Weekly update for The Shadow of Vale

I didn’t hit my weekly goal of 3,500 words this week, but I did get close. I wrote 3,212 words this week. A lot of character exploration. That was kind of my theme this week because when I did some character aesthetics I realized the main is kind of a flat character so I have been digging into him and figuring out what his motivations are so he is at least as interesting as Aila.

Here is an excerpt from this week’s labors:

“Ready?” Zuriel called down as Aila started toward them.

She nodded happily.

“I usually climb up his tail.”

Halvar waved the idea away and told Aila, “I’ll give you a lift.” Using a hold, he lifted the nymph up and set her carefully, with Zuriel’s help, between two spikes behind where Zuriel sat.

“Hold on to the spike,” Zuriel called over his shoulder.

“Got it.”

“Alright.” Zuriel turned and gave the command to Pyre who unfurled his great wings and leapt into the air.

Aila clung to the spike before her, white-knuckled, as Pyre climbed, then leveled out over the forest. She leaned slightly to take in the sights. It was remarkable. While the scar of the dead gathering was plain, there was a lot of forest still thriving around Halcyon. She could see smoke from villages hidden beneath the trees. People busy about their work.

“What do you think?”

“It’s incredible!”

Pyre climbed a bit higher and turned north, being allowed a great deal of freedom by Zuriel.

“You can see the ocean.” Aila pointed before them as the glimmer of the water came into view on the far horizon.

After turning right, Pyre began to dive which caused Aila to laugh happily as Zuriel groaned, his stomach doing summersaults within him. He climbed once more and repeated the abrupt descent. As much as Zuriel loathed it, he could feel the happiness radiating from Aila, so he did his best to suppress his displeasure.

Pyre took them a few more loops around the forest before heading back to the castle and dropping back into the courtyard where Halvar remained leaning against the wall.

“That was wonderful.” Aila reached her arms out to hug Zuriel, being mindful of the spike between them.

“Glad you liked it.” Zuriel smiled over his shoulder, patting her hands where they linked just under his ribs.

She released him and got to her feet, swaying unsteadily on Pyre’s back.

“I got ‘cha.” Halvar again took her in a gentile hold and brought her back down.

Zuriel stood a moment, waiting for his lift down.

“What? He’s your dragon, you’ve got to learn to get on and off of him.” Halvar crossed his arms.

Zuriel rolled his eyes and started back toward the tail. Pyre brought his wing up for the slide again which Zuriel glanced at with an amused smile as he continued onto the ladder that was his tail.

Pyre nuzzled Aila who patted his snout affectionately, smiling brightly. Zuriel couldn’t help smiling himself. After seeing her cry as much as he had, it felt good to see her genuinely happy.

“What do you have to do now?” Halvar asked as Pyre turned his attention to Zuriel.

“Uh, I don’t have any lessons, but I have a lot of studying to do also.” He stroked the side of Pyre’s face, stepping back as the dragon pushed against him.

“Could I help?” Aila asked.

“Uh, its mostly reading, not sure how you could help me with it.” Zuriel turned to Pyre and with a final affectionate pat, sent him off to the forest.

“I could read to you, break up the monotony of it.”

“Plus, we could answer questions.” Halvar added, loath to be left to himself.

Zuriel chuckled and shrugged. “Alright.”

This week in Vale

This week I made the decision to break the story into two pieces. The first part I will consider a prequel and write separately. Going forward, I will adjust the word count to reflect my decision to drop the first part.

That said, this week I wrote 5,614 words. Brought the word count up from 20,130 to 25,744 words.

The story was a lot of fun to write this week. Dealing with training and a dragon made for some entertaining scenes. I also introduced Samael to this part of the story for the first time personally.

Here are some snippets from this week’s labors:

Left to himself, Samael set the figurine on the table and fell into pacing as he waited for Jedrek to return with news and naims. No one who have his dragon but him, especially with the dueling returned safely to Vale.

That child was enough of a problem without some random naim linking his most powerful dragon. The one he intended to level Halcyon with as soon as he could work out how to command it. He turned and threw another shard of ice at the wall followed by a fireball which knocked several bricks out of place.

After staring blankly at the hole a moment, he rounded his desk and pulled the top right drawer open. He moved several papers around before finding the crystal he was seeking. Tucking it away in a pocket he walked to the door.

In the hall, Jedrek was speaking with a nervous looking sorcerer dressed in uniform. Seeing Samael step into the hall, the man stood at attention.

