I'm starting over. Let me try to explain. The concept I am talking about is inspired from several other sources. The land-law of the riddle master is one of them, but my concept is a little different.
This will be lengthy. But hopefully it will make sense.
Example #1 - The Riddlemaster of Hed(excerpts)
NOTE: The MC, Morgon, is talking about his brother to Deth, the harper of the High One.Quote:
"After our father died, we grew so close that sometimes we dream the same dreams... I was that close to my father as his land-heir. I felt him die. I didn't know how or why or where; I simply knew, at that moment, that he was dying. And then that he was dead, and the land-rule had passed to me. For a moment I saw every leaf, every seed, every root in Hed... I was every leaf, every new-planted seed... I don't know why I'm talking about that. You must have heard it a hundred times."
"The passage of the land-rule? No. From what little I have heard, though, the passing isn't so gentle in other lands. Mathom of An told me some of the various bindings that demand constant attention from the land-rulers of An: the binding of the spell-books of Madir, the binding of the ancient, rebellious lords of Hel in their graves, the binding of Peven in his tower."
That should give you a sense of the land rule in the High One's realm. The High one controls it, and he's the only one who can take it away. This has only happened once:
Quote:
The High One, from the beginning, had left men free to find their own destinies. His sole law was land-law, the law that passed like a breath of life from land-heir to land-heir; if the High One died, or withdrew his immense and intricate power, he could turn his realm into a wasteland. The evidences of his powers were subtle and unexpected; he was thought of, when at all, with both awe and trust; his dealings with rulers, generally through his harpist, were invariably courteous. His one concern was the land; his one law, the law instilled deeper than thought, deeper than dreaming, in his land-rulers. Morgon thought of the terrible tale of Awn of An, who, trying to discourage and army from Hel, had set fire to An, sending flames billowing over half the land, burning harvest, orchards, shearing the hilllsides and riverbanks. Safe at last, he had awakened out of a sleep of exhaustion to realize he had lost the wordless, gentle awareness of things beyond eyesight that had been with him, like a hidden eye, since the death of his father. His land-heir, running grief stricken into the room, had stopped, astonished, to find him still alive...
Figured it out? Okay. Now forget about Morgon, the High One, the Riddlemaster, and everything else. We're starting over again. I love the books, I'm the only one who's read them, but I'm not much of an imitator. I could never copy what Patricia McKellip did with that series. I much prefer to come up with something new. Which is what I'm doing. Because the whole concept of land-law set my brain wheels turning. The land-law in the excerpts above has little to do with any kind of moral code, or binding to the inhabitants of the land. It is knowledge of the land itself... the very earth in fact. So I started thinking about moral codes. I thought about Socrates, and I thought about a thorny problem in a book I'm writing. Time for example #2: Natural law.
Natural laws are normal things you take for granted, but they are laws in the sense that they can't be broken and all things are ordered by them. Things like Spring follows Winter, Night follows day, Rain only falls up, and the second law of thermodynamics that states that entropy must always increase. I'm not talking about law as in "Thou shalt not steal", that's a moral and ethical code. (Things like taxes aren't laws either, those are simply decrees by the big guys.) I'm thinking law in the scientific term. Newton's Law of Gravity. The Laws of Thermodynamics. They aren't called laws for nothing. This is the kind of context I'm thinking in. You can't break these laws, the universe would fall apart if they didn't exist. (Like the High One's land-law.) But nobody ever said that there wasn't a way to circumvent them. After all, despite gravity, we can fly! Keep that thought in mind. We're going to need it later.
Example #3: This was what really got my brain going. The Book of Proverbs. You've heard of that one, right? My dad would go around quoting things like "See a man who excels in his work, he shall stand before kings!" He would explain that that's not a promise, that's a fact, a Truth. And my brain translated, "that's a law." It is. There's no how, or why, or if about it. A great many proverbs are simple truths. I'll give examples if you want them, but you should get the idea. My brain thought, that's a law. No, that's a
land-law. A word to convey an idea that I don't think has been expressed before.
(I know, I'm getting long-winded, but hold on! I'm almost done!)
