiting Telos in a future novel... One continent explored will be pure Sci-Fi in contrast to Telos' Medieval-Renaissance High Fantasy
Magic seems to be powered by The Light in this setting, so maybe they're a polar continent that just can't get much light. There will be further advancements in Magitek in future novels involving melted and/or powdered darkstone.
I was just wondering the other day if darkstone can be sufficiently heated to the point of melting. The idea is never explored in the novel, so perhaps you just need way more heat than anyone is able to produce at the current level of technology. There're a lot of interesting directions Shad could go with the properties of liquid darkstone; What shape does it take when hovering in midair and shrouded in darkness, for example? It probably wouldn't glow like other molten rocks do, so under the right circumstances it might be easy to mistake for solid darkstone. It could thus be potentially used in a trap designed to get someone to burn their hand off. Or there could be a new weapon in development based on the shooter that, instead of the gun, emulates Real Life's flamethrowers.Powdered darkstone, in turn, has lots of possible uses. We know that it can be fashioned in this way since Daylen was able to carve a dagger from darkstone, so he could probably have just as easily taken a regular dagger and just coated it in the stuff. Maybe a block of wood coated in such a way could be used for smaller, faster darkstone drivers in the future. Kept in a sunstone container, it could also make for a nice "instant invisible wall" during trips into caves to fight the Shade. You could also load it into the above flamethrower thing instead of the liquid form when faced with lots of sunforged-equipped enemies.
Chronicles of Everfall will eventually have a Cosmic Horror Reveal
The Sun is an Angelic Abomination not native to the universe of Everfall. The reason people transform into shades when deprived of the sun's light for long enough is because that's actually the natural state of denizens of Everfall, and thus the state they return to when shielded from the sun's outside influence. The unknown, ancient and subterranean civilization that built the Underworld accidentally created the Shade
Shades don’t seem to build things, and Daylen’s notes seem to regard the two as entirely seperate, but no one Saine would construct an underground civilization in a world where the Shade can be born just by avoiding the sun for long periods, Lightbringers or no, and it must be huge if it took a whole year for Daylen and the others to escape, even fighting the Shade all the way out. Such an advanced and powerful civilization from before the First Night - the same civilization, likely, that created the Unlimited Sunforge that destroyed the Floating Isles - might have the capacity for something to Gone Horribly Wrong and create darkness-based monsters. It would hardly be their first accidental catastrophe, given the destroyed continent.- Even if they didn’t create them, it’s likely they predated the Shade, if they built underground cities and infrastructure.
- Or maybe they had artificial light sources that were enough to prevent people from turning, and had successfully routed the Shade as the Dawn Empire hoped to, reducing them to very rare accidental turnings (and intentional turnings by people) that were easily dealt with, before some unrelated catastrophe annihilated them so badly their measures failed, resulting in the the world’s current status.
- Maybe it was not accidental. The Shade would be a weapon that has gotten out of control, either after whatever war they were built with ended with a civilization-level Mutual Kill or during said war.
- The Sunforge in the Broken Isles allowing the sunforging of darkstone, combined with Word of God stablishing that humans can be sunforged into human-sunucles, makes the hipothesis of human-made Shades highly likely
Daylen isn't actually repentant at all.
- Credit to T. Alex Ratcliffe for this one. Daylen's actions throughout the novel are the actions of a psychopath who's afraid to die, rather than a truly repentant man.
