The stories of THE BARROW and the ARTESIA comic books are set in the fantasy setting of the Known World. Combining research into the histories, myths, and religions of the ancient and classical worlds of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Celts, the medieval world of alchemy and witch hunts, and 16 th century armor and warfare, with years of influence from role-playing games, fantasy novels, and comic books, the Known World is designed as a place at once familiar and fantastical.
The Known World is just that: the part of the world for which written histories create a firm understanding of the region’s past and inform its future, centered on the Mera Argenta, the Silver Scale Sea at the center of the world, surrounded by pincers of long-inhabited land, including the great Empire of Thessid-Gola, creation of the legendary Dauban Hess, the Conqueror King and first Emperor, which once covered the whole of the Known World and now is resurgent, ruled by an Undying Emperor who sits trapped on his throne by the Gray Dream; the island of Illia, seat of the Sun Court, where Islik the Divine King was born and ruled before ascending into the Heavens, and the cities of Hemispia, where his true descendants, the Dragon Kings, first ruled; the isle of Khael, with its Oracle Queen and her city, where past and future meet; Palatia, the city-state ruled by Urech the Usurper and his vizier, the Lord Mott, now become a barbarian empire to rival Thessid-Gola; and beneath the waves, lost Ürüne Düré, the greatest city the world had ever known, destroyed by hubris and jealousy.
And beyond lies a vast and dangerous world: the Great Midlands , once the earthly paradise of Geniché’s Garden, and now become a horrid desert; the vast deserts and hidden jungles of the south; and further still, the great peripheries of the Unknown World, where magic and legend rule.
THE MIDDLE KINGDOMS
The bulk of these stories take place towards the geographic center of the Known World in the Middle Kingdoms, prosperous lowland realms where worship of the Divine King holds sway and which occupy a peninsula jutting into the Mera Argenta. Over teeming merchant cities and ports, squabbling feudal knights at tournament, a plague of cultists to Forbidden Gods, and brigands and bandits gathering in the cracks of a splintering society, an increasingly infirm High King seeks to maintain his rule from his capital of Therapoli Magni and keep a peace that has lasted for nearly two hundred years, ever since the end of the Wars of the Throne Thief.
Artesia and her brother, Stjepan Black-Heart, hail from An-Athair, a woodland realm that was once a place of magic and power, now faded to become a haunted memory in the center of the Middle Kingdoms. To the north rises up Daradja, sometimes called the Highlands, to which Artesia has escaped: an ancient land of crags, valleys, citadels, and crossroads inhabited by proud and resilient folk drawn from all over the Known World to the region’s isolation and its dedication to the Old Religion of Yhera, the Queen of Heaven. To the west lies the cursed lands of Uthedmael, where the last Worm King was unmasked and slain, and the sprawling mountains of the Dain Éduins, where mysterious kings from half-way around the world have settled and imposed a harsh and malevolent rule.