Progress…

Hello again everyone! My latest book, Legacy of the Displaced is now available on Amazon, and I wanted to give an update. I have, admittedly struggled with book three, detailing the Age of Thought. It has been my intention to tell a different type of story with each book, and the story for book three has been more challenging than I anticipated. I’ve reframed it several times and finally settled some essential aspects.

The third book will also be a Legacy title, with the idea that the first three form The Legacy Trilogy (future titles will deviate from this theme, I promise). With that said, I present to you my working prologue for book three, The Legacy of the Critic and the Crow. If you have any feedback, I would truly love to hear about it.

Prologue: What Has Been…

There is a place, a crossroads, where one can reach out and caress, if only for a moment, the life of any other being in existence, and this place is called Dream.

Though all worlds have paths to the place called Dream, there were two that influenced it more heavily than others. The first of these was called The Strings, a realm of fate magic and fae creatures, and the second was named The Shadows, infused by the magic of minds and populated by the living shadows for which it was named. In the unfolding Age of Thought, these two worlds were at war.

As is often the case with those in conflict, these places had more in common than their populations wished to admit. They were both foundation realms, two of nine pillars on which the city of Nexus, the city at the center of all things, was built. These worlds, like the other foundation realms, were attuned to particular aspects of magic. The Strings and The Shadows fed fate and thought to all of existence but, unlike the other realms, they were fed in return.

The fae were creatures of stories, categorized not by physical characteristics, but by appetites. With the magic of fate, they delighted in the concepts of what could be, and inserted themselves in the lives of others to become what was needed. If an adventurer needed a mentor, the fae were there. If one needed a sidekick or a companion or a deal for their story to reach fulfillment, these beings of fate eagerly adopted those roles. If one needed an adversary, a villain that would test their mettle, the fae were only too happy to oblige. And, when the populations of the worlds didn’t come to them, the realm of Dream was where they found those in need. It was, in a sense, a hunting ground.

The shadow creatures of thought existed because of sentience. Here, shadows were not just the absence of light, but a tangible substance born of the things that cast them. When a being several worlds away had a notion, a reflection of that idea was born in their realm, sometimes as a new entity, and sometimes as an addition to an existing shadow, widening its grasp and depth. These were creatures that relished the concept of what is. In the realm of Dream, these shadows connected to  minds that called to them, minds that traveled to that place and relived the most vivid events of their lives. It was, for these shadows, a source of reflection and growth.

It was from others that the beings of shadow drew life, while the fae drew purpose. In this regard, they were distorted reflections of each other. There was balance between these worlds, for a time, but balance is a precarious thing.

There came a time when a goddess needed an adversary, an element in her story that would make her stronger for what was to come, and so she made a deal with one of the fae. The goddess was an avatar and incarnation of Nexus, the city at the center, and the fae creature she struck a bargain with became what was needed. It became the Critic.

The Critic was a creature of doubt, a lurking thought that needled at her confidence, at her insecurities and the things she had not foreseen. Through their arrangement, the goddess became more than she had been, but so too did the Critic. As a result of their bargain, the fae creature was carried to all minds in all realms, inserted into all stories.

In this transaction, the Critic became not just a singular fae, but a shadow present in every intellect everywhere; it became a creature of both fate and thought. The fae creature found different voices in different minds—for some it whispered as a heckling stranger, while for others it spoke with the voices of those they trusted most. And for others still, it was simply the voice of the self, the most convincing of all. But always the voices carried doubt.

It was through the spread of the Critic that the balance was broken and the war started. It spread quickly, as war usually does, and infected the other foundation realms. The peoples of those worlds had long been separated and, though most had expected prosperity at their reunion, they received instead the influence of the Critic. In spreading doubt and distrust through every interaction, every meeting and greeting, the creature of fate and shadow brought strife.

There are many other things that happened between the two events, the deal of a goddess and the war of the realms, but those are other stories of different ages, other tales that have already been told. This chronicle is of the Age of Thought.

This is the story of the Critic and the Crow…