• About
  • Waypoint
    • AIN
    • Before the Sun Fades
    • Convergence
    • The Galactic Federation
      • Tsien: Chapter 1
    • The Fallen Empire
    • The Fused
      • Chapter 1: Mission
      • Chapter 2: Lindsi
      • Chapter 3: Fusion
      • Chapter 4: Morning
      • Chapter 5: Meridian Park
      • Chapter 6: Filtration
      • Chapter 7: Explanation
      • Chapter 8: New Destination
      • Chapter 9: Solar Strip
      • Chapter 10: Power Imbalance
      • Chapter 11: Lock and Key
      • Chapter 12: Self-Determination
      • Chapter 13: Engineering
      • Chapter 14: Radiation Leak
      • Chapter 15: Shielding Patch
      • Chapter 16: Doubt
      • Chapter 17: Reactor Control
      • Chapter 18: Silent Success
      • Chapter 19: Need to Know
      • Chapter 20: Maintenance Entry
      • Chapter 21: Shards of Sight
      • Chapter 22: Nothing For It
      • Chapter 23: In Case of Emergency
      • Chapter 24: Sightlines
      • Chapter 25: Into the Unseen
      • Chapter 26: Escape to Nowhere
      • Chapter 27: Consequences
      • Chapter 28: Hard Vacuum
      • Chapter 29: Spacewalk
      • Chapter 30: Unanswered Questions
      • Chapter 31: Captain on Bridge
      • Chapter 32: Horizon Mission
      • Chapter 33: Answers
    • Mysteries Unite
    • Oranges and Lemons
    • The Path of the Gods
    • The Bridged Divide
      • Grehstadt
        • Paralysis
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Distant Realms

~ A selection of tales from across the Multiverse! Travel via Waypoint to learn more…

Tag Archives: Characters

Meet the Characters: King Sariven

14 Thu Jul 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

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Ask away!, Before the Sun Fades, Characters, Fantasy

A legendary figure in Before the Sun Fades, recalled almost reverentially by the remnants of his people, King Sariven faced the darkness consuming his valley to the last, until the palace fell with him still within it. But how much did he manage to learn about the oncoming disaster? What secrets did he take with him into the shadows? Despite his desperate struggle to save his people, was there something more he could have, should have done?

Warning: contains serious spoilers, to the point where if you haven’t already read the book I really suggest you don’t read any further! After all, the tale of Rakariel’s attempt to restore the valley depends inextricably on the tale of how it came to be engulfed in darkness in the first place.


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A Fanfic With Permission!

21 Thu Apr 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Roleplay, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Characters, Fanfic, Fantasy, Short stories

Brought to you from the epic city of Grehstadt with the kind permission of its creator, my friend JD, I give you this rather unfortunate tale, Paralysis! My last weekend was spent travelling in order to go to two excellent roleplay games, hosted and run by some of my friends. In the particular one I’m writing about, my character, Jax Lightweave, found himself conscious but immobile after the entire party was hit with knockout gas by a paranoid and perhaps slightly nutty human biologist. The end result was, for him, decidedly traumatising. And, since things like that tend to stick in the head (hopefully not literally…), I wrote a little story about the aftermath from Jax’s point of view – which I am absolutely delighted to be able to share with the world!

Note: his nightmares aren’t necessarily quite representative of what actually happened… although they’re also not that far off!

Brought Up To Believe

16 Wed Mar 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Philosophical Meanderings, Writing

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Characters, Fantasy, Thoughts

Why, yes, that is a song I rather like. I often have music playing around the house – with a good speaker system (and lovely neighbours, who are easily as musical as I am and never seem to mind my noise), there’s really no good reason not to! So naturally, sometimes it will prompt me to think.

In this instance, about the difference between truth and belief, and the depth of belief, and the mistake of confusing belief with truth, and how easy that is. For example, I don’t think I generally confuse belief with truth, but that’s a horribly dangerous thing to think. After all, if I did, and I didn’t think so, how would I know? Particularly since, having looked up the available evidence on a given subject, I then tend to commit the conclusion to my belief faculty and forget how I got there. (I have a terrible memory.) As a result, I try to remember  I could always be wrong, and to continually question the conclusions I can’t remember how I arrived at rather than doing what instinct tells me and defending them blindly.

