Amara (Stone trilogy)

Amara, also known as Stone, is the fictional world in British fantasy author Graham Edwards' Stone trilogy. To the series' protagonists Jonah Lightfoot and Annie West, Amara first seems to be a giant, never-ending stone wall, stretching on into the imperceptible distance in all directions. The wall is tilted approximately ten degrees from vertical. It is so large that many civilisations, both alive and dead, are constructed precariously along its surface.

Magic is evident everywhere in Amara. It is in the air, allowing speech, vastly different between races, to be understood by all. It nourishes the inhabitants of Amara, and somehow holds giant oceans in place on its surface.

Directions

Because the landscape of Amara is flipped, there are no compass points. Instead, six directions exist as follows:
*Upstone (along the wall to the right, when facing the wall)
*Downstone (along the wall to the left, when facing the wall)
*Up (up the wall)
*Down (down the wall)
*In (towards the wall)
*Out (towards the sky)

True shape of Amara

Jonah, with the help of Gerent, discovers the true nature of Amara early in the second novel of the trilogy, Stone and Sea. Noticing that the sun sets behind the vertical horizon, Jonah postulates that Amara is curved, and proves this is true when he and Gerent make simultaneous measurements of shadows at different points on the face of the wall. Considering that the wall is also sloped at a ten degree angle, they realise that the true shape of Amara is conical, and that the inhabitable, horizontal ledges and caves run around the face of Amara in a screw-like thread, spiralling around thousands of times towards the very tip, unimaginable heights above.

Purpose and features of Amara

Amara was built eons ago by the Deathless, the six immortal basilisks who became mortal in Dragonstorm after the dragon Archan stole their immortality. Amara's purpose is to store the history and memories of the world; relics (including living beings) from all periods of Earth's past and future are, in a way, catalogued there.

Into the future, into the past

As one moves Upstone along the thread, they move into Earth's future. A small way along the thread from where he first entered, Jonah encounters Tom Coyote, a man from the United States in the year 1980. Immediately Downstone are the ancestors of the human race, then dragons, then a point of decay which marks the ancient Turning Of The World (which occurred in Dragoncharm). Downstone from here are hundreds of strange civilisations and a massive ocean.

The memory rods and the tip

Pulsating ebonite rods called 'memory rods' are embedded deep inside the stone of Amara, running unbroken like veins and sometimes breaking to the surface. They serve as a continuous current along which all the memories travel up around the thread towards the tip of Amara. Jonah is one of the few, along with Archan, who can tap into the memory rods and change the course of history or look into the future. At the very top of Amara, where future history ends, lies a garden. Here, all the rods merge into one thin string that reaches high into the endless sky, signifying hope for all that has come before it. It seems to Jonah that the entirety of Amara, in its infinite self, is hanging from this string.