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Since I'm on the original fiction kick at the minute, I figured I'd do the sequel to this post, and run through the worlds I listed at the bottom of it. Or, well, most of them. So. Overviews of six original worlds under the cut, have at thee ...
Worlds I've Built In My Head, Part II:
Shadow Mage: (multiple iterations)
This one has gone through multiple iterations, from a basic story structure. That happens sometimes with my stories (read: a lot). *grins* Usually what happens with iteration-stories is that I'll take the same basic opening premise, and the same character ROLES, and put different people in them. Shadow Mage has a basic premise of a world where magic is divided into light- and shadow-mages, and the main character turns out to have a different kind of magic, just in time to be dumped into the middle of the conflict. It's ... rather far from the more serious of my worlds. Mostly just something to play with on long train journeys, kinda thing. Heh.
Iteration One: one of my older stories, from when I was a very young teenager. I think I actually have the (rather yellowing) bits of rounded-corner A4 it was originally written on. *grins* The main character (who for the life of me I cannot remember the name of - I think it was something along the lines of 'Winstarell') had 'pewter-coloured' hair (by which I meant the dark-greyish with a silvery sheen that my auntie's dragon statues were made of), and was a slave to a shadow mage named Alberon. Her power was song (I think I'd recently read LE Modesitt's Spellsong Cycle). The story starts where her master, who's been in hiding in his tower for the past fifteen odd years (most of her life) is finally tracked down by his light-mage brother, Ulberon, and taken prisoner. Turns out, he's been protecting her all along with the 'slave' charade. Ulberon has a slave himself, an ex-shadow mage called Zachariah, and the story from that point follows our heroine as she tries to keep the two shadow mages alive in Ulberon's hands, and ends up interfering in the balance of power between light and shadow mages (which had drastically shifted in favour the knight-templar-ish light mages some two decades previously - I think I've always had a real bias against the whole light = goodness trope. Heh).
Iteration Two: rebooting the basic idea some years later, when I was (slightly) more mature. *straight faced - sort of* Same basic principle, the heroine is a slave of a shadow mage for her own protection, has different powers (in this case, transmutation) in a light/shadow binary system, gets dumped in the middle of the conflict. In this case, though, the heroine was much younger (still more or less a kid), the shadow mage in question is actually her father, her mother was a light magess who was brutally murdered by her own kind for marrying a shadow sorceror, and the story is kicked off when the dead woman's sister, again a light mage, finally catches up to the shadow bastard who 'violated' her sister and intends to give him a fittingly grisly death in his turn. Except his brother, a shadow-trickster of some power and lots of irreverence, crashes the vengeance-party, and with our heroine's (somewhat accidental) help, rescues his brother, kidnaps the sister-in-law, and drops them in the middle of a revolution as the shadow mages rise up against the light council with our heroine's recently revealed powers to help.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the latter iteration, most of my sympathies were actually with the vengeful sister-in-law, mostly on the grounds that that was a hell of a family to get dumped in the middle of, between her brother-in-law's rather hapless demeanor and worrying amount of power, his brother's trickster nature, and her niece's wordless and inexplicable devotion to two men she should probably have hated, who have completely ruined her for polite society. Heh.
In general, though, the Shadow Mage iterations mostly just show that I really, really hate the Light Equals Good trope, and also that I probably read Janny Wurts' Wars of Light and Shadow at FAR too young an age. *grins sheepishly*
Wolf Kingdom:
... Firstly, you should probably know that I have a weird attachment to hapless male characters. Also, that a lot of my early villains were wicked sorceresses, because I grew up on fairytales and Disney, yes? The main villain (and in some senses, main character) of this world was a weird combination of the Wicked Queen from Snow White, and a female Judge Claude Frollo (Disney film, not book) in her relationship with her son. She was also, of course, a black widow of stunning proportions.
The world's name comes from the actual main character of the story, the sorceress' son, the wolf-man. Ah. May take some explaining, that one. The sorceress, in the backstory for the plot, had attempted to take over the kingdom the story's set in by seducing and enslaving the king. This ... rather failed, due to a heroine-of-another-story, and for a backup the sorceress seduced and enslaved one of the more powerful lords of the kingdom on the sly, rather more successfully. Over the intervening years she has cemented her power over the lord's lands and extended her influence over a lot of his neighbours, taking the somewhat slower but more reliable route to taking over the kingdom. Because of the amount of time it was taking, though, and barred from direct access to the royal palace on the not-unwarranted grounds that she previously attempted to, you know, seduce and enslave the king, she needed a proxy ruler she could control. So she, rather coldly and deliberately, set about conceiving a child with her captured lord (casting him out once she was through with him), in, among other things, the hopes that her child would carry her magic as well as being loyal to her.
The result was Wolfen, her son, who through a corruption of her magic, or possibly his father's influence, became a creature of magic, rather than a mage himself. A werewolf, a monster his mother leaves run once a month to terrorise her lands, and who she hopes to marry to the king's daughter in a bid to take over the throne. Wolfen himself, due in part to his fears of his own nature, and in part to living with, well, his mother, has developed into an incredibly timid and unconfrontational young man, with a fledgeling conscience that he really, desperately does not want his mother to find out about. A conscience which, unfortunately for him, makes the prospect of marrying an unsuspecting young woman who has no idea what she's getting into, and then leaving her essentially at his mother's mercy, more than a little unpalatable.
