Earth
| Type | World |
|---|---|
| Notable sites | Mountbridge, Camp Tossbridge |
| Notable inhabitants | Beatrice Tidal, Reagan Hideaway |
| Status | No route back from Eslura is known |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Earth is the world Beatrice Tidal and Reagan Hideaway were born into, and the world on the far side of the cave portal in the woods beyond Camp Tossbridge.[1][2] Both of them left it in a thunderstorm on the first day of a week at summer camp, and neither has been back.[1][3]
Almost everything recorded about Earth is recorded from Eslura, by two people remembering it. Nobody they meet in Eslura knows the place: asked what Tossbridge was, Aero Ellisvat had never heard of it, and Reagan told him it was a little off the beaten path.[3]
The name
Sacred: Eslura's Calling never names the world at all. Two of its early chapters are set there without saying where there is, and afterwards Bea and Reagan simply call it home. The name Earth appears only in Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened, four times and always from Bea's or Reagan's point of view: Bea's high school is placed on Earth, red hair is said to be a common enough hue there, a covered wagon is measured against a small Earthen truck, and Bea reflects that her mother went missing on Earth rather than in Eslura.[2][4][5] Where the narration needs another term for it, it uses an entirely different world.[6][5]
Places
Three places on Earth are named above the level of a single building: the town of Mountbridge, Camp Tossbridge in the woods, and the state of Montana. Everything else that carries a name, a high school, a psychiatric ward, a farm, a field and a cabin, sits inside one of the first two.
Mountbridge
A small town of one thousand two hundred forty-six residents, with a high school, a psychiatric ward and a farm outside it that keeps horses. Bea lived there with Fran and Joe Dildecker after her mother disappeared, and it is the only settlement on Earth the books describe from the inside.[7]
Camp Tossbridge
A week-long summer camp in the woods, run by teenaged counsellors, with a lodge, a pond and four rundown cabins in a clearing. Bea was sent there against her will, Reagan was one of its counsellors, and the cave portal opens beyond it.[1]
Montana
Reagan is from Montana, and says so in as many words when she is told a Sacred Book has chosen her.[8] She has wondered whether a Montana ID would get her served at The Avonbourn, and has compared the Avonbourn on a bad night to the frat houses she used to wander into back in Montana.[9][10] Whether Mountbridge and Camp Tossbridge stand in the same state is never said, and no country, city or date is given for any of it.
Everyday life
What the books show of Earth is ordinary and modern, and it is nearly always a measuring stick held up against Eslura. Reagan had seen earthquakes only on the news before she felt one in the Kella Desert, and sized up the Book of Fire in its Chamber against a California king bed she had seen on television commercials.[11][12] A florahorse in Eslura felt to Bea like the AstroTurf of her school's soccer field, and a horse in Eslura outran the Dildeckers' old Dodge Dart.[13] A covered wagon in the desert is described as about the size of a small Earthen truck.[4]
Earth has telephones, buses, foster placements, psychiatric wards and identity cards, and it keeps Christmas: the Dildecker house stays decorated for it all year round.[7][9] Nothing there is recognised as magic. When the five-fold symbol appeared to Bea on the bottom of a grocery bag and she pointed it out, Fran Dildecker took her to Mountbridge Psych Ward the next day, and Bea, who could find no earthly explanation for it, stopped saying such things aloud.[7]
Earth and Eslura
The two worlds meet at the cave portal, which nobody in either of them understands.[1][3] More than one crossing has been made, and the books explain none of them.
- Beatrice Tidal and Reagan Hideaway went through the cave together during a thunderstorm at Camp Tossbridge and came up in a lake in Eslura under two moons. Bea was carrying the mark of the Sacred Head when she surfaced.[1][13]
- Bea's mother vanished on Earth, and Bea spent the years afterwards chalking the days off a wall in the Dildeckers' attic. Lumikki Otsby later identified the woman held in a cell beneath Veskadoth, who named Beatrice Tidal as her daughter, as Amelia Lunala, the Sacred Head before Bea.[5]
- Elmryn, Sacred Ruler of the Book of Fire, fathered Reagan and left her the Eyearke Stone as a baby. She wore it on Earth for her whole life believing it a cheap amethyst her dad had given her.[14][6] Told in Eslura that a Book cannot choose someone who is not Eslurian, she worked out that both her parents had been trueborn Eslurians, and that she was one too.[8]
No return crossing is made anywhere in the books. Reagan does not know where a route home would even begin, and admits she does not entirely mind the thought of staying.[3] She expects trouble from the camp if she ever does return, having lost the same camper twice.[15]
What is not recorded
The books never say what country Earth's towns are in beyond Montana, what year it is there, or how time on Earth runs against time in Eslura. They do not say whether anyone on Earth searched the woods for the camper and the counsellor who never came back, whether the cave can be entered from the Eslura side, or how Elmryn and Amelia Lunala reached Earth and why. Nor is it ever established whether Earth is unusual in this respect or whether Eslura touches other worlds as well.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Book 1, Ch. 4.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Book 2, Ch. 17.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Book 2, Ch. 16.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Book 2, Ch. 20.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Book 2, Ch. 28.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Book 1, Ch. 18.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Book 1, Ch. 2.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Book 2, Ch. 26.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Book 1, Ch. 19.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 8.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 12.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 23.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Book 1, Ch. 6.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 10.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 2.