Many of my other works in progress and finished but currently unsold stories take place in the world of Ixilon. At first glance it is a pretty typical fantasy world, a parallel Earth where magic really works. Many of the civilizations there are descendants of various groups of humans who fled wars and persecution in our timeline or varous alternate timelines.
New England is inhabited by Cavaliers who fled Cromwell's hatchetmen. The Gulf Coast is inhabited by the descendants of the followers of the Lost Dauphin, although they now call their country the Swamp Kingdom. California is the home of Americans from a world where the British crushed the Independence movement and Baron von Steuben led the frightened survivors to a new home on the shores of a sheltered bay.
However, there is more to Ixilon than meets the eye. The "trolls," the brutish humanoids who inhabit the Old World and often make war upon the humans of the Americas, are not anthropoids at all. Rather, they are the creatures who evolved to fill the "intelligent tool-user" niche in a world where the Permian extinctions never took place and the proto-mammals developed directly into mammal-equivalents without aeons of being suppressed by the dinosaurs. Like humans, they came to Ixilon through worldgates from their native timelines.
Speaking of dinosaurs, it soon becomes evident that the mysterious Old Ixilons who created the worldgates and whose ruins are scattered all over the world were intelligent dinosaurs. This is a world where the K-T Boundary Meteor never fell, where some line of dinosaurs closely related to the birds went on to develop self-awareness, civilization and technology of a peculiarly magical sort.
What nature failed to do, the Old Ixilons brought upon themselves. They fought among themselves in a terrible magical war that left the ecosystem ravaged for millenia. The Old Ixilons are extinct, and their artifacts remain as mute testimony of the danger of magic uncontrolled. However, in those last desperate days a few powerful mages created the worldgates as a way of attoning for their civilization's sins by making their world into a refuge for refugees from other timelines.
There they create a world that is a mixture of the cultures they brought with them and the echoes of the lost civilization of the Old Ixilons. Horses and cattle share pasturage with hadrosaurs and ceretopsians. Cats and dogs share their masters' affection with silken-feathered compys. Along with Latin and Greek, humans study Old Ixilon, the language of magic.
Because of my interest in history, I frequently borrow and rework historical figures and events as the basis of Ixilon characters and stories. In fact, many of the original Ixilon stories grew out of a desire to create a sort of "Hornblower in Elfland" story of fighting-sail admirals with magic.
The original story of the Admiral's Gift was hashed out rather rapidly, with no real intention of creating a complete universe. But as I wrote, the society and history of the Swamp Kingdom just kept growing on me. Once I knew that their ancestors were French exiles who fled the Reign of Terror with the Lost Dauphin, it became natural to feed bits and pieces of actual French history into the story mill, creating such characters as King Rene the Great.
Although many of my Ixilon stories have been set in the Swamp Kingdom and dealt with the problems of the Admiral's Gift, I have also written stories about other parts of Ixilon. In "The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier" I turned my attention to New Albion, where the descendants of Cavaliers made a home in the ruins of an Old Ixilon city. One of the principal characters of that story was Alexander Lupian, the chief organist of St. George's Cathedral.
Currently I am working on a series of stories dealing with Admiral Shayell, a character inspired by a historical admiral, Sir Clowdisley Shovell.
All pictures on this page copyright 1999, 2000 by Leigh Kimmel, all rights reserved.
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This page last updated March 15, 2000
