And while it's never appeared on a map, I have a suspicion if I ever draw a much older map of the territories, you may find it listed there. I studied Nate's pages to try and be consistent with the visual depiction of the location. The location of Nettledown, is from Nate Pride's Legends of the Guard story 'The Ballad of Nettledown'. Orren as the 4th wielder of the Axe was covered (in pictogram) in The Black Axe book, but the story of his death and children are new for this story. The acorns were chosen as the other symbol because I'd already drawn the cover with the characters standing on a pile of acorns and didn't have a way to visually explain it beyond that it looked cool.ДЄs the tale within a tale begins, the readers are introduced to some Black Axe lore. I've got all my notes for how a complete set of them work (with their own versions and counts of suits and numbers) The cards we see for the story are 3 axes (each with a different Haven Guild founder 'suit' and a pair of acorns. In my blogpost about the cover, I described the visual influence for these cards. In past years, I used a few objects as lead-ins for the stories: stained glass, marionettes, and storybook style illustrations. At the start of the story we see that as a child he and his father (and mother too) lived in Shorestone, a city I featured in Black Axe and is a building trade craftmouse den as well as having secret ties to the mythic Black Axe itself. So, this story gave me the opportunity to introduce readers to him a bit more. He hasn't been a major player in Fall or Winter, but he will be in the upcoming (and as-of-yet unscheduled) Weasel War of 1149. As I said at the top of the post, this story is a tale told to Rand.

Mouse war black axe