Building Sylfaen: Magic, Memory, and Myth
If you see a light like this in the woods, you’re probably in a portal fantasy—or maybe it’s just Ireland.
A Reader’s Guide to Sylfaen
When you build a world from scratch, it’s easy to get lost in the details—especially when the details span tens of thousands of years of imagined history. And if you’re me, you end up with more timelines, side notes, and contradictory supporting documents than any one person really needs.
The Fractured Soul is a story of identity, memory, and the legacies we inherit, but it’s also a story about a world where magic isn’t just a force—it’s a history, a lineage, and sometimes a burden.
Whether you’re a reader, a writer, or just curious about how worlds take shape, here’s a look at what makes Sylfaen what it is.
A World Shaped by Transformation
Sylfaen’s magic and its people have always been intertwined. Long before Bastien’s arrival, the world belonged to two ancient races: the Sylphs—timeless, fey beings who could reshape their forms—and the Dwarves, grounded and elemental, bound to the stone itself.
From the Sylphs came primal magic: raw, living energy. Over millennia, some Sylphs sought to refine that chaos into something structured. By fusing sideryn—a living, arcane-conductive metal—into their bodies, they ascended into the Arsídh: ageless, innately magical, and ever more bound to ritual and memory. Their arcane magic became stable—like regulated currents compared to the wild tides of primal magic. (In hindsight, perhaps “regulated” is just a polite word for “unreasonably complicated.”)
Meanwhile, some progenitor Sylphs paired with the Dwarves, creating the Gnomes—irreverent, inventive, and often predisposed to metal or stone affinity—and the Durnir: the Lithic, caretakers of the ley lines and stone, and the Storm-touched, bound to Sylfaen’s primal tempests.
When the Sylphic Change rippled across the world tens of thousands of years later, most remaining Sylphs were transformed into the elemental sub-races: Dryads, Ifrit, Naiads, and Sprites—each carrying an echo of their progenitor heritage in root, flame, tide, or wind.
Humans arrived far later—Ancient Greek colonists seeking Nysa, the mythical birthplace of Dionysos. Their descendants, the Nyseans, came without innate magic. But where human and Arsídh bloodlines crossed, the Metxenoi emerged: longer-lived, partially magical, and never fully at home in either lineage.
In Sylfaen, heritage is more than just history—it’s power. And every choice, every union, has shaped what magic can become.
Entering Sylfaen – A Portal to Discovery
When I first visited Glendalough, I was studying archaeology in Ireland. Even then, it felt like a place apart—a quiet, liminal valley steeped in centuries of memory and often hidden within drifting fog. Beautiful as it was, there was something more to it than just a lovely hike. It felt charged, as if the boundaries between past and present—and between reality and something beyond—were thinner there than anywhere else I’d been. It was one of those places that seems perfectly willing to be something more if you let it.
That feeling stayed with me. When it came time to decide where The Fractured Soul would begin, Glendalough was the only choice that ever made sense. It was the perfect threshold: a landscape grounded in real history, where something as improbable as a crossing into another world felt almost believable.
For Bastien, Glendalough becomes the point where everything he thought he knew about his life fractures. And for the reader, it’s a way to step into Sylfaen from solid ground—meeting magic not as an abstraction, but as an interruption of something familiar.
Thresholds and liminal spaces run through this story in every form. There are physical crossings—stepping from Earth into Sylfaen—but also internal ones: the quiet transformations that happen when you finally admit that your old life doesn’t fit. That you’ve crossed into something you can’t go back from.
From Myth to Manuscript – Inspirations
My lifelong fascination with myth and folklore—and the curiosity about how ancient people actually lived—eventually led me to study Classics and archaeology. Those fields, in turn, have shaped everything about how I build a world.
When you create a secondary world, you’re not just deciding what the mountains look like or how magic works. You’re thinking about how legends grow out of kernels of truth: how the landscape and its pressures shape what a culture values, fears, or aspires to. You’re considering how trade routes spread ideas and superstitions as easily as goods. How economies push people toward certain stories, and how memory can be polished into myth over generations. And if you’ve ever tried to remember exactly how your own story drafts started, you know selective memory isn’t just a cultural phenomenon.
In archaeology, interpreting a fragment of pottery or a burial mound is never just about the object itself. You’re reading what isn’t there—piecing together clues from material evidence, then cross-referencing them with whatever oral or written traditions survive. A single find only makes sense in context.
I think that’s true in fiction, too. A realistic world doesn’t come from cataloging every fact. It comes from acknowledging that no culture—or character—knows all of it. The people of Sylfaen don’t fully understand every influence that shaped their beliefs, their alliances, or their fears. That uncertainty introduces contradiction. And in those contradictions, you find something that feels alive.
Let’s Talk
Curious about Sylfaen or about worldbuilding in general? I’d love to hear your questions—drop them in the comments.