Luckily enough for him (or not, depending on how you look at it), there are quite a few other characters equally as unwilling to allow this to happen, including the princess' brother, who doesn't particularly want her to marry anyone, let alone the provincial lord of a backwards barony beset by monsters (less so again when he finds out said lord is the monster), the king himself, once he starts to get an inkling of who this suitor's mother is, and the leader of a group of bandits in the forests that cover a lot of the northern edges of the barony who has a particular interest in Wolfen. Mostly, admittedly, in killing him. Also his mother, but mostly Wolfen, for reasons that become obvious very quickly.
Most of the story once the plot kicks off is mostly his mother attempting to rule the kingdom, everyone else attempting to stop her (usually by attempting to kill Wolfen), and Wolfen himself attempting, without much hope it must be said, to survive the lot of them, and possibly also make the pretty girl realise that he is not, in fact, a mindless slavering monster. Or at least, not for most of the month, anyway. Heh.
Spindlebone:
Okay. Look. Sometimes, you just want a story were you mostly just follow a wicked, thoroughly implausible badass around the place, okay? Something anime-esque, with lots of swords and magic and demons, and honour-bound knights, and mad gods, and an anti-hero-slash-villain-protagonist that's some ridiculously implausible god-demon hydrid with an attitude, some stupidly awesome powers, and a few metric tonnes of tragic backstory. On a mad quest, involving lots and lots of collateral damage, to stop the end of the world, and face his demonic father, and possibly become an utterly insane god for the few seconds it takes for him to spectacularly explode after eating the end-of-the-world-in-a-bottle maguffin. Mourned by all his enemies-slash-reluctant-allies in the halcyon-coloured epilogue as mad, bad, dangerous to know, and thankfully far too awesome for this sinful earth, because if he'd stuck around much longer we probably wouldn't have had a sinful earth anymore. Or much of anything else, either. *grins* Y'all have those kinds of stories, right?
Spindlebone was mine. Semi-demonic Lord of Treachery, son of the Prince of Hell and a minor seer, incredibly ugly bone-white bastard with a silver arm that grows him weapons on demand. Frowned on by demons and gods alike, horribly betrayed at various points of his life by people close to him, lost his mother to insanity after she figured out what the hell (literally) she'd just slept with, lost the closest thing he had to a friend to betrayal and his father's machinations, lost the only woman who might have loved him to, well, more betrayal and machinations, and eventually draws the correct conclusion that he's never going to be allowed to indulge in this whole 'loving other people' thing until after he gets rid of his father. Who, luckily enough, is currently campaigning to take over the universe from the pantheon of gods, so it's not like Spindle is short on potential allies who'd like to help him smush the Prince of Hell into a (rather large) smear on the landscape. If they can get past the whole 'son of the Prince of Hell' thing, which rather understandibly makes people a little leery of his motivations, and also if they can get past the whole 'Lord of Treachery' thing where he is, occasionally, almost pathologically obliged to give people reasons to distrust him.
*waves hand aimlessly* This is not particularly a story with a point, you understand. It's not particularly plausible, even in terms of fantasy, not particularly well-plotted, and more or less runs off tropes and stereotypical fantasy/anime characters. It is, primarily, for having fun, on those days when I like to blow off steam by indulging in wholly-implausible-and-physically-impossible fight scenes, stern and honourable knights who have to work with quite-probably-insane half-demons and are trying to make the most of it, crap-tonnes of demonic daddy issues, and an end-of-the-world plot that has utterly no rhyme or reason, and doesn't, at the end of the day, particularly require any.
Plus. I like Spindle. He's ruthlessly pragmatic, has a regrettably tendancy to lie compulsively, has a weird and utterly backwards sense of honour (if you say you trust him, he feels contractually obliged to betray you. If, conversely, you vocally and repeatedly announce your distrust, he feels contractually obliged to prove you wrong by being trustworthy. 'Lord of Treachery', et cetera. He's, well, not really right in the head), and is nicely and implausibly badass. And I kinda love Lord Carthian, too. The main knight who is sent by his god to accompany Spindle on his quest. Mostly because he's deceptively cheerful, friendly, honourable, and very quickly figured out where Spindle's buttons were, so he can do things like loudly declare what an utter treacherous bastard Spindle is just before a major confrontation where they really need the half-demon on their side, with a grin and a twinkle in his eye and utter confidence that Spindle will, in fact, come through for them. And Spindle knows Carthian is playing the hell out of him, and Carthian knows he knows, and it's just this weird and oddly friendly game of 'We both know you're playing me, and we both know the only reason I let you play me is because I like you, and you probably shouldn't ever actually trust me, but in the meantime this is a nice facsimile, and it works for us'.
So. Utterly pointless, utterly ridiculous, breaks all the rules of good story-telling, is violent enough that I should probably be worried about myself, is utterly full of cliches and stereotypes, and ... Basically? A lot of mindless fun for those days where I really, really want something so far over the top it's actually on the way down again. *grins*
The Wizard: (multiple iterations)
Again, an iteration-story. This one, though, is from much, much later in the game than Shadow Mage up there. This one was from after I discovered the internet, and more to the point from after I discovered the concept of original slash, and spent a very satisfying few months reading various slash retellings of old fairytales (including quite a few I need to find again - there was a particular one that was a retelling of Vasilisa the Beautiful which I desperately want to reread ...). Again, there are two main iterations of the story (iteration stories tend to go through any number of versions, but usually only a couple of the threads settle into more fully-fledged, contains-actual-plot iterations), one considerably more insular than the other. The more expansive iteration has also gone through quite a few retools/changes, mostly while I tried to decide how much I wanted the revolution to be to the fore of the plot, rather than the romance (priorities, occasionally I do not have them ...).