Because that is, after all, what we generally do. In the wild, back when we lived in it, it’s much more efficient to come to instant conclusions in an emergency rather than dithering around trying to follow a train of thought. Shared instant conclusions foster social bonding and group cohesiveness, as well as ensuring the entire tribe will run the same way when danger threatens. Which was great, back when our biggest threats were large predators and the pointy sticks of the next tribe over.

These days, most of our biggest threats are internal. But we’re still wired up to unite in smallish groups and defend against external forces. We still have all those nifty shortcuts in our thinking that help us make snap decisions, only now they short-circuit the rational reasoning chains we need to make the considered choices our future as a species relies on.

Which brings us back to the title of the post. Children are, in general, particularly vulnerable to adopting beliefs; their reasoning faculties aren’t fully developed and they’re frequently taught to obey their various authority figures (parents, teachers, what-have-you). If they’re never taught to think rationally, it may never even occur to many of them to question the beliefs they were raised with as facts. It’s hard for anyone to admit they’re wrong about anything; how much harder to admit you were wrong about a fairly fundamental “truth” for your entire life? Subconsciously we all shy away from that one. (Of course, some kids do learn to think rationally all on their own, even with the odds horrifically stacked against them, and escape the various imprinted systems they’ve been primed to assume are true. But it can be horribly hard, and take a great many years.)

I was raised to question pretty much everything rather than accepting just about anything, regardless of who says it. It’s given me the best footing I can think of to continue to question everything and work out if it’s actually true or not, and even then, I have to be constantly on my guard.

One of the most fascinating characters I’ve played is a roleplay one, a man who goes by the name of Arden. (It’s not his real name, but he hasn’t used his real name since he was fifteen.) He has a natural talent for magic, to the point that he can’t really stop using it: he’s a born sorcerer. He also comes from a culture that believes, absolutely and implicitly, that magic is evil and corrupts the soul. Arden knows this on his deepest level. When his powers began to manifest, he fled his home, partially to protect his family from himself, partially because he was simply terrified. He’s been kicking around the criminal underworld of his home city ever since, doing whatever he needs to to survive – and knowing, all the time, that his very existence is wrong. That every breath he draws is a crime against the natural order, that everything he touches is tainted.

Arden is a good, honest, honourable man, a born paladin: if it hadn’t been for his magic, he would have grown up to be one of the country’s most loyal and truly dedicated knights, as close to incorruptible as it’s possible to be. Even now, he’s still that person. Believing he’s irredeemably evil, he causes the minimum amount of damage necessary to survive another day, even keeps the peace down in the shady dockside area where he lives: you don’t start roughing up the locals or you might just find yourself at the wrong end of his rapier. When increasingly bad things began happening in his city and he was drawn into it, he fought to protect it despite everything.

He makes the most of his life: as far as most people know, he’s a fairly cheerful and mostly easygoing pirate and smuggler. But deep down, that fundamental knowledge dictates his every action, and it’s endlessly fascinating to watch. He’ll do anything to survive because he has nothing left to lose; the day he dies whatever is left of him is bound for hell. He doesn’t even question it, it’s almost as though he can’t. Questioning it would be like questioning the colour of the sky: it’s perfectly obvious, you can look up and see it. Even though he wants to believe otherwise, he can’t. And it’s never even crossed his mind that maybe he could be wrong about the one thing that has shattered his life worse than anything else. Yes, Arden’s soul probably is rather damaged by this point, or at least carrying a heck of a lot of weight – but only because he’s done it to himself. He chooses to do wrong because he sees it as the lesser of the various evils available to him. As a fighter he’s efficient and fast, as a smuggler of illegal magical goods he keeps them as far from innocents as possible. And if only he didn’t believe so incredibly, fundamentally deeply that he was evil, he’d be a fine, upstanding pillar of society, working willingly to defend his homeland from any threat within or without, helping those around him to the limit of his ability.

