Warning: The following contains spoilers for Welcome to the World: Return to the World.

I’ve commented before how my protagonists tend to be less and less good as people as I’ve progressed in my writing career. There’s a line I haven’t crossed until now, but that line gets crossed in RttW. Let’s be blunt about it. One of the first things the main character does when he returns to the World is rape a young woman. The natural question is, “Why would you do this?” It’s not for any prurient interests, not for myself and not for the audience. It’s not some gimmick to draw people in. If anything, it’s going to be almost impossible for me to garner any sympathy for Pawel. It’s not a gamble you want to take with your protagonist, so why risk it? Well, let’s talk about that.

One of my inspirations was Westworld. I was intrigued by the idea of people’s moral code breaking down in an environment where they can let go of their inhibitions with little or no consequences. Also, consider the sort of cruelty players can engage in when they play video games, or even the random, thoughtless acts of cruelty in real life you see from children (or older folks who never developed a functioning superego). I wanted to explore the psychology behind this in the WttW series. The World in the WttW series summons children between the ages of 10 and 12. Mentally and physically, they are not yet fully formed, putty in the hands of whatever force guides the Game. It is quickly established that Players are a different breed, essentially demigods. It doesn’t take much for power to go to your head and bad things follow when that happens. Mix in a cruel world that gives you little choice but to fight and kill to survive with odds quite heavily stacked against you and it’s a recipe for some very broken people who will perpetuate the cycle of abuse.

At this early point in the story, I’ve only begun to hint at Pawel’s own experience and the nature of the World. I’m not excusing him in the slightest, but he is a thoroughly damaged individual whose tenuous sense of restraint didn’t hold up when presented with a convenient outlet for a variety of pent-up frustrations. If it’s any comfort to the more delicate reader, there will be log-lasting consequences for this lapse. This only scratches the surface of the ugliness of the World, but I’m not here to fetishize that ugliness. I want to dig into how characters face that ugliness, when they’re strong and when they’re weak. Will I succeed in crafting a compelling narrative in the process? We’ll see.

Anyway, I’m not the one who decides whether or not this little experiment works out. That’s for you, the reader. I may well have to have another one of these chats before things are all said and done. Stay tuned.

I didn’t do any work on the website, so I might as well talk a bit about what I did instead. You may recall that I mentioned doing some reworking of the House Wulf family tree. Of course, if I did it for one of the Eight Stars, I’d have to do it for the others, and some were a lot more effort than others. I was just kinda picking at it until I just went in full-bore and devoted a whole day’s efforts to it.

One of my dictionaries, one with encyclopedic material, included a section on the etymology of names and that was my first reference when it came to naming characters. I would go on to transcribe by hand a dedicated dictionary of names and compile numerous other sources as well. That being said, when I was first naming characters, I was only looking at the meaning of the name. I wasn’t thinking about the heritage of the character, whether the name was anachronistic or not, etc. I’ve gone through one or two passes of revisions over the years, but amid the reconstruction efforts (and my earlier campaign of proofing my manuscripts), I started thinking about these things even harder and working to amend incongruencies where I found them. While doing this, I was also painting a clearer history of the families. For instance, House Wulf was originally based in Gotland before moving to Skadia and later Titan (then to Gladius and ultimately back to Gotland). Despite the heirs of House Wulf ultimately becoming more Northman than Gotlander, they nevertheless maintain an old Germanic naming convention. Claudius is actually the first exception (which shows that Randwulf regarded his queen more than family tradition).

Anyway, it’s been a lot of work and the results are going to reverberate throughout the Gladius Cycle. Instead of making piecemeal changes here and there, I’ll just wait to fully implement the changes when it comes time to proof the manuscripts. Fun, fun, fun, but before that, I should get back to work on the site. I imagine other detours will crop up amid the slog of plugging in the remaining 1926 reviews, so I’ll be sure to comment then. Stay tuned.

I had a busy day. Not only was I implementing all those edits I’d been collecting over the week for TG, JJ1 and JJ2, but I also decided to actually make use of my word processor’s custom dictionary (a practice I fell out of because I got tired of starting the process all over again every time I had to migrate to a new machine). In this process, I caught some typos that would’ve slipped past me otherwise, not just in the three stories above but also in CeleKing1-3, EM1-3 and NagaTen. Just dealing with the Cross Arc was enough to keep me occupied for the time being, but I’ll deal with the other Arcs in the near future.