The Wizard's basic premise is the discovery/use of a magically bound man, the titular wizard, as the power-source of a kingdom and the means through which the king/ruler retains power. Sort of as if King Arthur had magically chained Merlin to be Camelot's genie-in-a-bottle, enforcer, and general all-round magical resource chest from here until eternity or the fall of the kingdom, whichever happens first. Over the years since the binding, the various kings have become increasingly corrupt and prone to abusing the power of the Wizard (and abusing the Wizard himself), and needless to say, by the time we get to the timeframe of the story, the Wizard is beginning to get more than a little pissed off.
Iteration One: Is the complicated version of the story. Set a couple of centuries down the line from the original binding, the existence of the Wizard himself has become a reasonably closely guarded secret, while the kingship has become decadently corrupt, to the point where assassinations, coup d'etats and rebellions have become relatively common, with a turn-over in kings being measured in decades down to years (in one case, a few weeks, but in that case he really should have known better than to appoint his ambitious nephew to Lord of the Treasury when most of the immediately previous kings had neglected to consistently pay the Guard, who were getting somewhat annoyed by this). The story cold-opens on the final assault on the king's castle by a very determined citizen's rebellion, and the rather grisly death of a fatally over-confident king by surprise assault before he even thinks to use the, you know, massively powerful enslaved Wizard in his own defense. Admittedly, because of the high rate of turn-over, a lot of the latterday kings don't know how to use the Wizard, which very quickly becomes a plot point when the leader of the rebellion, now the new king by default and right of conquest, has to start figuring out what to do with his newly-acquired kingdom and its guardian.
However, the citizen-king isn't actually the main character, and in fact could probably be considered almost the antagonist, or at least the source of conflict. Not least because the old king primarily used the Wizard for flashy displays of power including, but not limited to, the public scarring of the woman the new king loves (actually a relatively powerful mage in her own right, and considerably more level-headed about this than her lover - she at least consistently recognises that it wasn't the Wizard's choice to do that to her). The main character, and the one who ends up doing most of the interacting with the Wizard, is the citizen-king's right hand man, a soft-spoken disenfranchised minor noble whose job becomes to essentially run interference between the more bombastic and driven citizen king and everyone else. Including, of course, the Wizard.
It's this young man who gets close enough to the Wizard to actually start seeing him as a person again. And also, who gets close enough to be the first to start realising that the Wizard hasn't been as passive and idle these past few centuries as previous kings may have thought, and that the binding might not be holding quite as well as the kingdom might hope. Especially since the Wizard never asked to be bound in the first place, and has spent a couple hundred years by this stage being consistently ill-treated, and whose temper the citizen king, no matter how understandable his aversion, is really not helping.
Turns out, in this particular time and place, a job running interference between a precarious and still occasionally violent new administration, and a centuries-old and very pissed off magical being who may shortly escape his bonds, is NOT the easiest or most desirable job in the world. Fortunately, or maybe not, the Wizard appears to have taken a shine to our young man, which might just enable him to survive, or even avert, the coming explosion.
Iteration Two: the more insular version of the story. Also the one that is basically nothing but slash cliches, but hey. This one takes place much, much further down the line, after the kingdom itself has actually collapsed, and shrunk down to little more than the ruined remains of the original king's castle, the rest of the kingdom swallowed into neighbouring lands, and only the rumours of hauntings among the crumbling ruins to remind people of the power it once held. The hauntings, and rumours of a great magical power that could catapult the one who holds it to a new High Kingship, if they could only get past the defenses wreathing the castle. Enough people have tried, though, by this stage, tried and failed in such occasionally grisly fashion, that most people have given the legend up as a bad job, and settled on more traditional (read: violent) means of gathering power. The castle has slowly but surely faded into obscurity, but not, unfortunately, completely so.
The main character of this version (and one of essentially only three actual characters in the story) is again a disenfranchised lordling, this time turned essentially bandit, and on the run from powerful enemies who would quite like him captured, spitted, and held up as an example of what happens to people who don't do as the new world order tells them. Exhausted and pretty much on his last legs, more or less resigned to death, he stumbles on the ruins and manages, through a combination of luck and perseverance, and possibly severe boredom on the Wizard's part, to make it through the defenses, collapsing in exhaustion as he reaches the inner courtyard. And then, much to his consternation, waking up alarmingly unclothed and freshly bandaged in someone else's bed, with a tired and rather jumpy man leaning over him (cliche, yes, why do you ask? Besides. It's fun). The rest of the story should be obvious to anyone who's ever read original slash, right up to reveal of how the Wizard's freedom could be won, and the heroic sacrifice when our hero's enemies catch up to him and want to use the powers of an enslaved and world-weary wizard for themselves. *grins* This version is fluff, basically. But fun fluff.
There is actually a third version of the story, or what started out as a third version, at least, but it's gone somewhere else entirely, and is only barely in it's infancy. Heh. Maybe later.
