4 days till Quest of Fire: Resurgence of Dawn releases! I...

4 days till Quest of Fire: Resurgence of Dawn releases! I cannot tell you how excited I am to share this book with you. It is the biggest and most ambitious Quest of Fire book so far in a number of ways. It’s the longest, has the most maps and series insight features, most land traveled by the characters, and biggest payoffs yet on one aspect of Quest of Fire I don’t talk about much: parallelism.

I really love foreshadowing and reversals and events that show parallels in stories. You find it in surprising places sometimes, like the The Super Mario Bros. Movie with events at the start that made Mario and Luigi look foolish and then their dramatic, heroic parallels later (I might elaborate more on this in a future post). I love it most in Scripture’s recounting of Israel’s history that resulted in a failure to lead the lost world back to God and the Lord Jesus Christ’s life mirroring that history and His success at delivering man from sin.

What does that have to do with Quest of Fire? Well, my love of the aforementioned paradigm of parallels shows up in the way Anargen and Jason’s stories parallel one another. And the series as a whole has some mirroring in it for the novellas and novels both separately and jointly. It’s not perfect mirroring or reversals across every event, so I would say I followed the famous Mark Twain quote about history’s principle of events “rhyming”.

I talk a lot about Quest of Fire being a story about storytelling and how it shapes us. In Resurgence of Dawn you really see that showing through now and the way Jason’s story shapes out you can see him going on a journey that rhymes very well with Anargen’s in The Gathering Dark. In terms of the structure of the series, in book 1 Jason had a sliver of the total page count for his story and Anargen’s took up almost all of the book. In Shadows at Nightfall it became much more equal, and now in Resurgence of Dawn it’s Jason’s story that takes the lion’s share of space. For the finale in Book 7, I’m expecting things to be back in an even split (if the Lord allows and doesn’t redirect things). 

You might be wondering why I’m mentioning this, what does it all matter? Since storytelling is discovery for me and I feel like a guide along a mountain trail, leading readers along a path I enjoyed trekking already, I feel like I have to pause and point back the way we came, because so much of what Quest of Fire is and shows is seen when taking a broad look at the whole series just as much as a single entry. There’s beauty in the way it has collectively unfolded and I hope you’ll take a moment to appreciate that with me. There’s so much more to come, but for now, with Resurgence of Dawn, you should be able to see how it has all shaped to this point. How Anargen’s story is reflected in Jason’s and how each character’s struggles mirror one another. Most of all, how those struggles can mirror our own in the real world, so that having faced them in the stories of Anargen and Jason, the ones in our world may feel more manageable, particularly when faced with the true High King of All Realms, the Lord Jesus Christ.