Stories from the Horizon

🪷 This article is part of Stories from the Horizon, a journey across Vekllei's boroughs.

A New Format for Stories from Vekllei #

Vekllei has one hundred boroughs that are usually characterised as the foundation of the Vekllei city-state. Some, like Bakur, have only a few thousand people in them. Others, like the Great Coast, have over a million.

I’ve been working on this project for a while now, about five years counting backwards, and in that time what Vekllei means to me has matured. In some ways, things have calcified – a gift and a curse – but it’s also true that the project is more complicated now than it ever was. I think it’s more sophisticated, and it reflects a more complete person.

For a long time now, Vekllei has existed first as a series of pictures with stories attached – this very format you’re reading now, which number about 315 posts since 2017. They’re all on this site, check them out. Today, I’m announcing Stories from the Horizon, a new approach to this format that will depict Vekllei’s 100 boroughs in a series of 100 landscape pictures, woven together as a great journey featuring Tzipora.

In 2066, Tzipora is drifting between moments. Since high school, nothing has really worked out the way she’d hoped – not university, not work, and not love. She is waiting for the shape of her life to make sense. The past seems further away and more relevant than ever before, and her future is uncertain. Rather than confront these things directly, she meets the universe on her terms, and starts a journey in the great Vekllei tradition – the Visa Con, or Private Pilgrimage. The Visa Con is a winding path throughout the island of Vekllei, reaching all corners of its great Atlantic landscapes. It is a testament to the goodness of living in this world.

Stories from the Horizon isn’t the upcoming ‘Vekllei comic,’ but it will help me create it. The comic is a big deal for me, and it’s forced me to rethink many aspects of how I depict Vekllei. Five years since the first Vekllei post, I’m replacing the burden of an established format with the lightness of being a beginner again. These stories will resemble the posts you’re familiar with, but will be more considerate in how they depict landscape and architecture in Vekllei, and will altogether produce a really important album of Vekllei landscapes that I can draw on for future projects. You’ll notice some of my online presence changing to reflect this – new banners for social media and that sort of thing. Who knows, maybe Stories from the Horizon could be turned into a little picture-book when it’s done.

It won’t be fast – pictures will (probably) come out at the same pace as they do now (I want to make them faster, I really do, I’m always trying). It won’t be consistent – I’ll still want to do other concepts occasionally. And I can’t guarantee they’ll all be good. But I want to enjoy doing something new, from a new perspective and spirit, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

I’ve always loved journeys, so let’s see where this takes us.

– Hobart