Carogne:
*grins* Quite possibly the one of my stories (technically, mine and my sisters') that has the best chance of actually being a book some day. Problematic in that it's kind of short on plot at the minute (we've the basic shape, we know it has something to do with Stefan, and the General's legacy, and it's going to revolve around Jan and his perfectly innocent screwing with the established order of life in this city - but the actual specifics are, shall we say, somewhat shaky at the minute), but lucky in that we've managed to at least gather most of the important cast members into place by this point, and the fact that it has a protagonist (in no universe could you legitimately describe Sebastien as a 'hero') whose head I can easily get into, and who, because of his history and precarious position, the plot just tends to sort of happen to. Seriously. Just stand in Sebastien's apothecary long enough, and most of the major players in the city will come to you sooner or later. A very handy trait to have in a protagonist, let me tell you.
Most of the stories already written are basically scene-setting, me getting a feel for the run-up to the plot and the interactions of the important characters. I think we've got a few characters still to introduce (major antagonists, for a start - Stefan is working a lot of angles, but he's not actually trying to get anyone in the cast killed/ruined/abandoned/discommoded, not even by accident, which kind of disqualifies him from antagonist status), and it would by really useful if at some point in the near future I could actually get a clear idea of where we're supposed to be going and how I might go about getting there, but ... Basically, I'm quite hopeful for this one. *smiles sheepishly*
Southwark:
Gone into in some detail here
The Whore Prince:
Pretty much the newest of my worlds. It actually originated as an iteration of Wolf Kingdom, up there, and still retains a hell of a lot of the shape of the set-up and at least one clearly transfered character (evil sorceress ahoy!), but the rest of the characters got changed around so much, and the plot itself changed so much that it is, in my head, basically a different story. Admittedly, more or less because Wolfen and Tristan are completely different characters ... Okay, no. By the rules of the iteration-stories above, it still should totally count as just another iteration. I'm not sure why this one is different in my head. It just ... sort of is? *sheepish* I'm not always completely logical about these things, and Whore Prince just feels different in my head. *shrugs apologetically*
The inciting character is basically the same as Wolf Kingdom. The evil sorceress (named Mira, in this version - strangely enough, and you may have noticed this in descriptions, but an awful lot of my original characters don't actually have names for quite long periods of time, if at all - I know who they are in my head, so until we get to the potential writing stage, I often forget to name them) who attempts to seduce and enslave the High King, and fails spectacularly due to the intervention of the future High Queen who genuinely loves him. Again, the sorceress attempts to get around this failure by going to one of the High King's vassals, in this case the king of one of the smaller kingdoms of the land, and attempts to rinse and repeat, this time successfully.
The major difference in this case is that her motivation, beyond just power, has always been to provide herself with an heir, a continuation of her magical line. For her, this means a girl-child, as magic passes through the maternal line in her family. A major part of her motivation in seducing the High King in the first place was to get a child by him. And, in this version, she did. She was, in fact, in the early stages of pregnancy when she got kicked out (which no-one besides her was aware of). The only problem was, the child was a boy, which is why, along with vengeance, she was compelled to try again with the lesser king. And again, this time around she is successful, and six years after the birth of her (mostly unwanted) son, she gives birth to the daughter she plans will one day be her heir and the ruler of the Kingdom. Destroying the king she enslaved in the process, or so she thinks, such that she's not really all that concerned when the shattered man escapes following her daughter's birth. He'll still be under her control if he ever comes within range of her again, and is more or less broken after years under her thumb, so she's not worried.
Sixteen years later, and her daughter has come of age, and come into her power, and it's time for her plans to come to fruition. Time for her children to take the Kingdom and give her back the power she deserved from the start. Unfortunately, in the intervening sixteen years, quite a number of things have gone wrong, including the slow erosion of her power base due to political mismanagement, the revelation of her identity to the High King (making the threat of war between her new kingdom and the High Kingship very, very real), and the fact that her daughter, though coming into her power, came into the wrong power, at least as far as the mother is concerned. All of which results in her children being sent to the court of the High King, not as conquering or seductive weapons as she originally intended, but as supplicants sent apparently in a last-ditch effort to make peace with her oldest enemy through the marriage of her now-useless daughter to the High King's son.
The story mostly follows Tristan, the titular Whore Prince and her first unwanted son, and his sister, Analine, now more or less her mother's virgin sacrifice, as they try to survive in a hostile court who believes it knows exactly why they are there, what they are capable of, and how low they must be to stoop to it, all while in the background their mother strives to move alternate pieces into play for a more straightforward bid for the kingdom. Rounding out the main cast in the present is Wyatt, the High King's son who to begin with is not at all impressed with being courted by a woman everyone, everyone, knows is basically a whore sent to seduce him, but who starts to listen a bit more once he realises that something is very, very wrong with the pair of siblings sent to court him. On the second tier of the cast, there is Jeremiah, Wyatt's bodyguard, whom High King Benedict apparently trusts, for unknown reasons, to be able to tell if the sorceress' daughter is ensorcelling his son; Benedict himself, caught trying to both deal with the disruptive and possibly deadly youths sent to his court, and with the war their mother is setting up in the background; and Lilian, the High Queen, who has a better idea of what is happening to her son, and her once-rival's children, than probably even themselves.
And along the way, we realise that there are a number of people the sorceress really, really should have paid better attention to in her bid for power. Just because they were helpless against her on a personal level, doesn't mean they can't still drastically affect her ability to bring her plans to fruition. *grins nastily*
That's all she wrote for now. Heh. Should settle me down for a while yet, don't you think? *shakes head at self* Hoi ...
