When I started on the rewrite of this novel, I really only knew two things about Aiolia:  it's now known as Thessaly, and in ancient times it was particularly known for horse-breeding.

It wasn't until I turned to Google Earth to work out some of the logistics of the trio's arrival in the area that I realized why it was so renowned as a center for the breeding of horses:  it's pretty much the flattest place in Greece.

My original text did not describe a flat place.  Or, you know, anything even remotely like a flat place.

Because of that, I ended up having to reshape certain sections of the narrative (especially after their initial arrival), based on extensive time spent studying Google Earth's views of Mt. Pelion, Thessaly, and a few other places in Greece.

I made some notes on this screenshot to help me keep in mind what was where.  (I drew in the River Spercheios not because it wasn't on the map, but because it was too hard to see it at this distance from the map.  Pherai genuinely wasn't on the map, on the other hand, whereas Iolcos was, but only on a higher magnification.)

As you can see, I gave myself only a very general location for Phthia.  That's because no one actually knows where Phthia was.  It was already lost to the sands of time by the time of Euripides, who placed it in modern-day Farsala (which you can see on the map, just north of the center of the image), a trend many have followed (including the town's tourism board website, which spends more time identifying itself as Phthia than it does talking about the very real battle fought there by Julius Caesar (or did when I looked at it about five or six years ago, anyway)), but which doesn't really make a lot of sense given how far away it is from the River Spercheios.  Also, that puts it awfully darn close to Iolcos and Pherai, which are already too close to each other, given that the Late Bronze Age had kingdoms rather than the city-states of the historic period of Greek antiquity.  I can come up with a number of potential theories about why Pherai and Iolcos both have kings (ranging from Pherai being a lesser kingdom spawned from Iolcos when Admetos married Alcestis to them both actually being the same kingdom, and Admetos (or Eumelos) having shifted the palatial center from Iolcos to Pherai upon the death of Acastos and/or his sons) but...they're more fit for random speculation than fiction, particularly not this type of fiction, which is more about light adventure than it is about power politics.

Just thought I'd share that, to prove that I actually did do some research into the geography this time.  (Okay, I did do some for the previous book, but going to this level had not occurred to me...)

I probably put in considerably more effort than necessary on  map-plotting this^ leg of their journey, considering how little I actually ended up saying about it in the finished text.   But here it is, though.  That's where they land at the foot of Mount Pelion, and the path of their hike up to the cave where they fight the animated statue.

So, there you have it.

A brief glimpse into my disordered brain, and the way I approached the geographic layout of this novel.

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In other news, the ebook versions are now available.  As with Scions of Troy, they're no-frills ebooks auto-generated by AO3 once I finished posting the whole text of the book there, but...they do the job.  (I have also uploaded an amended version of the Ren'py text,  because it turns out that being able to read the AO3 version on my phone let me see a shocking number of typos and accidentally omitted/retained words that I hadn't seen on like a dozen read-throughs in the word processor, Ren'py editor, and Ren'py window.  Next time, I clearly need to put up the text on AO3 and check it there for mistakes before I post the finished product here.  Or find someone willing to beta-read it for me.  That would probably  be the better solution, but...)