The Towers of Lanis Rhyl Landemiriam

In old Lanis Rhyl Landemiriam are several towers called the Towers of Miriam. The tallest tower is called Bawn Hae, and you can actually see the river Miriam from it's top most window.

Unwed elf maidens are forbidden from climbing the towers for fear that their emotions will get the best of them, and they'll throw themselves out over unrequited love for some elf boy.

The towers resemble unopened flower blooms, and the slender stem-like columns sway in the wind.

The bricks of the tower, like all bricks of the city are iridescent, changing color with the movement of the sun. The bricks of the bloom-like turrets of the towers are richly colored scarlet reds, royal blues, sun yellows, and blushing purples.

New ideas for green architecture - number 5, the South Korean complex looks particularly interesting

Silfliette

Silfliette is a young elvish girl and the central character in Jaefa Smiota, my new short story available to download for free, for a limited time. (I gotta make people pay for this stuff eventually)

I was surprised to find I had no trouble whatsoever writing the voice of a young girl. Young! She's probably around thirty years old, but would still appear to be six to us humans. (Iounelle, the central character in The Last Elf of Lanis appears to be in her early twenties and is over three hundred years old!)

Silfliette's voice was one of wonder and overwhelming emotion. I think as adults we forget how devastating everything was on a daily basis for us as children. I remember, as a kid, running late with little league practice, walking home knowing I was late for dinner, and crying thinking the world was going to come to an end.

We, as adults, don't give children enough slack. I've seen parents blow up, absolutely blow up at their whining children in the supermarket. Who was the immature one?

And yet, sometimes the child sees what we do not, sometimes cannot, see. When I was a child, some sewer workers had set up a canvas tarp around a manhole in the street. My youngest sister Koral made a comment about men's trousers and one of the workers angrily stalked over to demand what was so funny about his pants. "Look," she said, "Not you. The large canvas. It looks like a pair of pants." We all turned to look. The worker was dumbstruck. Probably having worked with the canvas tarp all his life, he never saw that it did indeed resemble a large pair of trousers! He apologized and went back to work.

Silfliette's name is a derivation of a couple of Old Norse words. 'Silf' is silver. 'Fliette' is a creek or stream. So 'Silfliette' would mean a little silver stream. Or, to the elves, a little laughing stream, as the words silver and laughter are synonmous in elvish. Elvish children aren't named for several years, not until their nature is apparent. So, clearly Silfliette was a very happy child.
Iounelle means eternal beauty, or the beauty of eternity. Morinnthe means a serious face, or a deep thought. Weylunne, or Welund (both spellings are appropriate) means the arm of god, or a divine purpose.

Silfliette is called a heid. Again Old Norse tells us that a heid is a prophetess, and worker of magic, usually an evil female. I personally think the 'evil' connotation came about when the seeress prophesied something the male didn't like.

This entry about Gullveig, a norse godess expresses it best:

This link might be easier to follow:
scroll down to the english translation, paragraph 21, instead of 'heid' they use the word 'bright'

This is a pretty good link, with an intelligent discussion

You'll find a link to my short story, Jaefa Smiota, here.

cheers,
Kurt