While I was doing that, I made a significant change. Well, it’s significant behind the scenes but only required one or two changes in the stories themselves. You see, back when I was writing CeleKing3, I decided that it would be simplest to use the year of adoption for the designation of Imperial weapons, i.e. the P777 was adopted in NE 777. However, CeleKing3 originally took place in NE 723. Yes, I could’ve just changed the designations of all the Imperial weapons, but instead I decided to shift the whole series one hundred years into the future. This might seem like a drastic step, but it actually made sense with the wider lore of the Cross Arc. You notice how there’s no mention of the Hybrids in the CeleKing series? Well, if I set the series after NagaTen (NE 745) and EM3 (NE 767), you can imagine a very good reason for that. Since there’s no mention of Hybrids in even later storied like JJ2 (NE 968) and TG (NE 1032), it starts to paint a bit of a picture. That being said, instead of changing a few weapon names in a couple chapters of CeleKing3, I had to go into the peripheral materials and change all the citations in the encyclopedia, timeline, genealogies, etc. Most of it was just applying a 100-year adjustment to the dates. I didn’t add any new members to the Imperial Family, though. Now the Yuanguang Emperor reigns for a whopping 167 years, but with juvenation therapy, it’s not all that wild. He dies at the age of 266, but Wuzong (who Yasuko killed in CeleKing2) was still rather peppy at 231 (though Erdi’s juvenation therapy had improved by then, so that makes a difference). Another significant change is that Princess Anmei (wife of the Yuanguang Emperor’s brother) wasn’t killed during the purge of the Sun Faction but instead in an assassination attempt on the future Emperor Wude. (She still gets posthumously honored as Empress Bian when Wude takes the throne, and it prompted me to add a whole thing where Wude’s successor Wuzheng was the son of a concubine and all the mess that led to. Fun times.)

I think I may start doing sweeps in the Space and Tellus Arcs and see what that brings up. I’ll then try to gear myself to focusing on TWH next week. Hopefully there won’t be any more head trauma cramping my style. Stay tuned.

I consider my primary goal as a writer is to entertain the reader (and myself, as I first set out to write a story I can enjoy and then hope others can share that enjoyment). That being said, I don’t want to just go the safe route and write the SFF equivalent of Hallmark movies (not that I don’t have some respect for the simple business model of delivering what the target audience wants). I do want to challenge both the reader and myself sometimes, and that leads us to the topic of today’s post. I’ve talked before about how my early novels tended to have more Boy Scout-type protagonists, but my protagonists have become more morally grey as I get older. I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly cynical sort, but no matter how sour you think you are, age has a way of souring you further and that gets reflected in the characters I write. Somewhat related to this is the idea I’ve floated before about creating an unlikeable character that the reader is nevertheless invested in. How many bad things add up to a bad person and how bad does a person have to be before it turns people away?

I bring all this up because it’s about time to debut the Welcome to the World series and I plan to be going into some dark territory. That’s not to say I haven’t gone into dark territory before, but there are lines I haven’t crossed with my protagonists that are going to get crossed here. I’ve had my doubts about going forward as planned, but I want to experiment with the audience’s tolerance for a character’s moral failings. Will the character’s good be only seen as hypocrisy or is it part of a more rounded and nuanced individual? Ultimately, this isn’t something I’ll decide but rather the audience. It may be rejected, but I’ve decided to give it a shot and see what happens.

I’ve drawn some inspiration from Westworld (Season 1, at least) for WttW in that there’s an environment where there’s a power imbalance that encourages people to indulge in their lesser nature. People succumb to temptation with varying degrees of enthusiasm and I want to see how they deal with their own internal moral conflict and how that either resonates or clashes with the moral core of the reader. As a creator, I’m dancing in a minefield of my own making. Here’s to it yielding a better result than just me getting gibbed.

There’s definitely going to be a followup post when the aforementioned line gets crossed, so we can have a chat then. Until that time, though, stay tuned.

The primary religion in the World centers around the worship of a pantheon known as the Twelve. The Twelve consist of six gods and six goddesses considered by some to be distinct individuals and by others as different manifestations of a single godhead. While it’s possible to worship the Twelve as a whole or certain combinations therein, devotion is typically focused on a single member. This is mostly due to the fact that Players must choose a single god to act as their Patron. This is less relevant for People of the World, but they also tend to focus on a single god as a matter of convention.

While the Twelve are associated with numerous aspects of Nature and society (often overlapping with others), I’m just going to list them with their primary attributes here and may do more extensive coverage in the future.

1. Luxion, the God of Light
2. Nyxia, the Goddess of Darkness
3. Manaan, the Goddess of Life
4. Tantalion, the God of Death
5. Parthena, the Goddess of Order
6. Kontos, the God of Chaos
7. Pyrion, the God of Fire
8. Maara, the Goddess of Water
9. Thoros, the God of Wind
10. Genaan, the Goddess of Earth
11. Denaan, the Goddess of Wood
12. Zoltan, the God of Metal

Obviously, the way Players view the Twelve and the way the People of the World view them are different. For Players, the benefits of a Patron are more tangible. A Patron determines the type of magic a Player can use and conveys Blessings that influence things like weapon proficiency, resistances, and more. Now, it is possible for Players decline to have a Patron, but there are few benefits to this other than avoiding the weaknesses of any single alignment.

