The Floorplan in the Fantasy

with illustrations by Mandy Mackenzie Ng

A few years ago, a friend (Airene) and I started a webcomic: The Night Wolves. When preparing for this, we worked with an illustrator (Mandy) in designing the world from a brief.

While most comics tend to keep their background art pretty generic (for time and cost reasons), Airene was adamant that without a grounding in the world, the story simply wouldn’t work. She was right. We needed to see the world to figure out basic logistics: How far from the campus to the beach? What would the characters be seeing when they were walking towards the dorm? In a pivotal scene, what angle would make the most sense? It brought an almost directorial lens to storytelling. And while comics are definitely a far more visual medium than novels, I’ve found that working with an illustrator, especially one who’s gifted, can be game-changing when working on a fantasy.

In my WIP fantasy novel series (FQ hereafter), there is a temple that plays a rather pivotal role. Loosely based on the Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan and the Shwedagon pagoda in Myanmar (both of which I’ve visited), it is neither Hindu nor Buddhist, but draws on elements from both. It is set near a waterfall and the meeting of two rivers, with mountains all around. There are also a lot of odd specifications. There need to be two pathways to the temple, one less paved and more precarious than the other, that meet at a halfway point (because an army will march up the steps, but people need to be able to escape to the caves down the hidden path). There’s got to be an infirmary separate from the main visitor area, a place for dance performances, and all sorts of other things.

Lo, and behold! Introducing: Triveni temple!

Recently, at a writers’ conference I mentioned this to other writers, and one of them mentioned that crime writers did something similar; they made a floorplan. Especially for one of those “we’re all stuck in a house and one of us is the murderer” plots, it’s critical to know where the doors and stairs are, and who can see what from where. It’s one of the things I love about the Knives Out mysteries, that they fully inhabit the space, making it a character in the story.

In my case, getting Triveni right is critical not just for logistics. The fantasy world revolves around this location and around the many religious factions fighting to claim it. So many scenes are set here that I need to be able to describe from any person’s point of view what they’re seeing (which side is the cliff?) or hearing (temple music, soldiers, footsteps) or sensing (the waterfall spray) at any given time. 

There’s something even deeper at work in this temple’s architecture. Music is everywhere. Not just out in the open, where prayers are sung and dance performances are held everyday, but in the fabric of its construction (e.g. pillars that make music when struck). So, for instance, when one character explains a musical raga to a child, she does so using the temple’s structure. 

A lot of the story is about the juxtaposition of old and new, e.g. old music and new technologies. In one scene, Yeshe (22) is teaching music to Avani (6). Avani is a prodigy and taught herself a raga by reading the notes. This is the scene:

Together she and Avani broke into Bhairavi. It wasn’t really a melancholy raga, but it was heavy. Serious and introspective, working its way patiently into tense muscles and locked-up hearts. For what felt like moments but was probably several ghati given the burn in her lungs, she gave herself over entirely to this, shutting out everything else.

“Hold it,” she said, when Avani went through a sequence. “That’s not right. You can’t go up from Pa to Da and then back down to Pa.”

“Why not? Besides, that’s what the notes say! I looked them up on the screen.”

Yeshe winced. This was what came of letting Kshetrans translate their music without properly understanding it. “Think of it this way. You know the two different stairways to Triveni? Say you can only go up on one stairway, and only go down on the other. But the two stairways only meet at Pa. So if you’re halfway up and you want to come down—”

“Oh!” Avani cried out excitedly. “I get it. I can’t magically teleport to the other staircase. I have to keep going up before I can go down.” 

This time as Avani let herself feel into the music, there was something joyous about it, like a child hopping up and down familiar stairs.

Yeshe’s heart seized with homesickness, but they were entirely in tune with each other now.

For those unfamiliar with the Bhairavi raga, the scale that goes S R G M P D N S has two different D’s in it, one on the way up, and a different one on the way down. What Yeshe is describing is in fact the architecture of Triveni temple, since one of the names of the goddess in the temple is in fact Bhairavi, meaning: terrifying, awe-inspiring, the fierce and transformative power of the divine feminine, the energy that destroys the egoistic consciousness to achieve enlightenment. 

You can see now that Avani is referring to a sequence of notes that is ambiguous, since according to the rules, you can only go UP to the pink D and DOWN to the blue D. 

Obviously, no rules are perfect, and ultimately the raga just has to feel right. 

If you found this intense geekery fascinating, or would be interested in hearing more about the story of and making of the FQ series, please let me know in a comment. Otherwise, I’ll leave you all here with an amateur rendering of Bhairavi.