Also, I shall by trying to get the Carogne prompts from the meme written sometime soon, possibly also the other Dak Territories one too. Heh. You know. With luck, and patience, and providing I stop procrastinating on things ... *grins sheepishly*
Shadow Mage: (multiple iterations)
This one has gone through multiple iterations, from a basic story structure. That happens sometimes with my stories (read: a lot). *grins* Usually what happens with iteration-stories is that I'll take the same basic opening premise, and the same character ROLES, and put different people in them. Shadow Mage has a basic premise of a world where magic is divided into light- and shadow-mages, and the main character turns out to have a different kind of magic, just in time to be dumped into the middle of the conflict. It's ... rather far from the more serious of my worlds. Mostly just something to play with on long train journeys, kinda thing. Heh.
Iteration One: one of my older stories, from when I was a very young teenager. I think I actually have the (rather yellowing) bits of rounded-corner A4 it was originally written on. *grins* The main character (who for the life of me I cannot remember the name of - I think it was something along the lines of 'Winstarell') had 'pewter-coloured' hair (by which I meant the dark-greyish with a silvery sheen that my auntie's dragon statues were made of), and was a slave to a shadow mage named Alberon. Her power was song (I think I'd recently read LE Modesitt's Spellsong Cycle). The story starts where her master, who's been in hiding in his tower for the past fifteen odd years (most of her life) is finally tracked down by his light-mage brother, Ulberon, and taken prisoner. Turns out, he's been protecting her all along with the 'slave' charade. Ulberon has a slave himself, an ex-shadow mage called Zachariah, and the story from that point follows our heroine as she tries to keep the two shadow mages alive in Ulberon's hands, and ends up interfering in the balance of power between light and shadow mages (which had drastically shifted in favour the knight-templar-ish light mages some two decades previously - I think I've always had a real bias against the whole light = goodness trope. Heh).
Iteration Two: rebooting the basic idea some years later, when I was (slightly) more mature. *straight faced - sort of* Same basic principle, the heroine is a slave of a shadow mage for her own protection, has different powers (in this case, transmutation) in a light/shadow binary system, gets dumped in the middle of the conflict. In this case, though, the heroine was much younger (still more or less a kid), the shadow mage in question is actually her father, her mother was a light magess who was brutally murdered by her own kind for marrying a shadow sorceror, and the story is kicked off when the dead woman's sister, again a light mage, finally catches up to the shadow bastard who 'violated' her sister and intends to give him a fittingly grisly death in his turn. Except his brother, a shadow-trickster of some power and lots of irreverence, crashes the vengeance-party, and with our heroine's (somewhat accidental) help, rescues his brother, kidnaps the sister-in-law, and drops them in the middle of a revolution as the shadow mages rise up against the light council with our heroine's recently revealed powers to help.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the latter iteration, most of my sympathies were actually with the vengeful sister-in-law, mostly on the grounds that that was a hell of a family to get dumped in the middle of, between her brother-in-law's rather hapless demeanor and worrying amount of power, his brother's trickster nature, and her niece's wordless and inexplicable devotion to two men she should probably have hated, who have completely ruined her for polite society. Heh.
In general, though, the Shadow Mage iterations mostly just show that I really, really hate the Light Equals Good trope, and also that I probably read Janny Wurts' Wars of Light and Shadow at FAR too young an age. *grins sheepishly*
Wolf Kingdom:
... Firstly, you should probably know that I have a weird attachment to hapless male characters. Also, that a lot of my early villains were wicked sorceresses, because I grew up on fairytales and Disney, yes? The main villain (and in some senses, main character) of this world was a weird combination of the Wicked Queen from Snow White, and a female Judge Claude Frollo (Disney film, not book) in her relationship with her son. She was also, of course, a black widow of stunning proportions.
The world's name comes from the actual main character of the story, the sorceress' son, the wolf-man. Ah. May take some explaining, that one. The sorceress, in the backstory for the plot, had attempted to take over the kingdom the story's set in by seducing and enslaving the king. This ... rather failed, due to a heroine-of-another-story, and for a backup the sorceress seduced and enslaved one of the more powerful lords of the kingdom on the sly, rather more successfully. Over the intervening years she has cemented her power over the lord's lands and extended her influence over a lot of his neighbours, taking the somewhat slower but more reliable route to taking over the kingdom. Because of the amount of time it was taking, though, and barred from direct access to the royal palace on the not-unwarranted grounds that she previously attempted to, you know, seduce and enslave the king, she needed a proxy ruler she could control. So she, rather coldly and deliberately, set about conceiving a child with her captured lord (casting him out once she was through with him), in, among other things, the hopes that her child would carry her magic as well as being loyal to her.
The result was Wolfen, her son, who through a corruption of her magic, or possibly his father's influence, became a creature of magic, rather than a mage himself. A werewolf, a monster his mother leaves run once a month to terrorise her lands, and who she hopes to marry to the king's daughter in a bid to take over the throne. Wolfen himself, due in part to his fears of his own nature, and in part to living with, well, his mother, has developed into an incredibly timid and unconfrontational young man, with a fledgeling conscience that he really, desperately does not want his mother to find out about. A conscience which, unfortunately for him, makes the prospect of marrying an unsuspecting young woman who has no idea what she's getting into, and then leaving her essentially at his mother's mercy, more than a little unpalatable.
