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. Watercolour: a very tall Annu woman with long red locs stands on the deck of a stilt-house of pointed arches over a lagoon, while a boatman far smaller than her hands up a basket. Watercolour: at the stone gate of a forge sunk into a hillside, a Kazran Orve smith in a leather apron and an Alban Orve trader in a fur mantle weigh bronze axe-heads over a stone table of furs and amber beads. Watercolour: a huge, heavy-browed Gol man stands thigh-deep in a pale tidal channel with a long oar beside a dugout, a Gol woman wading behind him with a basket, mangroves at the shore. 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 Oobin farmer kneels to set a seedling in black soil in a green food-forest, a basket on his back, while behind him a woman carries a crock between grassy burrow mounds lit from within. Watercolour: at a harbour market stall, an Alban Orve sailor sets down a bale of furs, an Oohan trader weighs bronze, a tall Annu woman examines a knife and a small Oobin woman offers fruit, ships and porters behind them. Watercolour: an old Alban Orve in a fur mantle sits by a stone window, a single boat on the grey sea beyond. Watercolour: in a smoky vaulted stone forge, a short, heavy-browed Kazran Orve smith raises his hammer over a glowing blade, two more smiths at a hearth behind him and oil lamps burning in wall niches. Watercolour: at night on an arched stone roof above a dark sea, an old Annu astronomer with a braided red beard and a star-patterned robe lays one hand on a hide sheet and lifts the other toward the stars, a small oil lamp burning beside him. Watercolour: a giant Chyan man with a heavy brow, long arms and long red hair stands with a pine-shaft spear on a mountain ledge above the clouds, an ordinary traveller with a pack beside him reaching only to his hip. Watercolour: high in snowy mountains, a shaggy, harnessed Othen rears on its hind legs to hold a stone block at a wall of many-sided fitted stones, while its Annu handler in a red shawl raises a hand to it. Watercolour: an Oohan navigator coils a line on a stone quay at dawn, plank-built ships moored beside her and a city of mud-brick and arched stone climbing the hill behind. Watercolour: at a tidal fish weir of stakes and woven screens, a towering Gol woman lifts a dripping basket of fish while a grey-haired Oobin man, reaching her hip, points to the next pen and laughs. 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. 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.

Where the sea came in.

The North Sea from the last ice age to today. Drag through the years and watch Doggerland, the plain that joined Britain to the continent, go under.

20,000 years ago The sea 120 m below today's

Open this coast in the atlas →

20,000 years agoToday
Sea level: Spratt & Lisiecki · ice and vegetation: Beyer, Krapp & Manica

Follow along

A first glimpse.