Samael waved him off with an air of annoyance and addressed Jedrek. “I need my wall repaired. Have the naims sent to my lab. I’m going out.”

“Yes sir. No word yet on who linked Pyre.” Jedrek raised his voice slightly to be heard by the elder sorcerer as he rushed down the hall. Once he was out of sight, Jedrek refocused on the sorcerer before him. “Like I was saying, the one that worked was a young naima. A boy might work. It is possible that linking won’t be possible until we know who has linked the dragon, so that is first priority. If we can bring whoever linked him here, that would be ideal.”

“First decade?” the sorcerer looked disturbed by the request.

Jedrek’s expression hardened at once. “I believe I made myself perfectly clear as it was made to me. Do I need to find another?”

“No, no. I’ll bring them.”

“To the lab. Within the hour.”

The sorcerer nodded and made his way down the hall.

“No, we are moving on.”

“Come on, I won’t do it again.”

“Do you know how you lit the block on fire?” Halvar crossed his arms.

“No, but I think I just slipped over into it. I felt when I did it. I think I can stop it from happening again.”

“Nope,” Halvar said, shaking his head. “We move on. I’ll show you stairs. That way if you light the block on fire again, you’ll be standing on it.”

Zuriel rolled his eyes and walked back to their starting point. Aila came into the courtyard as Halvar prepared to explain how to form stairs.

“Hey,” Zuriel waved to her.

“Are you guys training?” She asked as she drew close.

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing, you want to join us?” Zuriel asked.

“Fair warning, he tried to light me on fire.”

“I did not!”

Halvar pulled his shirt where it was singed. “Uh, what did this then?”

Aila laughed. “That looks like it was burned.”

Zuriel sighed. “Fine. I accidently lit a block on fire which Halvar was leaning against. It might have singed a few hairs.”

“Stairs.”

“I think I’ll watch from over there.” Aila smiled and pointed to a bench on the far wall.

Zuriel turned his attention back to Halvar who was explaining the logic of making steps.

“You need to trust yourself, which will be hard because you will probably drop yourself a few times, but you’ll grow more confident and it will happen less. Try it.”

Zuriel looked at the ground and imagined the first two stairs. He lifted his right foot and planted it on the first. It was lower than he thought. He brought up his other foot and stood on it. He tried to lift his right foot to go to the second but caught the bottom of it. He tripped and fell landing on his hands and knees.

“Not bad.”

“Why do I feel like I am going to spend the next few weeks on the ground.”

“Probably because you are going to spend the next few weeks on the ground. I am sure that will mostly be with Cyrus. I don’t think Rafael will have you falling much. Unless he wants you to practice healing yourself. Hey! You can practice healing things you do to yourself in our morning sessions.” Halvar said mockingly.

Now back on his feet, he rolled his eyes at Halvar and tried the stairs again. He made it up onto the second stair, then Halvar instructed him to step back at which point he missed one and fall on his back.

After an hour of increasingly infrequent stumbles, he could manage three stairs without much issue.

This was a huge, super productive week for me

While I might still write a little more today, which will technically be the same week, I have already written so much that I am just gonna take the time now to do the weekly update.

So this week, I managed to add 9,971 words to the second draft. I haven’t hit a number like that since last year. As I mentioned before, I am writing exclusively in the later part of the story. It is a little easier in part due to the fact that it isn’t a mess of separate strands where we are following different characters moving independently, there is the main, Zuriel, and all action kinda moves around him.

A lot of what I wrote this week, I wrote so quickly it all feels really rough to me, there are a lot of emotions that I think I could express better, but that’s the point of this blog, to bring you along, so I hope you don’t mind the mess.

From this weeks labors:

“Wait, wait, wait. You knew that I was not a human and you never thought to tell me?” Aaron’s voice rose with marked irritation.

“I see that that was probably a mistake, but I thought that if you didn’t know what you were, you couldn’t betray yourself. I haven’t kept a close enough watch over you though.”

“Betray myself? To who? I am apparently not even from here!”

“I know, I know.” He stopped, trying to put his thoughts into words. There was simply too much information. “Look, there are ways to get from there to here, and on the off chance that someone from Vale was able to find you, I didn’t want you to be in any danger of being discovered. If you got read and thought you were just a normal guy, you’d be safer.”

“But I did get read and her first thought was that I was the dueling.”

Ray emptied his lungs through parted lips with his eyes closed a moment. Taking another deep breath, he replied, “Well, alright. My plan didn’t work so well.”

“Ray, what am I?”

