Today I finally retired Abawok / Kavalek, the working name for the constellation Corvus. Here's the old naming development notes:

• Abawok - Coptic: Corvus - Crow - Abwk
  • Abowk - Algorab - Crow - Abowk
  • Brusoot - Kraz - Chariot - Brusoot
  • Kepeh - Alchiba - Tent - Covered Space - Kepeh
• Nahrina - Minkar - Nostril - Face - Nahrina
• Tinh - Gienah - Wing - Tinh

Picking a language

Originally I'd leaned into Coptic as the linguistic root for my working names in this region. There wasn't any particular reason for that. Languages weren't high on my list of focus areas for a long time, and so I just distributed them around the globe and thought it good enough for the time.

I knew I wanted some historical depth to my place names. They would grow and change with the history, but what that history was still needed to be worked out. How can you work out a place's history until you know its environment, ecology, staples, relationships with neighbors? Like everything else in The Hierophant, I was trapped by the systems thinking. I needed to understand it all in order to understand the parts.

The language had to follow the same arc. Using Coptic phonetics as filler never matched the society I was sketching, so I built a Lokhan sound set that serves the culture: aspirated kh, tight s/z/l clusters, clipped vowels, final-syllable stress. Those rules grew out of the civic rituals, so the sounds and the institutions reinforce each other. Once the morphemes started earning their keep (lokh + -var for the nation, val for harbors, -rel/-vyr for edges and glides), the names started coming together.

Giving it life

Lokhavar fits. The new write-up leans into the feather lexeme that runs through the Lokhan language, so the Feathers Circle, the Kelresh Belt, and the Lokhfire Nights all feel like they belong to the same place. I finally wrote down the Mask Houses, Sazrel, Lazkhor, Velrun, and let them anchor the politics instead of leaving the archipelago implied.

Oh! I should note here that this is an archipelago. This is one area where my graphical map is lagging behind the text. The block of land appears quite solid, but this whole region is a network of thousands of islands. That's going to take some work.

Getting the name right also meant giving the cities their due. Valokh now steps down basalt terraces into the parliamentary harbor, Zavrel gets its equinox chariot launches, Kelresh has those geothermal arcades drying reed-wool, Nasrel holds court in its acoustically tuned basins, and Talvyr keeps watch from the glider ramps. Each city got its own page so the map labels aren’t pointing at ghosts anymore.

Will the story ever travel here? It's not likely. My current plotting keeps most of the story along the Ioma. So why bother?

Well, it's a part of the system. People are from there. Trade is from there. I may encounter characters is my book who spent time there. And even if it remains a distant speck, now it's a living speck.

Cleanup

Now comes the hard part. After I've done the renaming I need to go back through all of my other notes and find references to the old names, systems, cities, rituals, etc. I need to update the balance of the system to take in those changes. This is the one space I have allowed myself to dip into that dreaded evil, AI. I don't want it to touch the generation of my world in any way. This is my brain's work. This is my passion, my dreams. But double-checking thousands of notes across multiple projects that might reference things in passing? Yeah, cool, go ahead and scan away little robot.

In this case it was really helpful in identifying some issues with the calendar system I'd started for this area. Two of them, actually. I was able to cut some threads, remove old ideas, and just smooth over the rough spots.

It's never perfect, though. I can't blame the LLM for this, but this book has gone through so many iterative ideas, settings, and growths, that my notes sometimes have some true nonsense in them. Did you know at one point I had an evolutionary extension of neanderthals in here? Or that the story went steampunk for a good two weeks? I think I still have an airship reference in the atlas somewhere I'll need to clean up eventually.

Once I have all of my nations and cities properly named I can do a clean run-through of everything with a red pen. It shall be glorious.

Just a few more to go.