Luckily enough for him (or not, depending on how you look at it), there are quite a few other characters equally as unwilling to allow this to happen, including the princess' brother, who doesn't particularly want her to marry anyone, let alone the provincial lord of a backwards barony beset by monsters (less so again when he finds out said lord is the monster), the king himself, once he starts to get an inkling of who this suitor's mother is, and the leader of a group of bandits in the forests that cover a lot of the northern edges of the barony who has a particular interest in Wolfen. Mostly, admittedly, in killing him. Also his mother, but mostly Wolfen, for reasons that become obvious very quickly.
Most of the story once the plot kicks off is mostly his mother attempting to rule the kingdom, everyone else attempting to stop her (usually by attempting to kill Wolfen), and Wolfen himself attempting, without much hope it must be said, to survive the lot of them, and possibly also make the pretty girl realise that he is not, in fact, a mindless slavering monster. Or at least, not for most of the month, anyway. Heh.
Spindlebone:
Okay. Look. Sometimes, you just want a story were you mostly just follow a wicked, thoroughly implausible badass around the place, okay? Something anime-esque, with lots of swords and magic and demons, and honour-bound knights, and mad gods, and an anti-hero-slash-villain-protagonist that's some ridiculously implausible god-demon hydrid with an attitude, some stupidly awesome powers, and a few metric tonnes of tragic backstory. On a mad quest, involving lots and lots of collateral damage, to stop the end of the world, and face his demonic father, and possibly become an utterly insane god for the few seconds it takes for him to spectacularly explode after eating the end-of-the-world-in-a-bottle maguffin. Mourned by all his enemies-slash-reluctant-allies in the halcyon-coloured epilogue as mad, bad, dangerous to know, and thankfully far too awesome for this sinful earth, because if he'd stuck around much longer we probably wouldn't have had a sinful earth anymore. Or much of anything else, either. *grins* Y'all have those kinds of stories, right?
Spindlebone was mine. Semi-demonic Lord of Treachery, son of the Prince of Hell and a minor seer, incredibly ugly bone-white bastard with a silver arm that grows him weapons on demand. Frowned on by demons and gods alike, horribly betrayed at various points of his life by people close to him, lost his mother to insanity after she figured out what the hell (literally) she'd just slept with, lost the closest thing he had to a friend to betrayal and his father's machinations, lost the only woman who might have loved him to, well, more betrayal and machinations, and eventually draws the correct conclusion that he's never going to be allowed to indulge in this whole 'loving other people' thing until after he gets rid of his father. Who, luckily enough, is currently campaigning to take over the universe from the pantheon of gods, so it's not like Spindle is short on potential allies who'd like to help him smush the Prince of Hell into a (rather large) smear on the landscape. If they can get past the whole 'son of the Prince of Hell' thing, which rather understandibly makes people a little leery of his motivations, and also if they can get past the whole 'Lord of Treachery' thing where he is, occasionally, almost pathologically obliged to give people reasons to distrust him.
*waves hand aimlessly* This is not particularly a story with a point, you understand. It's not particularly plausible, even in terms of fantasy, not particularly well-plotted, and more or less runs off tropes and stereotypical fantasy/anime characters. It is, primarily, for having fun, on those days when I like to blow off steam by indulging in wholly-implausible-and-physically-impossible fight scenes, stern and honourable knights who have to work with quite-probably-insane half-demons and are trying to make the most of it, crap-tonnes of demonic daddy issues, and an end-of-the-world plot that has utterly no rhyme or reason, and doesn't, at the end of the day, particularly require any.
Plus. I like Spindle. He's ruthlessly pragmatic, has a regrettably tendancy to lie compulsively, has a weird and utterly backwards sense of honour (if you say you trust him, he feels contractually obliged to betray you. If, conversely, you vocally and repeatedly announce your distrust, he feels contractually obliged to prove you wrong by being trustworthy. 'Lord of Treachery', et cetera. He's, well, not really right in the head), and is nicely and implausibly badass. And I kinda love Lord Carthian, too. The main knight who is sent by his god to accompany Spindle on his quest. Mostly because he's deceptively cheerful, friendly, honourable, and very quickly figured out where Spindle's buttons were, so he can do things like loudly declare what an utter treacherous bastard Spindle is just before a major confrontation where they really need the half-demon on their side, with a grin and a twinkle in his eye and utter confidence that Spindle will, in fact, come through for them. And Spindle knows Carthian is playing the hell out of him, and Carthian knows he knows, and it's just this weird and oddly friendly game of 'We both know you're playing me, and we both know the only reason I let you play me is because I like you, and you probably shouldn't ever actually trust me, but in the meantime this is a nice facsimile, and it works for us'.
So. Utterly pointless, utterly ridiculous, breaks all the rules of good story-telling, is violent enough that I should probably be worried about myself, is utterly full of cliches and stereotypes, and ... Basically? A lot of mindless fun for those days where I really, really want something so far over the top it's actually on the way down again. *grins*
The Wizard: (multiple iterations)
Again, an iteration-story. This one, though, is from much, much later in the game than Shadow Mage up there. This one was from after I discovered the internet, and more to the point from after I discovered the concept of original slash, and spent a very satisfying few months reading various slash retellings of old fairytales (including quite a few I need to find again - there was a particular one that was a retelling of Vasilisa the Beautiful which I desperately want to reread ...). Again, there are two main iterations of the story (iteration stories tend to go through any number of versions, but usually only a couple of the threads settle into more fully-fledged, contains-actual-plot iterations), one considerably more insular than the other. The more expansive iteration has also gone through quite a few retools/changes, mostly while I tried to decide how much I wanted the revolution to be to the fore of the plot, rather than the romance (priorities, occasionally I do not have them ...).
