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I’ve been told I don’t talk about my work enough. So, as I edit book 2 in The Black Crusade series, let’s talk about book1, Dark Lament.
The blurb: When good men forsake the light, humanity must pay the price, and the dead will collect. Inspired by the Crusades. Vas was raised by monks to be a clerical healer, one that channels the light of Heaven to mend the broken and cure the sick. But when his uncle dies in a farming accident, Vas defies the will of Heaven by making a deal with a dark entity and turning to the black art of necromancy. The price is the lives of several around him, including the sister of the girl he loves. Vas vows to learn from his mistakes and atone for his weakness. But when dark forces seek him out, Vas must choose between watching his loved ones die or becoming darkness itself to save them.
This book has a history related to many ups and downs in my life, and maybe I’ll get into that another time. Right now, I want to talk about the how this story was born and evolved over time. Historical fantasy/horror has always been fascinating to me. History is full of dark yet interesting times and events, and they often breed interesting and horrific ideas. The Crusades are just such a period. There have been a few video games that used the Crusades as a backdrop or an element, but few have explored them from the perspectives I wanted to explore. I’m only aware of one other fantasy book on the topic from a fellow indie author. Before I bury the lead. I want to start with the concept of a paladin in fantasy terms. This is a holy warrior blessed by their god to smite his or her enemies on earth. Keep that in mind.
The first perspective I wanted to explore was a religious one. A pragmatic view of history will reveal most wars are fought for things like power, land, wealth, and resources, but leaders often use big ideals and themes to rally the masses to fight for them. The movie Troy does a great job of showing how the “theft” of Helen rallied Greeks to lay siege to Troy, while Agamemnon only went to war to add Troy to his empire. The Crusades were ostensibly a series of religious conflicts, though all the oldest reasons for conquest undergirded these wars.
But, just looking at the wars in terms of the religions, it occurred to me that Catholic Christians and Muslims were fighting with the blessings of God, and never once did they argue that one god was better than another. In fact, they very much agreed that it was the same God. They differed on a great many things beyond that, and those things were the meat and potatoes of the conflict, surely. The idea occurred to me that if it were a fantasy setting where paladins were common, and if both sides had paladins, the issue of right and wrong would be even more confusing. And under the right circumstances, it could bring the sides together.
I also wanted to view it through the lens of a typical Crusader who is not there because he hates men that worship differently than he does, but in service to a heroic leader who inspires men to greatness through honor, sacrifice, and the art of war.
Last, a world where paladins are required must be pretty terrible. But what happens when there’s peace? What happens to a world where paladins are no longer needed? That is the setting of the main story, explored through a young man raised as a monk and healer who is seduced by ancient evil. An evil that has slept, biding its time until the world no longer needed heroes, the champions of Heaven.For me, novel-length stories derive from these kernels, these interesting concepts and ideas that mesh together, then bloom into a setting or world. I then ask a lot of questions of the setting to define a world with a unique quality or feature. Then I ask specific questions to formulate the story.
What conflicts arise because of the unique feature of the world?
How does that affect the people in the world?
Who among those people has the most interesting story to tell?
How does the conflict affect them directly?
There then are questions about the character, or characters, what they want, why can’t they have it, what will they do to get it, what happens if they don’t get it, what happens if they do get it, etc… A cohesive story results from this as the world fleshes itself out, past, present, and future.
In Dark Lament, I had an arc in mind for Vas, what I wanted to be true about him, how it affected his life, and what he became (will become in terms of this series). But book 1, Dark Lament, was originally a 10 page (less than 3000 words) opening chapter when I first wrote it. I hadn’t connected it to my ideas about the Crusades yet. I knew only that he was being hid out in a mountain monastery and that zombies would come for him one day. He would be saved by being forced through a portal while his mentor stayed behind to cover his retreat. That’s how the first edition of Dark Lament ended, by the way. Not how it currently ends. In that original idea, Vas came out of the other side of the portal and was immediately faced with the threat of a giant sand dragon so large that, as it traveled beneath the sands like Dune sandworms, it created ripples through the desert. I didn’t know the details, but I knew I wanted Vas to surf out of the desert on a sand wave on one of the dragon’s scales. The people that dwelled on the edge of the desert would then take him in, and we’d learn the culture of what would turn out to be the other side of the Crusades conflict. I would later go on to develop two fantasy religions that had characteristics of Catholicism and Islam while being different enough as to not be offensive. That story led Vas on a grand quest for knowledge as he discovered who he really was and why the dead sought him out. No spoilers. I only said all that to say that I knew this story, as I wanted to tell it, would be well over 200k words. That’s how writers measure story length. The average fantasy novel is 100k-125k by industry standards, but you do have writers like Brandon Sanderson who write 200k-300k per book. As an unpublished author, I was way over-shooting the limits for traditional publishing. So, I chopped that story up into smaller pieces. Thus, 10 pages, became 377 pages, or about 112k words. Book 1 focuses on Vas learning who and what he is and the events that lead up to an army of undead coming to claim him. That wasn’t enough, though. I had already decided to call the series The Black Crusade. Actually, that was the original name of the book when I sent it to my first beta readers. But they pointed out that there wasn’t enough crusade in The Black Crusade. So now there’s a historical account within the story that ties into Vas’s story in a strong way while also presenting the last of the Color Crusades and roots this book in that setting. So, you get a fantasy, rural Europe-inspired setting and Arabian-inspired Crusades tale all in one. Tiny spoilers. The sand dragon still shows up in the historical account in Dark Lament, and book 2, The Iron Cross, does start with Vas in the middle of the desert.
It's very cool to me to look back on the humble origins of Dark Lament and to see how it evolved into a dark fantasy epic, which definitely has 3 more books to come. Maybe 4. Themes and tropes you’ll find here are: Subverted Chosen One
prophecy
Resurrection but fully supported by the story and magic system
Military combat
Necromancy
Fantasy zombies
Lots of gross bits
Dragons
There are many themes of coming of age, duty, service to a higher power, love, fear, weakness, PTSD, and how sometimes there are no right choices. It draws inspiration from Frank Herbert’s Dune, Brian Lumley’s The Necroscope series, and one of my favorite films, Kingdom of Heaven.
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