The Dry Land

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

- from The Creation of Éa

Timeline

- Creation of Éa by Segoy whose Word balanced dark and light, and established the lands amidst the seas (the Making); the Nameless Ones planted in the darkness

- Division or Vedurnan; dragons and humans follow separate paths

- Rune Makers invent runes and the art of naming, and establish the Archipelagan afterlife, the dry land


Most of the books in the Earthsea series seem to be centered around issues created by the Dry Land, yet Le Guin gave little insight as to how the Dry Land came about, so I thought it would be interesting to ‘document’ this historical event.

So far we know that the Dry Land is the land of the dead, a dark, dry land where people go after they have died. The sky is filled with stars, but they are all small, cold, and did not move. The land of the living is separated from the land of the dead by a low wall of stones. On the other side the souls of the dead wandered, never recognizing or caring for one another. At the bottom of the valley of the dead (known as the dry land) was the dry river, and beyond that lay the mountains of Pain, the only way back to the land of the living once one went too far from the wall.

We also know that the world of the dead was a failed attempt by mages to achieve immortality for the Hardic peoples. The mages stole half of the land "west of west" from the dragons as a paradise in which their souls would dwell. When they walled off the land, however, its beauty vanished, it fell under eternal night, and the immortal souls that went there existed without any meaning. In one of the final scenes of the cycle, the wall around the world of the dead is destroyed, freeing the lost souls to rejoin the cycle of death and rebirth.

The fan fiction is mainly going to cover exactly why and how the Dry Land was created, and why the creators got trapped inside it, in other words, reasons for its failure.