Notes on the Original Quastrian

Throughout the course of this re-telling of the Pentarch Cycle of Classical Quastrian pre-history, readers may notice something of a semantic, linguistic, and lexical drift through the progression of the tales. This is intentionally done, an effort to align more perfectly with the fluid nature of what is known about the early history of Quastria, a nearly exclusively oral tradition, and later millenia of Pantarctican priestly and scholarly interpretation — and misinterpretation — across the diversity of proto-pantarctic sources.

For example, Redgraves in his Quatrian Codex renders the city we here transliterate as Abbadon (“gift of the father” — i.e., Anthuor) as “Abaddon,” from the Hebrew for “bottomless pit,” of which Bucks used the Latin equivalent instead, “Exterminans,” (for destroyer) on account of the vicious destruction unleashed upon the landscape by the fall of that eponymous city. (See also: Wild Waste, Dead River, Death of Eldrin, Wormwood/Assenzju)

Similarly, various scholarly traditions have each transliterated the ideo-tonal cluster associated with the name of the land itself into a multitude of different stylings including, among others:

Quatria
Cuatria
Kwatria
Quastria
Quâstria
Quaztría
Quastrie
Quastry
Quatrilla
Quaestrea (supposedly for their equestrian prowess)
Questry (origin of the modern word ‘quest’)
Quaïz
Kestry
Kestria
Kellstria
Kaestrie
Kastria
Kuaýstria
Kuaťtrea
Kwetuor
Kwetwor

And so on. To list all the variations for the nomenclature of this rich and storied land would fill volumes in itself (and has: see Fuller’s incomparable Complete Names of Quastria). The author here chooses generally Quatria, as it is the most widely known to modern Pantarctican audiences, as well as Quastria, or occasionally Quâstria — where appropriate — for literary or poetic reasons, fully comprehending, accepting, and encouraging the many other valid alternate variations of names — just as we see evidenced by the countless variations in characters, locales, and events in the tales themselves as later sources preserved them for us.