A little while ago I posted on headcasting for Storm Bride based on pictures that I found on the internet. I promised a post about the locations of Storm Bride, which is late, but better late than never.

For a refresher, here’s the map of Storm Bride:

The story begins at the shore near Prasa, when Saotsa washes up on a sea stack called Six Pine Rock. It looks something like this:

The city of Prasa like in a wet coastal region, and the extended family called the enna lives in lodges together. Prasa is a pretty big city; it has about 30,000 people in it at the time of the story, which is much bigger than any real-world settlements in the Pacific NW before the arrival of Europeans. But I imagine that it looked something like this, stretching quite a ways back along both shores of the Prasa river, with lodges marching in rows away from the shore:

The greater size of Prasa relative to any real-world settlement is one of the big changes. Unlike the other tribes of the Pacific NW, the Prasei are not just fishers and foragers, but have a variety of domesticated crops which drives a larger population size.

The Yakhat hail from a distant part of Aratasa known as the Bans. This is an amusing story, because I originally conceived of the Bans as a sort of hilly marsh, in which lowland areas perennially flooded, but hilltops served as sites of permanent structures, where the people lived during the flood season. I didn’t know whether any such place actually existed on the earth, until I saw this picture:

This is exactly what I thought the Bans should look like, and I was excited to see that something very similar to what I had imagined actually existed.

Finally, much of the action of Storm Bride takes place away from the rainy coast, on the high, dry plains which are in the rain shadow of the White Teeth Mountains. Just as I imagined the coast of the Pacific NW as the setting for Prasa, I took the inland parts of Washington state, across the Cascade Mountains, as examples of what this area looks like.

Imagine the tents and cattle of the Yakhat spread across those hills, and it’s just about perfect.