He looked at his friend a moment, trying to decide how exactly to answer. “In simple terms, you are the dueling, like she said.”

Aaron’s brow creased, “What does that mean, I have like magic powers or something?”

“No, not right now. You’ll have to be unlocked.”

“Unlocked?”

“Yeah, it’s a specific process involving certain physical bonds and fluid, exchange.” Ray’s voice dropped slightly. He had never said it out loud before and could see from Aaron’s face that it sounded just as bad to him as it did to himself.

“Fluid exchange?”

“Not like that, I mean,” He sighed, “The kiss and the blood. That’s the process. One magic unlocked through a kiss, the other, the final, through blood.” He paused, “You’re half through.”

“What?”

Ray fidgeted in his seat. This was the hard part. Telling about Vale and magic was one thing, but telling him his girlfriend was dangerous, he didn’t know how it would go. There was every chance she would use some sort of enchantment spell to draw Aaron in.

“You can’t let her in here.” Ray said, almost in disbelief. If nothing else was getting through, that had to. She was going to try to kill him unless he went with her, and he could not go with her.

“She won’t hurt me. You don’t know her.” Aaron pleaded, not sure if he believed himself or his best friend.

“Aaron, I can read her mind. I can do it from here. She is not here to make sure you are okay.” Halvar kept his voice calm. Cyrus stood behind him with his sword drawn. Kyra stood beside him, anxiety creasing her brow.

“Aaron?” Rachel called again from behind the door.

He turned back to the door.

“Get back. Get away from the door.” Ray said with an urgency that made him take a step back before he even thought about it.

Halvar rushed forward as frost spread across the door and it began to groan under the pressure Rachel was putting on it from the outside. The door finally exploded, raining down chunks of ice and wood across the foyer. Most hit the invisible barrier that was the block Halvar had put up in front of Aaron and fell harmlessly to the laminate floor. Halvar pulled the dazed Aaron backward who stumbled and fell back as Rachel stepped through the ruined door.

Looking at her, Aaron felt as if time slowed. It felt surreal to look at her now. She was dressed much more like the two naims than a normal woman would be dressed. She looked around for him and when her eyes fell on him a chill ran down his spin. He saw what they were talking about for the first time. Her mask was off. Sweet, awkward Rachel was not the woman standing before him now.

She stared at him a moment, seeming to be debating something within herself. He saw on her face as she made a decision and immediately formed a spear of ice and thrust it at him. It exploded on another barrier a foot from him where Kyra had blocked it.

“Get him out of here!” Kyra cried as she lifted Rachel off of the floor. Rachel struggled against the invisible binds, glaring at the naima.

Halvar reached down to help Aaron up who struggled to get his legs to move. Aaron watched as Kyra threw Rachel across the room where she landed with a cry of pain into the entertainment center. Cyrus moved to stand between Rachel and the others as Kyra stepped forward to join him. She turned to Halvar and Zuriel. “You know where Nydia is? You remember?” Aaron nodded. “Take your guardian there, we will be right behind you.”

Halvar laid on a large bed across the room propped up on pillows. He smiled weakly at Zuriel as he entered. Despite his pallor and obvious weakness, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief just to see him awake.

“Your hair.” Halvar said with half a smile as Zuriel came to the bed side.

“What about it?” He asked, flattening it self-consciously.

“Go look in the mirror.” He said, nodding slightly to a mirror which sat above the fireplace to the right of the bed.

He approached the mirror slowly, stopping short as his reflection made him turn to see if someone was behind him. He turned back, rushing forward, running his hands through his now black hair. Strange green eyes looked back at him from his otherwise familiar face. Same nose, same cheeks, same scare on his chin, but his brown hair was now jet black and his grey eyes a vibrant green.

“I thought you might take my color.” Halvar said behind him.

Zuriel turned back toward him, “There is no color in my hair.”

“No, I think your hair went sorcerer.” He said with a mock frown. “Your eyes are definitely naim though. Guess the magic has some physical manifestations.”

He glanced back at the mirror before turning away again and drawing up a chair to Halvar’s bed side. “Its really unnerving to have different eyes.”

“I can imagine.” Halvar said, smiling slightly. “Good job with the sorcerer. You probably saved our lives.”

He felt his stomach turn at the mention. “I killed him.”

“You had to.”

He closed his eyes, pressing his hands over his face. “I can see his face.”

“You will for a while. It’ll pass.” He looked somberly at his friend.

He dropped his hands, clasping them on his lap. “That’s what I am going to have to do, right? Fight? Like that?”