NOTE: The rest of this post deals solely with the story I'm writing that uses land-law. If you get the idea and don't need a run down of the history of Elleys and are willing to ignore the question of the MC of mine who breaks the law and are really tired of reading something of great length; than you need read no further. You asked about my story. In an attempt to do away with much of the magic I had originally written into my first novel, (The Prince of Yen,) I turned to the concept of land-law. The name of the land is Elleys. Originally the original inhabitants were fairies. Now they're just... I don't know. Special people. From the other side of an impassable mountain range came simple mortals who were escaping enemies, (who never caught up with them, the enemies are just a convenience to get them out of their own land) and settled in Elleys, mingling with the... whatever, and diluting their powers. (Much of this I haven't redeveloped yet, so magic is still the only explanation for the history. It's an unfinished story. Live with it.)
Magic and mortal blood don't mix well, and many years later evil had corrupted the power of the Elloi into a race of wizards. Each wizard wanted to rule the others and they massed huge armies of the innocent (relatively powerless) inhabitants and fought each other. Finally one day, a leader for the downtrodden arises and Tell leads the armies of the wizards to unite against their masters and destroy them. Many of them surrender. Tell accepts their offer of advice and friendship and help (many of whom say was a mistake but whatever) to protect the land forever from war and invaders and whatever. They
write the land-law. They write some ambiguous moral code that's bound into the earth itself, and into the hearts of everyone born west of the mountains. (Where Elleys is situated.) Only the Kings of Yen, in direct succession from King Tell, have the power to add to that law, but as centuries of peace go by and the wizards grow weaker and weaker, the knowledge of how the binding is done is forgotten. The law of Elleys becomes a political mess.
(Making sense so far? I should copy all this into the 'history' forum and get help developing it all!)
Hundreds of years later, enter Janin. (not me, my character. My real name is Katie.) Janin is the heir to Yen. He's sworn an oath to uphold the law of Elleys. No one's quite sure what that law is, but Janin's very loyal, and just. However, due to some complicated circumstances, a friend of his from the other side of the mountains, (he shouldn't have gone and mixed with the mortals in the first place but Janin was never one to listen to sound advice,) comes to Yen and is forbidden to leave because one of Tell's original laws stated no mortal who came to Elleys could ever return to tell his own people of what he had seen in case they decided to mount an invasion. Well. Janin's sworn to keep the law of Elleys. He can't help his friend escape and go home. No one knows the limit and definition and extent of Tell's laws, they can add to them, amend them, change them, no one knows which ones are important, no one knows who wrote which or which are bound to the earth or whatever, but everyone knows that if Tell's laws are broken the land will be detroyed/loose it's peace/whatever. this is regarded with what is almost bordering on superstition. But Janin's cousin, (the evil villain, who's also a traitor, and also his best friend,) says that Tell's law has already been broken by kings who twisted it to their own purposes, the land is already failing, the political situation is already as crazy as the Galactic Republic when it fell, and that Janin should give more attention to solving real problems than bickering about law. Janin's friend agrees. Janin disagrees. He won't break the law. But, like man learning to fly, he finds a way to circumvent it and get what he wants in spite of it. (I'm not telling you what he does 'cause that would give away my story, which I'm
not doing.) However, circumvention is the same as breaking it apparently because, fast forward another few decades.
(BTW. This is actually a whole trilogy of books. Or rather, the Prince of Yen is a book and The Elleysian Chronicles covers everything that happened before and after. It might fit in one volume. I'm not sure. Tell is part one, Janin part two, and this is part three.)
The line of King Tell, unbroken for centuries, has splintered. A distant cousin is the only successor until an upstart from a distant land arrives, claiming to be the only son of the last king. (Reminder: This is not based on the Riddlemaster land-law! The law is in the land, not the rulers. It's not passed from ruler to ruler like in her books!) the council of the rulers of Elleys ignore his claim, and the King of Yen banishes him as a traitor. Ian (the rightful heir) has many adventures, finally deciding to claim his birthright at any cost, and throwing off any pretense at following a law that clearly no longer exists. He goes to the mortal world, raises an army there and marches into Elleys, breaking practically every law Tell ever wrote, shattering the protection and peace of a land once called "The Blessed." War comes, for the first time in a thousand years, to the gates of Yen. The land-law has been shattered, the knowledge of it lost forever in ignorance.
(I could rant forever on who
really started the downfall of Elleys, don't let me.)
So. That's the land-law as I'm using it currently. It's more complex than that, but I'm in the middle of the seventh revision of Prince of Yen (Janin's story) and I've barely started on the others. *sigh*. I should finish it...
Sorry about the length. Hope I didn't scare you off.
So I'll look at this topic when I have time and write a good, long, answer. 
