Etymology of the Aestraean Menu

When building the culinary landscape of Aestraea, I quickly realized that food is one of the most powerful ways to anchor a reader. But it presents a unique worldbuilding challenge: When do you invent an entirely new word, and when do you reach back into our own history to let real-world language do the heavy lifting?

In Aestraea’s kitchens, the menu is split cleanly down the middle between words born of this new world and words resurrected from our oldest roots.

Part I: The Words Born of Necessity

Two things in Aestraea's kitchen required entirely new words because nothing on Earth had ever made them before. They couldn't borrow existing reputations; they had to build their own, one wince or one hunt at a time.

Kavren (The Black Brew)

Served pitch-black in Marleigh’s kitchen, kavren is the first of these new words. When she first discovered the beans, they yielded a harsh, unapologetically bitter brew that left patrons grimacing. But Marleigh didn't give up on it; she spent weeks experimenting with roast times, tracking the exact moment when the heat's harshness, unlocking a smooth flavor profile.

Kavren & Cream

Typically, bitter, cream, and honey tame the bitterness, making the drink slightly more palatable to those with sensitivities to bitter.

To complement her new roast, she introduced a whole line of house-made creams, ranging from rich and plain to heavily infused. Now, ordering kavren is a local pastime, with regulars discovering they can mix different creams for entirely new flavor profiles. Riordan, for instance, has a known weakness for layering her chocolate and peppermint creams into his mug, a small, comforting luxury in a dangerous world. Because Kavren didn't inherit coffee's modern, ready-made reputation, the characters (and the readers) get to watch its culture be built from scratch, one experiment at a time.

Boartusk

The second is the boartusk. Larger than a standard boar but smaller than whatever Mirodan's people call a bölény, this beast provides Aestraea with its meat, its bacon, and its leather. It also provides a running argument about exactly how many boartusk Mirodan can talk someone into hunting on a single trip. It’s an animal of profound utility and weight; Riordan always thanks the animal before he touches it, placing a hand on its shoulder, a debt acknowledged before it is spent.

Neither word existed before this world explicitly needed it. Everything else? I only had to remember.

Part II: The Words Borne of History

Everything else on the menu is much older than it looks. Rather than inventing alien phonetics for the sake of it, I chose to look back at the linguistic footprints of ancient Earth.

Cysar (The Golden Pour)

Our cyser is a traditional real-world cyser. In standard cider-making, apples ferment on their own; in traditional mead, honey ferments in water. A cyser is the beautiful intersection where honey ferments directly alongside apple juice. Because they share the same barrel from day one, the sweetness and the fruit forge entirely separate identities in the same cup.

Zhwazhat (The Ghostly Fruit)

This is where the real-world spice routes bleed directly into Aestraea. Zhwazhat is adapted from Jawz al-Hind (جوز الهند), the historical Arabic name meaning "Nut of India." It is a linguistic fossil from the ancient Indian Ocean trade routes, from an era when early explorers like Marco Polo first documented the fruit in the thirteenth century and mistakenly assumed it originated solely on the Indian subcontinent.

Zhwazhat & Olea

Zhwazhat al-hind translates to walnut of India, and is one of the older terms used for the humble coconut. It was in the 16th Century that the Portuguese began calling it a “coconut.”

It was a globe-spanning term used for hundreds of years before Portuguese sailors finally settled the matter with "coco,” their word for a grinning ghost or goblin, inspired by the three eerie, face-like spots on the shell. In the real world, the older trade names quietly lost the argument. In Aestraea, the ancient name survived.

Olea & Boneknit (The Botanical Heritage)

• Olea: Steps straight out of classical Latin. It is the direct, untouched genus of the olive tree, left alone rather than reinvented because the classical weight of the word already feels timeless.

• Boneknit: This is simply comfrey by its old, working folk-name. Long before modern medicine, traditional herbalists relied on the plant to heal fractures, affectionately calling it "knitbone" or "boneset" because they expected it to knit a fracture back together literally.

The Everyday Green: Tubers, Karota, and Aepfel

The basic crops follow a similar linguistic drift:

• Tubers remain our reliable potatoes.

• Karota are our carrots.

• Aepfels are apples. For a long stretch of history, æppel was just the Old English word used generally for any round fruit or nut (which is why we still have words like pineapple). Eventually, English narrowed its focus down to a single tree, but Aestraea keeps the broader, older memory alive.

Even Capsicas (peppers) and Tettnanger Lager follow the old ways, the lager being named exactly as beers have been named for centuries, after the noble hops harvested in medieval Europe long before anyone in Aestraea ever poured a glass.

Part III: Bridging the Gap

Vael'Capsicas sits directly in the middle of all this, with one foot in history and one foot in Aestraea.

Capsicas is the old world doing what it has always done, maintaining its botanical roots. Vael' is entirely mine, a prefix that exists nowhere but here. Together, they form a hybrid language to create a pepper that earns its terrifying warning long before anyone reaches for it. I built Vael' because this world eventually needed a word that hot.