I’ve played him for years, of both my life and his. Never once has it even crossed his mind that this most basic assumption could be utterly wrong, even though he desperately wants it to be. It’s hard to even represent in words how completely certain he is, more certain than he is that ground is solid, that the sun emits light, that gravity pulls him down. Find the most basic, unchallenged, uncontested assumption about your world: he’s that certain, if not even more so.

Or he was, but that final impossibility is a story for another time…

Let’s Talk About… Siris!

28 Sun Feb 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

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Books, Characters, Galactic Federation, Sci-Fi, Siris

Have we talked about Siris before? I can’t remember.

Siris is one of my main Galactic Federation characters. You may have met him in the first chapter of Tsien’s story, if you’ve been reading around the site. By that point, though, he’s over 300 years old chronologically, and I’ve actually no idea how old he is in terms of years experienced, since various versions of him have been recorded, stored, brought back, blown up, and so on.

His life is, needless to say, more than a little complicated.

But it’s been complicated almost from the start. Siris was born on a remote colony world, on the “fringes” of Federation space. I say “fringes” because that’s never, strictly speaking, accurate in space terms. For illustration, here’s a picture that never ceases to amaze me:

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Alt-Shift: Introduction

27 Wed Jan 2016

Posted by Metalwings in Writing

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Alt-Shift, Books, Cal Forester, Characters, Sci-Fi

This is Caleb Forester. Average kind of height, brown hair. A nice young man, if you passed him on the street.

He’s psychic, but that’s only somewhat surprising: where he’s from, a small but significant percentage of the population are. They’re typically identified as their powers start to emerge, usually around the early teens, and awarded free entry into the prestigious psychic schools, where the best education in both normal subjects and their unusual powers is to be had. Adult psychics, while admittedly registered as such, are free to live their lives more or less how they will, and are in high demand for any number of jobs. Telepathy and telekinesis are very, very useful.

You would think, then, that Cal has very little to worry about. You’d be wrong.

Something terrible is going to happen. And while anyone can change the world, the sheer momentum of its course is hard enough to combat when you’re just one person – never mind if there are others steering it another way.

Meet the Characters: Tei

25 Thu Jun 2015

Posted by Metalwings in Behind the Scenes

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Tags

Ask away!, Before the Sun Fades, Characters, Fantasy, Tei

Considering the book’s been out for a month now, it’s past time for another “Meet the Characters” post! Today, let’s introduce Tei, a young survivor with an unexpected talent who accompanies Rakariel through Before the Sun Fades.

Click to reveal spoilers: Continue reading →

Ashi and Arien

05 Thu Mar 2015

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Ashi & Arien, Background, Characters, Fantasy

As promised, an actual character post! Here are two of my older ones… though not, I think, as old as Wildcat. (Arien possibly gives her a run for her money, but I think she’s older.) They live in the same universe as Rakariel of Before the Sun Fades, a world of magic, gods, and destinies.

Arien and Ashi are not your usual travelling companions. For a start, one of them’s a demigod, and the other is technically dead. One is on the run from his own powers and those bent on killing or using him; the other is searching for the person or people who slaughtered her monastic warrior order. One can’t stand to lose one of the few friends he has; one resents the unintended magic that keeps her something resembling alive.

It was luck that saw Ashi escape the death of her people. Hiring their skills out to those they judged to be on the side of good was the way that they supported their lives in the remote mountain environment that was their home. Ashi was away when the attack happened, and returned home weeks later to find nothing but carnage. She set out to discover who or what had been behind it, as, one by one, other survivors like her who were scattered across the lands were picked off.

To support herself along the way, she continued to hire out her skills, often in places and over matters that would once have been beneath her notice. In a small country town, she was paid to act as a member of the local watch and help solve the mystery of several disappearances. Questioned by her when he passed through, Arien stopped there to lend his skills as a ranger to her cause — and it was good that he did. The disappearances were part of a complex trap, one set to lure in and kill the last of the Daienne — and it succeeded.