The Wizard's basic premise is the discovery/use of a magically bound man, the titular wizard, as the power-source of a kingdom and the means through which the king/ruler retains power. Sort of as if King Arthur had magically chained Merlin to be Camelot's genie-in-a-bottle, enforcer, and general all-round magical resource chest from here until eternity or the fall of the kingdom, whichever happens first. Over the years since the binding, the various kings have become increasingly corrupt and prone to abusing the power of the Wizard (and abusing the Wizard himself), and needless to say, by the time we get to the timeframe of the story, the Wizard is beginning to get more than a little pissed off.
Iteration One: Is the complicated version of the story. Set a couple of centuries down the line from the original binding, the existence of the Wizard himself has become a reasonably closely guarded secret, while the kingship has become decadently corrupt, to the point where assassinations, coup d'etats and rebellions have become relatively common, with a turn-over in kings being measured in decades down to years (in one case, a few weeks, but in that case he really should have known better than to appoint his ambitious nephew to Lord of the Treasury when most of the immediately previous kings had neglected to consistently pay the Guard, who were getting somewhat annoyed by this). The story cold-opens on the final assault on the king's castle by a very determined citizen's rebellion, and the rather grisly death of a fatally over-confident king by surprise assault before he even thinks to use the, you know, massively powerful enslaved Wizard in his own defense. Admittedly, because of the high rate of turn-over, a lot of the latterday kings don't know how to use the Wizard, which very quickly becomes a plot point when the leader of the rebellion, now the new king by default and right of conquest, has to start figuring out what to do with his newly-acquired kingdom and its guardian.
However, the citizen-king isn't actually the main character, and in fact could probably be considered almost the antagonist, or at least the source of conflict. Not least because the old king primarily used the Wizard for flashy displays of power including, but not limited to, the public scarring of the woman the new king loves (actually a relatively powerful mage in her own right, and considerably more level-headed about this than her lover - she at least consistently recognises that it wasn't the Wizard's choice to do that to her). The main character, and the one who ends up doing most of the interacting with the Wizard, is the citizen-king's right hand man, a soft-spoken disenfranchised minor noble whose job becomes to essentially run interference between the more bombastic and driven citizen king and everyone else. Including, of course, the Wizard.
It's this young man who gets close enough to the Wizard to actually start seeing him as a person again. And also, who gets close enough to be the first to start realising that the Wizard hasn't been as passive and idle these past few centuries as previous kings may have thought, and that the binding might not be holding quite as well as the kingdom might hope. Especially since the Wizard never asked to be bound in the first place, and has spent a couple hundred years by this stage being consistently ill-treated, and whose temper the citizen king, no matter how understandable his aversion, is really not helping.
Turns out, in this particular time and place, a job running interference between a precarious and still occasionally violent new administration, and a centuries-old and very pissed off magical being who may shortly escape his bonds, is NOT the easiest or most desirable job in the world. Fortunately, or maybe not, the Wizard appears to have taken a shine to our young man, which might just enable him to survive, or even avert, the coming explosion.
Iteration Two: the more insular version of the story. Also the one that is basically nothing but slash cliches, but hey. This one takes place much, much further down the line, after the kingdom itself has actually collapsed, and shrunk down to little more than the ruined remains of the original king's castle, the rest of the kingdom swallowed into neighbouring lands, and only the rumours of hauntings among the crumbling ruins to remind people of the power it once held. The hauntings, and rumours of a great magical power that could catapult the one who holds it to a new High Kingship, if they could only get past the defenses wreathing the castle. Enough people have tried, though, by this stage, tried and failed in such occasionally grisly fashion, that most people have given the legend up as a bad job, and settled on more traditional (read: violent) means of gathering power. The castle has slowly but surely faded into obscurity, but not, unfortunately, completely so.
The main character of this version (and one of essentially only three actual characters in the story) is again a disenfranchised lordling, this time turned essentially bandit, and on the run from powerful enemies who would quite like him captured, spitted, and held up as an example of what happens to people who don't do as the new world order tells them. Exhausted and pretty much on his last legs, more or less resigned to death, he stumbles on the ruins and manages, through a combination of luck and perseverance, and possibly severe boredom on the Wizard's part, to make it through the defenses, collapsing in exhaustion as he reaches the inner courtyard. And then, much to his consternation, waking up alarmingly unclothed and freshly bandaged in someone else's bed, with a tired and rather jumpy man leaning over him (cliche, yes, why do you ask? Besides. It's fun). The rest of the story should be obvious to anyone who's ever read original slash, right up to reveal of how the Wizard's freedom could be won, and the heroic sacrifice when our hero's enemies catch up to him and want to use the powers of an enslaved and world-weary wizard for themselves. *grins* This version is fluff, basically. But fun fluff.
There is actually a third version of the story, or what started out as a third version, at least, but it's gone somewhere else entirely, and is only barely in it's infancy. Heh. Maybe later.