The Significance of the Ordinary

Doctor #4 - Tom Baker

“Baker had always seemed like someone out of place in ordinary reality, the eccentricity audiences would soon celebrate simply being how he carried himself.” - from How Tom Baker Changed TV as the Fourth Doctor Who: “I Became the Doctor” by Ed Gross

It is no secret that one of my favourite fandoms is Dr. Who. In fact, I have two Doctor Who-themed tattoos, and my dream of earning a Ph.D. stemmed directly from watching Tom Baker as The Doctor on PBS when I was 3. I wanted to be a doctor just like The Doctor.

As time went on (as it is wont to do), I found The Doctor again. He was harder, angrier, sadder. When Christopher Eccelston stepped into the role in 2005 as the 9th Doctor, he brought a grit with him that hadn’t been present previously. Tennant reminded us of the fun the Doctor used to have and how humans were always so amazing.

But it was his final episode, “The End of Time, pt. 2,” in which he uttered a line written by Russell T. Davies that just never sat well with me. The Doctor said to Wilfred, “Look at you. Not remotely important.” It was his way of trying to rationalize his last moments as what he had come to know, which made his last line even more heart-rending: “I don’t want to go!”

It would take a season of Matt Smith getting his feet as the Doctor. In the first episode of his second season (the sixth of New Who), Steven Moffat fixed the error Davies had made, and allowed Smith to speak one of Moffat’s greatest quotes into existence: “…You know that in nine hundred years of time and space and I've never met anybody who wasn't important before.” That simple, throw-away line became the anthem for many neurodivergent nerds out there who felt themselves insignificant or unimportant. It was emblazoned on a t-shirt and given to me as a reminder of the power I have in this world.

In this world, and in the world I created.

Doctors #10 (David Tennant) & #11 (Matt Smith) in “The End of Time”

You see, Aestraea did not begin with a plot. It began with a question I could not stop turning over: what if the thing a person considers most unremarkable about themselves turned out to be the greatest feat humankind had ever witnessed? Not because of prophecy, not because some external force reached down and assigned them importance, but because the particular shape of who they are was precisely what the moment required.

I have spent a long time watching people make themselves small, and being one of those people I watched do it. Shrinking is not a sign of weakness; it is a defence mechanism. There is safety in anonymity. There is peace in blending in. There is also a deep sadness and loneliness in being overlooked and unrecognised.

I built a world where that is simply not true.

The Hearthlight Cycle is, at its structural core, about cycles: birth, death, rebirth, and the living that happens within and between them. It is about found family as a genuine architecture of belonging. It is about the idea that the bonds we choose are as load-bearing as the ones we were given.

Marleigh l’Mer runs a tavern at the edge of the known world. By every ordinary measure, she is easy to overlook. She does not carry a sword. She does not hold political power. What she holds is an uncanny understanding of what people need before they know to ask for it, and a refusal to let anyone in her orbit diminish themselves without being challenged on it. The world would look significantly different without her in it, and she will never be the one to say so.

That is the story I needed to tell. Across seven books, in the bones of a world built from the beginning to hold the argument: significance has never been as legible as we were led to believe.

I needed someone like The Doctor to rescue me. So I became The Doctor to save myself. I needed a world like Aestraea to prove that no one and nothing was insignificant. So I created it and breathed it into existence. If, like me, you have found yourself crying late into the early hours of the morning, pleading with the Universe to save you from your pit of despair, then know the Universe has answered. It has sent me, The Creator, to put pen to paper and create a world in which no one is unimportant and nothing is insignificant.

This post first published on Substack, June 19, 2026. The content has been modified for this blog.

What is The Hearthlight Cycle & Where Do I Start?

What is The Hearthlight Cycle and Where Do I Start?

As with many adventures, it is best to start at the beginning; and for The Hearthlight Cycle, the beginning is A World Reborn.

The Hearthlight Cycle is a seven-book epic fantasy series set in Aestraea, an original world created by C.N. Mackey and published by Map's Edge Media. It follows an ensemble cast across a world shaped by ancient dragons, warring nations, and the remnants of a forgotten age. It is epic fantasy with psychological depth, morally complex characters, and prose that reads as poetry.

You start with A World Reborn. That is Book 1, and it is the intended entry point. The series is sequential. Each book builds on what came before. There is no good reason to read them out of order, and several good reasons not to.

A World Reborn is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The campaign runs through 30 June 2026. After that, a standard edition will be available through Map's Edge Media.

If you want to be inside the world before the book is finished, the Map's Edge newsletter on Substack is where that happens. Lore, character insights, behind-the-scenes writing, and everything happening with the series as it develops. It is free. It is where readers find the door first.

The full series runs seven books, from A World Reborn through A New Age. It is worth it.