About 2 years ago I found myself(and a couple hundred others) caught in a layoff. The best job prospect I had at the time was 300 miles away from home. This put me driving home every other weekend. Being away from home puts a strain on things, but I live for road trips so this was sort of a mixed curse/blessing for me. Also, It wasn’t just any 300 miles. It was 300 miles of some of my favorite roads in the state, crossing several of my old stomping grounds.

on one trip while passing thru one of my favorite valleys I couldn’t help but stop and take a picture of this really cool granite plateau that was sticking up out of the center of the valley. I’d seen it many times, but for some reason it caught my eye differently than it ever had before. It was almost magical. The only thing it was missing was some sort of castle or fortress built on top of it. My picture taken, I got back on the bike and headed on. The rest of the trip and to be honest up until a few weeks ago, I’ve tossed around the idea of who those people would be that lived in that fortress. What would their story be.

Every fortress has something it protects, I figured a princess or a magical artifact have already been done. It has to be something that gives the people who live there a purpose. Something that would be coveted by others. Who hasn’t heard of the expression, knowledge is power.

A library would be protected within the great keep and those that protected it would be guildsmen who have sworn to preserve knowledge and skills so that they are not lost to time.

Ok, so maybe only a book worm like myself would find the idea of a university in a medeval setting noble or romantic. But there had to be something I could do with this. Who would be the protagonists, the counter culture that feared or envied this wealth of knowledge that the Guildsmen protected. I was at a blank.

A few weeks ago we were at a convention and I kept noticing a large turnout of what I guess is called steampunk type characters. They were really cool, but I couldn’t help but think that everything from the cloth to the hardware of their costumes looked recycled. That was it.

Two cultures living side by side with opposing views on what technology should be. One culture that believes that a person should learn how everything is done from the bottom up and looks on the other culture as scavengers. The other culture believes in holding onto and reusing what ever they can find but looks on the first group as extremist even cultist.

They live side by side each on separate sides of a great river and connected by their love for the land on which they live and an old metal bridge built in a previous era.

So it is that i introduce you to a magical land where the only magic is knowledge.

The Guildsmen of Marble

Chapter 1 [link]

Chapter 2 [link]