City Names

Two of the city names actually have real thought behind them. Two of them are jokes. Are one of them is so arbitrary, I don’t even know how I came up with it. Read on to find out which ones are which!

Blerg

I’ll be going in order of the actual book, starting with N’Halia’s village. Yes, if you couldn’t tell, Blerg is one of the nonsense names. I wanted to come up with a really unimportant and unimpressive name for the place where N’Halia starts. I may have gone too far…

Alland

Alland is meant to be a dignified city. It’s the home of Alnea after all! Coming up with the name was pretty straightforward. The prefix Al- is commonly attributed to grand-sounding things, like altruism.

Despite that, Alnea’s name was different initially. I actually named her ‘Rayla’ like a ray of light. I changed it for one very important reason. My in-laws were about to have a daughter and name her Rheya! While there probably was no real reason to change the name, it just felt like it made more sense to change it.

Riford

So this one is the completely arbitrary one. Honestly, I have no idea how I came up with it and the name literally has no significance. I just needed a city name and it popped into my head. ‘Nuff said.

New Port City

This was an easy one to name. It is the main port city, but I didn’t want to just name it ‘Port City’. As I thought of the name, New Port City rolled off the tongue because it’s so similar to New York City. In the second book, Hermit does buy a ‘I ❤ NPC’ tunic because how could he not?

Teocalli

My favorite city name in the series! This is where Incus has set up the headquarters of the Church of Blood. I always had an image of an Aztec temple with the sacrificial alter in my mind. As a Forger, the alter would be a blood-stained anvil. It all fit so perfectly together so I looked up what the temples were called. From the name of the island, you can see what I found.

Next up

Next post will be talking about some of the finer points of fighting in the series.