Forum - View topicWeathering Continent vol.2 (untranslated)
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vanfanel
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So, many, many years after working my way through vol.1 with dictionary in hand, I was finally in the mood to read the second volume of Sei Takekawa's "Weathering Continent" fantasy series. I think it was the news of Mutsumi Inomata's passing that put me in that mood; she created the beautiful covers and illustrations for the whole series (except for a few side-story volumes), and it's hard to imagine those characters without her designs.
The series is set on Atlantis, which was once a prosperous land, but is now ravaged by desertification and natural disasters as the Ice Age comes to an end. The land is full of deserts and dead or dying city-states. In vol.1 we learned our three heroes' backstories, and got the story of how they all met: there's Tiei, a young man who was raised by a centaur-like alien and has an exceptional ability to see and commune with spirits...there's Lakshi, a runaway tribal princess who is vicious with a dagger...and there's Boyce, a sword-wielding "free knight" who owes a life-debt to Tiei. Volume 2 consists of three novellas. In each of them, the trio are on a long journey, and stop briefly in a different city. The first city is under a powerful curse that must be broken in order to save its children. The second city is in fact a city-sized graveyard where mummified corpses are arranged doing the things they did in life, tricking departed spirits into remaining. The third city is built deep underground, and is only discovered because Lakshi gets grabbed by its inhabitants for human sacrifice purposes. The stories are all solid, and for the most part read more like pulp fantasy than light novels as we think of them today (this, despite the series running in Dragon Magazine for many years). The second story, which served as the basis of the short anime movie that came out in the 90s, was the standout here. The afterword says that the main story hasn't really even started yet, but will in the next volume. I enjoyed this one, and would be willing to read another. |
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