Watercolour: a grey sea-cliff carved with galleries, doorways and windows above a small harbour of three-hulled boats, while an Alban Orve watches the sea from a carved ledge. Painting: a green aurora over a dark tidal flat, with sea-stacks and a stone arch reflected in the shallows below high cliffs. Watercolour: an old Alban Orve in a fur mantle sits by a stone window, a single boat on the grey sea beyond. Watercolour: a huge shaggy grey-and-russet Ota, a hide bag slung across its chest, knuckle-walks over a mossy ledge in snowy high cliffs.

Deluvia

A lost world, one piece at a time: a saga, an atlas and a watercolour webseries.

Open the atlas What is Deluvia?

A prehistory you were never taught.

Twelve thousand years ago, before the ice let go, the world wasn't empty, and it wasn't simple. Many kinds of people shared its coasts and trade roads: the broad-browed Alban Orves, who kept a continent's ledgers without writing a line of them down; the long-lived Annu; the small, sharp Oobins; the vast, quiet Othens. Then a comet came, and the sea took the maps.

Deluvia is that world, built one piece at a time.

The comet comes from a real argument. Whether fragments of one struck the northern world as the last ice age ended, the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, is still fought over by scientists. The atlas walks it strike by strike, with the papers on both sides: Firestone, Kennett, Sweatman, Holliday. Follow the strikes on the map →

Watercolour portrait of an Alban Orve: red hair, heavy brow, weathered freckled skin, and rows of dark tattooed bars and dots on his hands and neck, with sea-cliffs behind.

Three ways in

A detail of the atlas: the northern coasts in the age of ice, with dry land where the sea now runs.

The atlas

An interactive map of the drowned coastlines, with the places and peoples of that world across its ages.

Somewhere off the coast you know, there's a city no map remembers. We drew the map anyway.

Open the atlas →
Watercolour: a travelling Alban Orve with a staff and bedroll stands on a clifftop above a cove of boats.

The saga

Six books, from the world as it was to what the sea left behind.

You were taught they grunted. They kept ledgers: a continent of trade, and never a line of it written down.

Meet its peoples on the map →
Watercolour: a shaggy brown Ota with a near-human face leans over a boulder in a mountain gorge, a knotted net in its hand.

The webseries

The world in painted watercolour, one people and one place at a time.

Follow on YouTube →

Follow along

New pieces of the world land on the channels first.

How Deluvia is made

Deluvia is made by one person working with a studio of AI tools. I build the world, decide what happens in it, and approve every page and image that stays. The prose is drafted by an AI writing agent from my outlines, notes and rulings, and I keep reworking it, both the sentences and the way the agent writes them, until the saga reads like one author. The images and video are made with AI image and video tools, then chosen, corrected and remade until they match the world.