Arcadia: if you look closely, you can see the sheep
The Fall of the Sea People is an epic fantasy series by Henry Hallan.
The first volume, Venus and the Sea People, sees a singer return from life at The City to her home village nearly nine hundred years after she departs. She is befriended by two local girls, who persuade her to take them to the City.
The rest of the first volume follows the rise to power of one of those girls, and ends on a Cliffhanger.
Provides examples of:
- Anyone Can Die: half of Eala's novice companions are dead before the end of the first book.
- Arcadia: Anleacán. Éirime is even called The Shepherdess because she comes from Anleacán.
- Arc Words: "Immortality doesn't mean living forever" and "The Sea People do not marry"
- Cool Gate: One way to get to alternative universes. The Gate that leads to Anleacán is near the City, but there is another one, the Sky Gate, on the other side of the world.
- Cool Sword: the weapon of choice of the Sea People. Just having them made of metal makes them advanced weapons technology in the setting, but they also have battlefield communications and are used to direct magical attacks.
- Distant Prologue: Although it is all set in the time of Atlantis, the first chapter is set about 900 years before the rest. Despite this, the main character of the prologue is also a significant character in the rest of the first book.
- Fantastic Rank System: The City has three tiers of ranks; Novice, Veteran, and Immortal, with eight levels in each. The Fantastic Honorifics are simple: someone in a higher tier is addressed as "Lord/Lady", and the Mentor is addressed as "Mentor". But peasants address all of them, including the Mentor, as "Lord/Lady".
- Humans Are White: Averted. Many of the characters in the City are recognisably of other races, and several are described as mixed-race. It appears from the description of the Favourites that the Mentor prefers other races to the dominant Celtic type. Justified in Anleacán, which was designed and created by a white teenager.
- Our Fairies Are Different: The Forest People are genetically engineered to guard humanity from the Forest
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: poor Abhainne and her household gods
- Pygmalion Plot: Literal example, with Aclaí as Pygmalion and Éirime as Galatia - with Anleacán for her pedestal. Then she is Selected and he never speaks to her again.
- Really 700 Years Old: Damhánalla, Éirime, probably others
- Sacrificial Lamb: flocks of them. Three quarters of Novices die within a year of being Selected.
- Sacrificial Lion: starting with Rósa, Lách and Learó and possibly ending with Eala
- Spirit Advisor: played straight with Rónmór; horribly subverted by the Mentor's dead brother
- The Fog of Ages: The Mentor can't remember what his wife looked like.
- The Older Immortal: It is the older Immortals who run the City
- Unobtainium: The Metal the City uses for swords and armour. Presumably Orichalcum
- Worldbuilding: Anleacán, in-character and lampshaded by Cathúa over dinner with the Governor of the Two Rivers
