Welcome to the Moth Plateau!

This week (today as I write this, in fact) marks the release of the first novella in the Moth Plateau series, Riding the Moth Plateau, so it's fitting for me to give you a sense of the place, the plateau itself.

Each novella introduces you to the plateau through the eyes of its main character, so it isn't necessary to know anything more in advance. But here's the quick overview of the setting of these novellas, for those who are curious.

Moth Plateau is an impressive geographic feature of the inland, far from Spire City and the other locations that play a role in those stories. It is surrounded by steep walls of rock and hard-packed soil. The only known way up and down that escarpment is a series of switchbacks, a wide road that climbs back and forth. The switchbacks have pulleys and winched tracks for the steady flow of carts and wagons, but their primary purpose is to drive cattle up to pasture or down to market.

The heights of the Moth Plateau are not named symbolically--their most dominant feature is their moths. Clouds upon clouds of moths swarm the land, making travel impossible without specialized rituals, pets, or equipment. The only animals to endure the moths without special accommodations are the cattle, which thrive on the grasses here.

There are various locations on the main plateau that you will encounter as you read, but the most notable aspect of land is what was left behind by a mysterious culture long ago. These ancient ones knew how to repel the moths with a building material that even the mad scientists of the modern era have failed to understand. They used this to create the foundations for the singular city on the plateau, Lepta City, and some scattered buildings elsewhere, as well as a strangely haunted ghost town that the people today avoid.

And most importantly they created pathways through the prairie, walkways where a traveler can escape the swarms of moths. These walkways, however, move, shifting unpredictably even as travelers walk them, so they are useful but far from reliable.

In the interior of the plateau, another escarpment rises, forming a smaller but still substantial upland area, the Upper Plateau, criss-crossed by locomotive rails, though no train has ever run on these tracks. It is home to many moths, yet more herds of cattle and their tenders, as well as miners and recluses. Connecting these scattered people are the bicycle-riding messengers whose stories form the center of this series of novellas.

More on those riders and the other characters of the Moth Plateau soon!