Caulder NaNoWriMo: The Fifth Light

[Caulder Melhaire]

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Title: The Fifth Light
Genre: Fantasy
Goal: Hitting 50,000 words in a combined fresh-write/edit of the preexisting material.
Feedback: Open to anything

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Summary:

The first light bore a loom of fire, and wove among the night,
The second came from deep within, embracing all of light.
The third came forth from blossoms high, with blood as strong as bark
The fourth light rose upon itself, and saw the world go dark.

There are living flames which draw the wellsprings of magic up into the foundations of the world, and when they were extinguished, the world began to rot.

The people of a fledgling world asked the darkness for power, and it handed them a war they stood no chance of winning. During her final stand, Queen Isenri boldly compelled the deep fires to rise and used them to purge Struhn of its attackers. She was exiled for her crimes, but Struhn entered a moment of peace, and the people learned how to flourish in other ways as their magic slipped away into myth.

Yet as of late, a black wind has risen from the depths and now curses the land wherever it blows. With no power to combat the entities, the people of Struhn rely on those few whose bloodline is still saturated with the lost magics to mitigate the spread, but they are fewer with each battle. Word of the mysterious Sovereigns rising from their slumber has likewise spread, diluting the resistance with talk of immortal entities and the arrival of the Endlessness.

But one flame has returned to the world of the living, old and powerful enough to spark a new fire - a fifth light - which in the right hands, could reignite the world.

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Gods, this is like what - the 13th version of this story?  I finished a rough draft, Blue Fox Rising, in 2014 and was distinctly displeased with the results.  Been trying to rewrite things every since, and this year I think I've finally hit enough of a breakthrough that I can pull something palatable out of the wreckage.

I've also wanted to make this two novels: The Fifth Light, and then Black Winds of Silvaera, because a trilogy is too much for my brain to keep track of LOL  I'll never be able to do it.  I know myself too well.  


The only thing I'm keeping from the previous versions is my opening chapter, because I like the tone it sets.  Valanger heading towards the Oenwall in search of answers is a great starting point for things to come.  But after that, I'm gonna have to force myself to ignore everything I've already written and just... start anew.  Oof.  

[Caulder Melhaire]

Main cast of Characters
(These are mostly just rough concepts of how I want them to look)

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Rayna Vallise
(Ra yna: The stars of the harvest; adopted into the old family name Vallise)

Role: Lead Protagonist
Race: Rae, of Plains Silvaeran origin
Gender: Sil Lakwe (Joined Woman)
Age: 29 years
Hometown: Malgrave (Formerly Feldarc orphanage)
Occupation: Freelancer/Explorer

Originally from the Plains region of Silvaera, then adopted by a family from Malgrave. She became friends with the Winterheart Sorel during her time in the orphanage and helped him disguise his lineage. One night, a group of rogue Winterhearts tore through their home, killing her father and leaving her sister injured. Rayna's friendship with Sorel led to tensions within the rest of her family, and so she left to make her own way.

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Sorel, of the Oenwall line
(Sorel: literally means 'wandering ice')

Role: Supporting Lead
Race: Len Alnoie (colloq: Winterheart)
Gender: N/A
Age: Unknown
Hometown: N/A
Occupation: Freelancer/Explorer

Sorel, like his Len Alnoie kin, was born from the second (and final) collection of the ice-encased Filamemen - older, more powerful versions of the soul (filame) which encased themselves in layers and layers of ice to avoid breaking down into the lesser filame. When his rogue kin raided Malgrave, he protected Rayna and her sister as best he could.

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Avaya
(Avaya: A shortening of her full name, Arev Agr Yaaj, which translates to ripples in the moon-graced mire, in reference to the color of her bluish dark grey coat and the rippling brown patterns which cover it)

Role: Supporting Character
Race: Kyne Selahh, Bear form
Gender: Female
Age: 34 years
Hometown: Rosave, in western Suuna
Occupation: Scholar

Avaya works at Aurvendon Citadel, as a student of the natural world. Her studies take her across the breadth of Struhn, but hopes to find a way to get to the ancestral homelands of all life, assuming she can find someone crazy enough to escort her into the old lands.

[Caulder Melhaire]

Oh my god, day 1 is already here! And I'm trapped at work.  Well.  My brain never works properly on the first day of things, so my goal for today is: 

Edit the suggestions/feedback I got on my opening chapter so long ago into reality 

Nice and easy,  but should net me a few 500 hundred words or so, and ease me back into this world.  I've been avoiding it for so long, working on other projects here and there that it feels foreign to me in too many ways.  Time to get the toes wet!