Arien was there at her death. Helpless to save her, he couldn’t stand to lose someone he’d come to call a friend. In that dire situation, his dormant, untrained powers awoke, performing his will. Moments before her spirit was lost to the mortal realm forever, it was bound to her broken body, and to him.

Her wounds healed by his power, Ashi breathes and eats and walks the mortal world, but as long as she is bound to Arien, she can neither die nor truly live. She cannot go too far from him, and when she is hurt, his strength is drained to heal her. Unless the clumsy bond created by Arien’s uncontrolled power can be remade, she will never again be independent of him.

Agency, and the Lack Thereof

24 Mon Nov 2014

Posted by Metalwings in Authorial Gubbins, Reading

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Characters, Question for you!, Thoughts

I saw a film the other day. Admittedly, I was only partially watching it over the top of my computer (my usual state of watching films, since I’m not a big film person unless it’s something I really like), but I think I saw just about everything.

So what gets to me, and why I’m writing about it, is that in this particular instance, the main character might as well not have been there. Not that the MC had no personality, just that they did nothing. All the way through the film, it basically went a bit like this:

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Sing Along Stories

19 Wed Jun 2013

Posted by Metalwings in Behind the Scenes

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Books, Characters, Music, Writing process

Once I’ve got started on something, embarked on a voyage with the coast receding out of sight, I often like to pick a CD that I associate most with it, and put that on loop as I write. It’s a particularly useful motivator during NaNoWriMo, because it prompts my subconscious to stop getting distracted with other things by repeatedly distracting it with concepts from the very thing I’m writing! My subconscious all too frequently has the attention span of a one-year-old with multiple shiny objects being waved in front of their face. This is fine — my mind seems to come with multi-level multitasking built in — except when I’m doing full-focus tasks, like sticking to the 1,667 per day NaNo word count while simultaneously working for a PhD! These sorts of things are forefront tasks and I can’t put sufficient effort into them unless I have full focus… so here’s how I get it.

To date, I’ve been through NaNo three times, and here are the CDs I’ve used. Each of them in overall sense and feeling of the sound of the CD — not any single track and not even always the actual words — I find matches up reasonably well to the overall sense and feeling of the story, making it a good background prompt.

  • Before The Sun Fades — Within Temptation: The Heart of Everything
  • Alt-Shift — Doves: The Last Broadcast
  • Reclamation — Sirenia: The Thirteenth Floor

In addition, certain characters acquire songs, some of them more than others, which seem to me to express aspects of their personality or life: character music, picked up from around my collection and noticed as particularly relevant to one person or another. There are a few more of those, and some characters have more than one as various events affect them throughout their lives. As a random sample, we have:

  • Tsien: Disturbed: Indestructible (Indestructible)
  • Seolas: Disturbed: Haunted (Indestructible)
  • Rei: Green Day: She’s a Rebel (American Idiot)

I don’t think we’ve met Rei yet, here on Distant Realms. She comes from the Galactic Federation, but long in Tsien’s past: she was a contemporary of Siris’ back when he was still Human. Perhaps I’ll post something about her soon!

Meet the Characters: Rakariel

25 Sat May 2013

Posted by Metalwings in Behind the Scenes

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Ask away!, Before the Sun Fades, Characters, Fantasy, Rakariel

And now for something completely different: it’s time for another “Meet the Characters” post! Today, let’s hear a little bit about Rakariel, hero of Before the Sun Fades! (Yes, that’s the one I’ve finished but am sitting on. Just a little longer…!)

Rakariel, known in her home region as Rakariel Shadow-Bearer, is a travelling adventurer, a former mercenary whose hard-earned experience cost her dear. She’s cautious and careful about the situations she gets into, but once she’s chosen a course of action, she’s very difficult to sway. In a world of magic and a myriad conflicting gods, she forges a path as best she can through the trials of life.

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