The Eldar Sister
(Cover art by: Tony Guaraldi-Brown)
I’ve always liked fantasy stories. When I was a kid my father read The Lord of the Rings to me, but he worked a lot, so I learned to read at that level at a young age so that I could read the stories myself. From there I read a lot of Conan, Elric, for some reason in Junior High all of us seventh graders were reading Lord Foul’s Bane… it was a different era. From third grade on I played and still play Dungeons and Dragons and similar games.
The time came and I wanted to create a world for some fantasy stories. I didn’t want to tell one lone grand story in this world, I wanted to tell a bunch of stories. I wanted a world where someone like Conan or Elric could have their adventures, and somewhere nearby there was some other hero, anti hero, et al having their adventures.
About this time I was watching my friend Matt’s D&D videos on how to be a Dungeon Master and was particularly interested in what he said about world building. Following his advice, I started with a map. I made a great big map of a massive continent. I took a lot of what I know about real world geography to try and make it all sensible to start: mountain ranges would trap moisture on the ocean side for instance creating deserts on the inland side, place cities near rivers. From there stories were already popping up in my head. The desert on the other side of the mountains, what would players or protagonists find there? The ruins of a lost civilization with a statue a la Ozymandias there with a warning in an ancient tongue?
After I had a map, I made a timeline. I’d always thought about the Ages of Middle Earth. We know a lot about the Third Age. If we read the Silmarillion we get a lot about the First and Second Ages (especially if we read the appendices) but what happened after? I came up with ten ages for my world. The first three were similar to Tolkien’s. The First Age was legendary, the age of gods and the peoples of the world being but toys of their creators. The Second Age was a golden age of an Elven Empire, which collapsed in cataclysm at the age’s end. The Third Age was a dark age full of superstition and justifiable fear at what lay beyond the village walls. The Fourth Age was a High Middle Age, an age of kingdoms and renewed trade and progress. The Fifth Age was akin to the early modern period in Europe, from Renaissance up until right before the Napoleonic Era which was the Sixth Age. The Seventh Age included the wars to end the Empires ushering in the Atomic Era, the Eighth Age. The Ninth Age was a cyberpunkish Information Age, and the Tenth a full on space-faring era.
Before the pandemic started I ran Dungeons and Dragons campaigns set in this world two nights a week, a Monday group and a Tuesday group. After the pandemic started we went online, and playing online I was able to add a Sunday group as well which included the people I’d originally started playing D&D with back in the early 1980s. These three groups played campaigns in the Third, Fourth, and eventually Fifth ages of the world. The events that happened in the campaigns became part of the lore, so that people playing in the Fifth Age may or may not have known that the statue they passed was of one of the heroes from a campaign in the Fourth Age and so on.
I also started writing short stories set in the world. Initially I created four heroes to be my Conans, Elrics, Fafrd and the Grey Mouser, et al. These heroes were all in stories set in the Fourth Age, the High Middle Ages analog. I picked the best eight stories and published them as a collection named after the one with the title I liked best: A Cookbook for the Besieged.
After that came out I started writing stories set in other ages. I decided that I’d put together another collection with one story from each of the Ten Ages.
The Seventh Age story, Fire On The Docks, was a pulpy hardboiled detective story about an orc PI named Stessa Asho. In that story Asho, already an established detective in the City of Tides, breaks a big case. Pete Aldin, one of my favorite writers (he goes by Pete Aldin for his horror stories and Peter J Aldin for his scifi stories), was kind enough to critique all of the stories for me and said this was his favorite. He added that he thought I should write something longer with Stessa Asho.
The year after Ten for the Ages came out, my fourth novel, Union Station came out. I was also working on a number of other projects, researching the Fifth Age for the fantasy world had triggered some addiction to reading about the Early Modern Era in Europe, but I never stopped thinking about Pete’s suggestion.
So I wrote a novella with Stessa Asho. The Eldar Sister follows his life in three different but relevant periods: his time in the great war, after the war as a hardboiled private detective, and as an old orc brought back from his bar stool to revisit the case that broke him.
The Eldar Sister is now available.