[pelwrath]

Caulder, you're another one of those organized writers I envy. Like those profile pictures and info.

[RAVENEYE]

Omigosh, I cannot wait to see where this goes. The summary is so delicious, truly epic, like a tempest of dark chocolate.

[Caulder Melhaire]

Thanks you guys! Hopefully it pays off in the end. I'd love to actually turn out a functional draft of this thing for once and for all.

Day one finished! Got some editing done, padded out places that needed it and reminded myself what's at stake in this tale.  I'm actually excited to see what I can do for chapter one tomorrow.  And by excited I mean frantically searching for an excuse not to write it LOL

Oh yeah!  Spoilers ahead for the Joined Woman thing cause it's some worldbuilding stuff that's probably not likely to come up in the actual story without some shoehorning.  But just in case I'll spoiler tag it.

SPOILER: Click to show

The Rae are the human entities of Struhn, and there's four principle categories of them based on where they migrated to and settled: Rae of the Mountains (the Val), Rae of the Joined Lands (Sil), Rae of the Plains (Thi) and Rae of the Blacklands (Stru.)  Then you have Homun (male), Lakwe (female), and Eligemo, which would literally translate to "lesser steward." (The Elige were the beings that actually molded the lands and brought about the various forms of life, including Rae and Kyne, but that is not how the word Eligemo would be used LOL.)  Since the Elige were androgynous/genderless entities of extremely old magic, Eligemo amounts to the equivalent term for a trans or non-binary person because the Elige would have been the first such frame of reference they had when building their languages.

THEN, because the Rae have such a strong connection to their homelands, the people added a nationality tag to the identity.  It also helps because Silvaerans, due to their connection with the land, tend to be a bit more androgynous in appearance (like Rayna is) and so for a while, folks assumed that Eligemo exclusively came from Silvaera.  This was not the case, however, and so the geographic tag helps to establish that Eligemo can come from many places and have many differing presentations in spite of assumptions. It also helps differentiate that the Silvaeran mountain folks are not the same as the Mountain mountain folks.

So Rayna is Sil Lakwe, which roughly translates to Joined Woman, which then expands out to "woman who hails using customs of the Joined Lands." Someone being Val Eligemo would translate as: "non-binary person who hails using mountain customs."

Anyhoo!  Here's the excerpt of my toils from today:

Sabitha knelt, drawing Valanger down to her knees with a soft but irresistible force. The snow around them vanished, obliterated by an intense flash of energy that evaporated even the fresh flakes dropping into its influence. Valanger felt the chunks of ice lodged within the deepest knots of her fur break and fall away. She took a deep, shaky breath of the sudden stillness, aware of a crackling feeling where frost had settled into her snout. Though she expected the comforting embrace of heat, there was none. Instead she felt only the sense that here, in their tiny bubble amid the raging blizzard, the eternal fury of the Oenwall was not permitted to exist.

It had been outmatched.

“I am old, Kyne. Did you forget that?”

“So you are. And the eye that is old has watched much.” She pulled Ryckar away from Sabitha and stood. “You promise me the fate of many, but how long have you listened to their cries and done nothing?”

“I am not the one who cursed this cycle. My strength, like yours, is no longer eternal. And I do not take it upon myself to be the Sovereign of Fools in general. Only to the ones that cross my path.”

[Caulder Melhaire]

So I've decided to use the Save the Cat! plotting method, which I have never heard of until this year, not have any idea why it's called that. But what I do know is that it provides a decent pacing structure that will help me cement where to start my first (second) chapter.

I've got my resume squared away for now, and tonight is game night! So I'm gonna crank out some words for 2 hours and see where this goes. I've closed out Scrivener. I'm completely ignoring the previous bits I've written for this part, and it's the hardest damn thing, not going in there and stripping it for parts. But I need to start this from scratch if I'm ever gonna get my brain to work again. Whew.


EDIT: Okay! 422 words. This feels so weird! I've had the same parts of this story set in stone for so long that writing fresh and not caring about any of it is a bizarre feeling. Took me a minute to get past it, but I actually like this setting a lot more. I was starting Rayna's journey in a place that threw her right into the plot and so much worldbuilding without getting time to know her and her journey.

No excerpt for today as my chunk was all over the place, but it did throw me for a loop when I had to google how pigs pee.

[pelwrath]

Any progress is good writing. Keep it up, excelsior.

[RAVENEYE]

Nov 3, 2022 14:32:03 GMT -6 Caulder Melhaire said:

No excerpt for today as my chunk was all over the place, but it did throw me for a loop when I had to google how pigs pee.

 Well, that's a bit of research I never expected anyone to need. LMAO!