“That was the idea.” Halvar searched his face, looking to see whether he had or would accept the charge he was being given. At least he was in Vale now. He could see what he was fighting for and against. “Samael doesn’t just kill people. He destroys lives, cities, communities. There is an entire race that is missing from Vale now because of him.”

“What?”

“The nymphs. The wizards I spoke said that Aila is it. She’s all that is known to be left in Vale. He wiped them out. Genocide.” He laid his head back on the pillow. “It wasn’t like that when I left. North of here there was a whole village of nymphs. They were the Api nymphs, the forest was named for them. They’re gone now. All of them.”

“Jesus.” Zuriel said softly. “Does Aila know?”

“I don’t think so. She left not long after me. Given all she has lost, I can’t imagine she doesn’t suspect. She’ll have noticed their absence in the streets.”

Zuriel thought of Aila who was likely weeping with Lonan where he had left her. It wasn’t fair. She had done nothing; she was just a child when Samael began his reign of distruction. While he didn’t truly understand the new world he found himself in, he understood evil. If he had even a chance of setting any of it to right, he wanted to try.

“Alright.” He spoke mostly to himself, then looked at Halvar. “Get some rest. You’re going to have to train me.”

Halvar smiled. Maybe he hadn’t failed after all. “Right.”

Zuriel got to his feet, squeezed Halvar’s shoulder before turning to the door.

“Aaron?” Halvar called after him.

He turned back.

“I’m sorry about Rachel. I know that wasn’t easy.”

“Yeah. She wasn’t who I thought.” He turned back to the door but stopped short and turned back. “I need to get used to my name. Call me Zuriel now, alright?”

Halvar smiled, laying back on the pillow with his eyes closed. “Deal.”

This is a strangely productive week.

I am approaching 10k added for the week. I am writing exclusively in the later portion of the story. I think it will stay that way until the first calls me back for some reason. Still considering dropping the first, or making it its own story, separate from the later story.

In celebration of how extremely productive I have been this week, here is another excerpt:

Cyrus looked around, noted that the only other group that had been on the street had made their way around the corner, it was just the seven of them. “We don’t want any trouble. We are just returning to our homes.”

The sorcerer who seemed to be the leader of their group came to a stop before Cyrus. He was a tall man, slender with cold eyes that looked upon them with distain that made Aaron’s stomach drop. It was beyond what he had seen on Rachel’s face.

“Well why did you leave them? There is no peace agreement here.” The sorcerer abruptly summoned an ice spear and thrust it at Cyrus where it splintered against his block. The other two sorcerers began their own assaults with fire and lightening attacks.

Aaron pulled Aila behind him as they both stood behind Cyrus and Halvar who aptly blocked the onslaught. One of the sorcerers worked his way around to flank them, the leader. Focused on the other two, Halvar nearly missed the sorcerer forming an ice spear to his right. Without time to shift his block, he threw himself back as the sorcerer released, catching the spear in his side that had been meant for Aaron.

As Halvar fell into him, Aaron could feel a sharp pain in his side. The pain exploded, running out from the wound through his arms and legs. It seemed to center in his head causing him to cry out, clutching his head as he curled into a fetal position. His eyes burned particularly, but his entire body felt as though a fire had run through it. Then it was over. There only remained a dull throb at the point where the pain had first been felt.

Aaron sat up, shaking his head to clear it. Looking at his side he could see a scar through the bloody hole in his shirt. He looked over the rest of himself and he seemed unharmed.

“Aaron?” Aila said, kneeling beside him.

“I’m alright.” He said. He looked to the ground beside him and saw Ray writhing, his teeth bared in a grimace of pain. “Ray!”

Aaron crawled to his side trying to gage the damage. The spear was quickly melting from where it protruded from his side.

Halvar blocked an attack aimed at him. He could hardly focus through the pain. He saw Aaron, or someone who looked very much like Aaron lean over him.

“Ray.” Aaron said, feeling hopeless as he looked at the growing pool of blood coming from beneath his friend.

Halvar spotted the hole in Aaron’s shirt and realized what had happened. The blood. “You have your magic now.” He grunted, forced himself to focus, “Cyrus needs your help.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know how sorcerer magic works, but you have naim magic too. Think it. Command it to happen with your mind. Block them.” Halvar closed his eyes, breathing in uneven gasps. “Shit, shit, shit.” Aaron looked at Cyrus who had ran his sword through one of the sorcerers and struggled to keep the attacks from the other two off of them. Elemental magic, that would be the key. He had to stop them.