Crown of the North is the cycle of an alternative North America in 1666, where the Medawin, the living force of the continent, is dying under European settlement. It follows the Emissaries of the North and the Silver Chains.
| Type | Cycle |
| Era | Age of the New World (1666) |
| Spanish entry | Corona del Norte |
Background
The Medawin, the resonance of the living land, bleeds at every European settlement; each massacre creates a zone that kills natural magic. At Fort Henry, Virginia, a lumber magnate hires five strangers for a trading mission across the frontier:
- Patience Smith, a Puritan witch of the Commonwealth on crutches, who teaches Little Johnny to read; he dies in the first skirmish with the Shawnee.
- Warhol, a Cherokee bard.
- Neil, a Kelt warrior with two scimitars.
- StormJay Idaho, half Shoshone, seeking his white father.
- Edward, an agent of the English crown, “always on good terms with God and with the Devil”.
History
The group finds the Silver Chains buried in coffins with living creatures inside, sealed by the silversmith Sequoia, exiled for teaching writing. The chains are artifacts of Iroquois–English alliance, the Tree of Peace made metal, but the pacts are breaking. Sequoia buried four coffins to seal an ancestral corruption; his daughter Secoya built a chamber of chains to contain a corrupted Green Dragon.
Rebeca is Pocahontas: thought dead in England, she returned by unexplained means, seeks her son Stone and has pacts with dragons and serpents. The Great Serpent, the universal law weaving events toward the cycle’s end, appears as a pattern on the coffins, a mark on Patience’s powers, and an Iroquois ambassador who becomes a giant anaconda with Turkish scimitars before Governor’s Island.
Aboard the organic Flying Dutchman, the Captain, cursed never to stop, offers Patience a deal. She kills an infant and becomes Sinspawn, undead. Her pig familiar, Charles, tells her: “You deserve what you dream.”
Idaho petrifies into a golden statuette (“I think it is time to plant the seed”), first producing from his body chains like those that bound the children of Nicaramsa, now turned into a weapon. He has four lives: human, Golden Bones, statuette and Triaxian, a lunar elven creature reborn on a conscious Moon whose tree something is eating from within.
The Dutchman flies to the Moon, followed by the Emissaries of Pomola. There Patience walks without crutches and says “Parley”; the Captain accepts peace, the Chains return to the group, and he suggests they can bring things from another time: Cronotravel already exists in 1666.
In California, Los Malditos (“the Damned”), mercenaries shown their pasts in ololiuqui visions, face California, a Winton matriarch who is probably a dragoness and drove out the Green Dragon when Drake corrupted it. The Winton under her protection never attack first.
The gesta ends with Farruco dragged into a pit by clawed hands whispering something “crucial” he cannot remember, the Green Dragon flying toward Ohio, and the Medawin still dying.
Geography
The continent is mapped by its peoples — the Cree, Montagnais, Micmac and Beothuk in the north; the four districts of Algonkia and Apalache in the center — and by its river basins: the Mississippi and Missouri, the Ohio, the Arkansas and the Yellowstone, each still remembered by name by the Medawin.
Gallery
