It’s Wellington Heritage Week (or fortnight really) from 24 Oct to 6 Nov so I thought I’d write a quick piece about a couple of the Wellington heritage research holes I fell into while writing City of Souls and explain a few of the little things I added into the story as a love note to home. If you’re familiar with my short stories, you’ll know that’s a recurring theme in my work.
City of Souls is my enemies to lovers paranormal romance set in a postapocalyptic Te Whanganui-a-Tara inhabited by both humans from our modern world and winged elementals with magic. It comes out on 9 November.
One of the most fun (and I say that in the maniacal evil laughter sense of the word) bits of worldbuilding in City of Souls was collapsing all of the reclaimed land in Wellington back into the harbour leaving a graveyard of high rise buildings crumbled in the ocean.
The harbour was glittering under the sun, cerulean waves capped with white peaks where the wind caught the water. The graveyard of the crumbled remains of buildings yet to be salvaged from where they’d been consumed by the ocean looked like the scattered toys of a child from this height.
Below them, the city itself was a patchwork of the buildings from their two realities—high-rises of the human world interspersed with the organic bridged constructs of the elemental free city.
Over 155 hectares of Wellington's waterfront land was reclaimed from the harbour from the 1800s through to the 1970s, and there are brass plaques on various central city streets showing where the shoreline used to be. I've always wondered what it would be like if all that land sank back into the ocean in one of our frequent earthquakes and this book's given me a chance to play with that image.
A Foreshore Reclamations Report by Robert A. McClean referenced this historical record of the reclamation, which just boggles my mind when I try to imagine what that would’ve involved back then:
“In March of that year, tenders for reclaiming from the sea, at the south-west corner of Lambton Harbour, a piece of land 360 feet in length by 100 feet in breath, were called for. This contract required considerable care on my part in estimating, for it involved building a wood retaining wall out in the water, and filling in behind it with earth, ... This contract I commenced at once (for, in consequence of the Australian gold diggings, labour was to be scarce), and although a heavy sea once carried away some of the timber wall and a considerable quantity of earth forming the filling-in, I completed the contract within the time specified, and made out of it a clear profit of 212 pounds.”
And I found the maps in this NZS 1170.5:2004 site subsoil classification of Wellington City article by Semmens et al incredibly useful. Along with this Wellington City Council Guide to the Old Shoreline Heritage Trail.
The other fun heritage research hole I fell into was looking into the Majestic Theatre that previously occupied the site where the Majestic Centre now sits as Wellington’s tallest building at 116 metres (381 ft) high and with 29 above-ground storeys.
In City of Souls, the Majestic Centre is the landmark seat of power of the city’s ruling winged necromancer Bastion and has been altered by elemental magic to be covered in vines of twisting magical metal that contain thousands of souls of those who died in the apocalyptic “Melding” twenty-five years earlier. As one of the safest places in the city, it not only contains the Lord of Souls’ penthouse and several hydroponics floors for self-sufficiency, it also contains the city’s hottest nightclub The Crypt where winged elementals and humans alike can let loose without worrying about the magical predators of the world (like the pony-sized winged spider monsters that took over the Beehive after it was gutted by earth dragons. It’s now known as the Spiderhive. Sorry.).
There isn’t a nightclub in the real Majestic Centre, but the original Majestic Theatre was a Cabaret and Cinema. I loved that I could bring some of that history back into the building in my novel. And as I was researching, I found this amazing bronze plaque that used to be housed in the theatre and now resides in Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand’s Audiovisual Archive.
Above the doors hung a neo-classical bronze plaque from the days when the site the Tower stood on had first held a small human Cabaret Theatre over 100 years earlier. Designed in human Florence, a city in his brother’s territory of the Court of Fire, it depicted the god Apollo introducing the new art of cinema to the arts of dance, drama and music. It served as a piece of human history in the now very elemental tower, a link between the Court of Fire and the City of Souls, and a reminder of the evolution of the space.
Hilariously, as I was revisiting the Ngā Taonga link for this article, I discovered it mentions an old Evening Post article describing the building as “arisen phoenix-like as it were from the ‘ashes.'” I hadn’t discovered this article when I wrote my prequel short story to City of Souls, but the story (available to my newsletter subscribers for free) is titled ‘From the Ashes’ and features a murderous phoenix!
I love the richness that comes with setting a story at home: the deep sense of place and the history you can draw on. There are so many ways my love for Wellington shows through in City of Souls, even if I did destroy and rebuild it just a little bit.
The magical predators that came to the city in the Melding are all winged, because our fauna has always tended towards birds and wings, even if they don’t all fly, and the ubiquitous winds of Wellington lend themselves to flight. So, my City of Souls is full of dragons, griffins, and winged spiders with hairs that sting like ongaonga nettles (they probably flew here from Australia though because they’re venomous).
It's hard to get a decent cup of coffee in a post-apocalyptic world where magical predators have made planes and boats a dangerous proposition, but there’s no way a Wellingtonian would go without. In its place the elementals have partnered with tangata whenua to produce a kawakawa tea imbued with a magical stimulant.
And, of course, my characters wear a lot of black (it’s Wellington! It’s basically a uniform), to the point where my friends tease me about my goth heart showing on my cover lol.
Black wings, black clothes, and all the angst.
If you want to see someone else’s take on what it’s like reading a paranormal romance set in Wellington, check out this early review from SFF Romance Books (also, give them a follow on Insta because they’re doing awesome things!) Here’s an excerpt:
“Although I’ve lived in the South Island for some years now, I’m a Wellington girl at heart. I spent the whole book thinking ‘Is this what paranormal romance is like for Americans??? This is amazing!’ Because I’ve never before had that experience of reading a book in which a place I am so familiar with is altered in such interesting ways. I could immediately identify almost every location and building mentioned.”
City of Souls releases 9 November and is available from Good Books (support my fave Wellington bookshop! They deliver to the rest of the country too), direct from me (if you live in NZ), or from a bunch of online retailers. If you prefer ebooks, it will be on Amazon (and will be in Kindle Unlimited). To see what early reviews are saying, head to Goodreads.