Carogne:
*grins* Quite possibly the one of my stories (technically, mine and my sisters') that has the best chance of actually being a book some day. Problematic in that it's kind of short on plot at the minute (we've the basic shape, we know it has something to do with Stefan, and the General's legacy, and it's going to revolve around Jan and his perfectly innocent screwing with the established order of life in this city - but the actual specifics are, shall we say, somewhat shaky at the minute), but lucky in that we've managed to at least gather most of the important cast members into place by this point, and the fact that it has a protagonist (in no universe could you legitimately describe Sebastien as a 'hero') whose head I can easily get into, and who, because of his history and precarious position, the plot just tends to sort of happen to. Seriously. Just stand in Sebastien's apothecary long enough, and most of the major players in the city will come to you sooner or later. A very handy trait to have in a protagonist, let me tell you.
Most of the stories already written are basically scene-setting, me getting a feel for the run-up to the plot and the interactions of the important characters. I think we've got a few characters still to introduce (major antagonists, for a start - Stefan is working a lot of angles, but he's not actually trying to get anyone in the cast killed/ruined/abandoned/discommoded, not even by accident, which kind of disqualifies him from antagonist status), and it would by really useful if at some point in the near future I could actually get a clear idea of where we're supposed to be going and how I might go about getting there, but ... Basically, I'm quite hopeful for this one. *smiles sheepishly*
Southwark:
Gone into in some detail here
The Whore Prince:
Pretty much the newest of my worlds. It actually originated as an iteration of Wolf Kingdom, up there, and still retains a hell of a lot of the shape of the set-up and at least one clearly transfered character (evil sorceress ahoy!), but the rest of the characters got changed around so much, and the plot itself changed so much that it is, in my head, basically a different story. Admittedly, more or less because Wolfen and Tristan are completely different characters ... Okay, no. By the rules of the iteration-stories above, it still should totally count as just another iteration. I'm not sure why this one is different in my head. It just ... sort of is? *sheepish* I'm not always completely logical about these things, and Whore Prince just feels different in my head. *shrugs apologetically*
The inciting character is basically the same as Wolf Kingdom. The evil sorceress (named Mira, in this version - strangely enough, and you may have noticed this in descriptions, but an awful lot of my original characters don't actually have names for quite long periods of time, if at all - I know who they are in my head, so until we get to the potential writing stage, I often forget to name them) who attempts to seduce and enslave the High King, and fails spectacularly due to the intervention of the future High Queen who genuinely loves him. Again, the sorceress attempts to get around this failure by going to one of the High King's vassals, in this case the king of one of the smaller kingdoms of the land, and attempts to rinse and repeat, this time successfully.
The major difference in this case is that her motivation, beyond just power, has always been to provide herself with an heir, a continuation of her magical line. For her, this means a girl-child, as magic passes through the maternal line in her family. A major part of her motivation in seducing the High King in the first place was to get a child by him. And, in this version, she did. She was, in fact, in the early stages of pregnancy when she got kicked out (which no-one besides her was aware of). The only problem was, the child was a boy, which is why, along with vengeance, she was compelled to try again with the lesser king. And again, this time around she is successful, and six years after the birth of her (mostly unwanted) son, she gives birth to the daughter she plans will one day be her heir and the ruler of the Kingdom. Destroying the king she enslaved in the process, or so she thinks, such that she's not really all that concerned when the shattered man escapes following her daughter's birth. He'll still be under her control if he ever comes within range of her again, and is more or less broken after years under her thumb, so she's not worried.
Sixteen years later, and her daughter has come of age, and come into her power, and it's time for her plans to come to fruition. Time for her children to take the Kingdom and give her back the power she deserved from the start. Unfortunately, in the intervening sixteen years, quite a number of things have gone wrong, including the slow erosion of her power base due to political mismanagement, the revelation of her identity to the High King (making the threat of war between her new kingdom and the High Kingship very, very real), and the fact that her daughter, though coming into her power, came into the wrong power, at least as far as the mother is concerned. All of which results in her children being sent to the court of the High King, not as conquering or seductive weapons as she originally intended, but as supplicants sent apparently in a last-ditch effort to make peace with her oldest enemy through the marriage of her now-useless daughter to the High King's son.
The story mostly follows Tristan, the titular Whore Prince and her first unwanted son, and his sister, Analine, now more or less her mother's virgin sacrifice, as they try to survive in a hostile court who believes it knows exactly why they are there, what they are capable of, and how low they must be to stoop to it, all while in the background their mother strives to move alternate pieces into play for a more straightforward bid for the kingdom. Rounding out the main cast in the present is Wyatt, the High King's son who to begin with is not at all impressed with being courted by a woman everyone, everyone, knows is basically a whore sent to seduce him, but who starts to listen a bit more once he realises that something is very, very wrong with the pair of siblings sent to court him. On the second tier of the cast, there is Jeremiah, Wyatt's bodyguard, whom High King Benedict apparently trusts, for unknown reasons, to be able to tell if the sorceress' daughter is ensorcelling his son; Benedict himself, caught trying to both deal with the disruptive and possibly deadly youths sent to his court, and with the war their mother is setting up in the background; and Lilian, the High Queen, who has a better idea of what is happening to her son, and her once-rival's children, than probably even themselves.
And along the way, we realise that there are a number of people the sorceress really, really should have paid better attention to in her bid for power. Just because they were helpless against her on a personal level, doesn't mean they can't still drastically affect her ability to bring her plans to fruition. *grins nastily*
That's all she wrote for now. Heh. Should settle me down for a while yet, don't you think? *shakes head at self* Hoi ...
Also, I shall by trying to get the Carogne prompts from the meme written sometime soon, possibly also the other Dak Territories one too. Heh. You know. With luck, and patience, and providing I stop procrastinating on things ... *grins sheepishly*
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