Mist and Shadows

Long ago, when the world was young, or at least I was, the world was born in a tree, and it was good.

The story begins back in primary school, when I was a young boy. I was already a fan of fantasy, though I hadn’t read that much of it at the time; mainly Narnia and a bit of the Black Cauldron series. I was at that age, however, a massive history buff and had wanted to be an archaeologist since the age of five at least. No, seriously. I loved reading about history, and more so the myths and legends of cultures.

One day, a friend and I were playing in the tree-house in the backyard of my house. By tree-house, health and safety not being what it is now days, it was simple an old door nailed between some branches.

For whatever reason, now long forgotten, we decided to play at being a fictional race of people which, in the height of originality, we called The Tree People. We pretended we were brothers known as Ash and Oak Sycamore, that we lived in trees and everything we did was tree related.

At the end of that year though my parents moved states and took me with them and I lost track with my old friends, this being before the days of mobile phones and texting and the internet.

That next year I really got involved with fantasy for the first time, starting with The Hobbit and soon moving on from there. I started devouring any book of the genre I could get my hands on; Eddings, Fiest, Gemmel, Pratchett and many others.

During that year, the first year of high school, for our English class we were tasked with writing a story. Having only just read The Hobbit, the story I wrote, named The Battle of Red River Ravine was heavily influenced by it, or at least the Battle of Five Armies from it.

Remembering the games I had played the year before, I used those two character, the brothers Oak and Ash Sycamore, going off to war to fight alongside the dwarves and elves and centaurs and fauns and talking beasts (The Chronicles of Narnia being the other main influence on the story) against an army of orcs and bats and wolves.

It was truly terrible stuff, but no worse than you’d expect from a twelve year old, but in that story was born the seeds of the setting, seeds that took many years to sprout and grow into something totally unrecognisable from those first few faltering steps.

As part of that first story, there was a simple map drawn; three main islands off of the east coast of a landmass. From there it sort of exploded, out into a 3×3 A4 map, and then further out into a 5×5 map, stuck to the wall of my room, comprising an archipelago of islands. At that early stage it comprised of near every fantasy cliché and knock of you could name; elves in their forests, dwarves in their mountains, pseudo-Romans, dragonriders, and even a clone of the riders of Rohan. It stayed that way for a long time as I plotted stories and wars and adventurers and genealogies and what-not.

As I grew older though, and realised how poor it was in parts, things began to change, though not much at first. The real big change came towards the end of high school, when I came across the Dark Sun setting and the world of Athas, a bleak, blasted desert world in which simply to survive was the main goal. It opened my eyes to a different type of fantasy rather than the norm I had been used to.

With that, and other influences, my world suffered major changes. The archipelago was gone, races started disappearing and nations were erased, it all turning into a much more arid world was vast tracks of wilderness and deserts. From those early days of change, I wanted to model the landscape after that of Australia, my country. Most fantasy seems based in rather European feeling worlds; I wanted something different and something I knew.

A few years later saw the largest and most profound change. I had an idea for a story. At first it wasn’t set in the same world, but as I developed the ideas, I transplanted it to the same world, but on the far side. The old setting was pretty much consigned to boxes and stored under the bed. With the new region I was given a fresh start to ignore or the old mistakes and use what I liked; a few races, people and some history moved over. The story that gave birth to this change has been long forgotten, and quite a few years have gone by as it took shape. Much new was created and it began to settle down into a workable form.

Then, most recently, came another major change. The stories I had been working on were set in a period of time much like any other fantasy world – a sort of middle ages Europe, though in a much hotter world and without knights and castles. I had at the time started reading heavily of the period of the Napoleonic Wars – books by Bernard Cornwell, C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian, and of course watching Master & Commander the movie. It struck me that here was a period fantasy worlds never advanced to. They technologically stagnated in medieval European eras and never advanced. What would happen if magic and monsters mixed with muskets and man-of-wars? So I sat down and advanced the world four hundred years and began to experiment with ideas and stories.

And that is how the world was born.

Of course it isn’t finished; it possibly never will be. There is always something new to explore and new ideas to shape. That is what I enjoy so much about writing – there is always something new the next day.