The center of worship is the Great Temple in Axios. This is where Players are first summoned. There is a separate chapel for the Faithful of each of the Twelve. Because People of the World do not have access to magic or Blessings, Players comprise the whole of the clergy and are supported by dedicated layfolk among the People of the World called tertiaries. Each Cult is headed by a Pontifex supported by an Archbishop for each domain (two for Axios) and any number of Bishops (which is not restricted to the Job class of Bishop but includes all Tier 3 Clerics). Simply having the Job of Cleric doesn’t automatically make a player recognized clergy of a particular Cult. They must complete a term of Temple Service in order to be eligible to wear the official vestment and must maintain good standing with the Cult to retain that privilege (and wearing vestments without the Cult’s recognition can result in prosecution for the crime of impersonation).

Different days of the week are assigned as sabbaths to each of the Twelve. Furthermore, there are weekly cycles for each season, excluding the weeks of the solstices and equinoxes, which have their own celebrations. Beyond that, there are monthly and yearly cycles (akin to the Western and Chinese zodiacs respectively), and whenever these align, it marks times seen as especially holy. Other observations commemorating saints and martyrs and such have varying degrees of observation depending on your location.

Outside the worship of the Twelve, traces of animism and other folk religions can be found among the smallfolk, as well as ersatz versions of various Earth religions, particularly a pseudo-Buddhism observed in parts of the Hidden Trials of Murakumo and Shangri-La. In many cases, there is a syncretistic blending of these other belief systems and the worship of the Twelve.

As a brief overview, this should suffice for now. I may do expanded commentary on particular aspects of religious observation in the World at a later date. Stay tuned.

Since I’m going to be kicking off the Welcome to the World series in the next couple weeks, I thought I might go ahead and give you a quick overview of what the World is and how it works before we get started. If you’d rather let the World reveal itself over the course of the story, you can ignore this post. Anyway, without further ado…

Whereas the Planet in the Tellus Arc is a parallel world to our Earth with the same overall dimensions, the World of WttW is a little more abstract. Rather than a sphere, it’s a helix, starting with the Royal Capital of Axios in Upper Midgard (what one might term “the Zeroeth Trial”) and terminating in the Womb of the World, the site of the Twenty-first Trial. The World is divided into twenty-one zones known as the Trials, with an additional four Hidden Trials that branch off the Golden Path running from one end of the World to the other. The Trials vary in size but are limited and bound by invisible walls known as the Barrier. There is one way in and one way out of each Trial (excepting the ones that branch off into a Hidden Trial). The Exit Gate can only be activated after defeating the Trial Master, the boss monster of each Trial. Because each Trial is not connected by ordinary geography, you could face wildly different biomes going from one Trial to the next. The further you descend, the stronger the monsters are, and as a general principle, if you’re strong enough to beat one Trial Master, you will be just strong enough to survive in the next Trial.

There are two kinds of humans in the World: the Summoned (Players) and People of the World (NPCs). The People of the World are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the World, while the Summoned are brought into the World from Earth to participate in the Game. The goal of the Game is to complete the Trials and defeat the final Trial Master, the God-Dragon Ur-Tiamat, who is said to be the root of all evil in the world. The Summoned have greater potential than the People of the World (in numerical terms, the People of the World are level-capped at 40 while the Summoned are level-capped at 80) and are therefore the only ones with any chance of winning the Game. One way the World ensures the division between between the Summoned and the People of the World is that the two cannot interbreed. Another is that it is very difficult for the Summoned to survive without adventuring, but adventuring also has a high mortality rate (with a single annual cohort typically being reduced by half in the first year alone). Players are able to have children with each other, but a small portion even survive long enough to reach child-bearing age, much less find the stability to raise children, then Second-Generation Players have challenges of their own, such as a high risk of being orphaned and being pushed into adventuring too early with fatal results. Second-Generation Players are valued because they inherit some of their parents’ abilities, which gives them an advantage over the newly Summoned, though overconfidence in this potential often leads to the aforementioned fatal results.

Tied to the goal of winning the Game is the concept of the Brave. It is believed that the Brave is the only Player capable of reaching Level 99 and therefore most likely to stand a chance against Ur-Tiamat, who is also said to be Level 99. What’s more, it is believed that the Brave will possess the Blessings of all of the Twelve Gods of the World. You see, each Summoned chooses a Patron among the Twelves and receives Blessings as a reward for their faith. These Blessings can be inherited from parents to children, so in theory, a child with all twelve Blessings could be achieved by the fifth generation, but efforts to orchestrate a breeding program have failed to yield fruit, as it were.

I’ll stop here as I could keep on going for a good long while if I let myself. I’m thinking of doing little featurettes on different aspects of the World and the game system as we go, breaking things up into digestible chunks (though I may actually publish the full game guide on the site at a later date). I don’t know if we’ll have one of those featurettes next week or if we’ll do something else. Stay tuned.

The fact that I didn’t commit to writing the Chronicles of the Æther War series before starting on the Post-Apocalyptic and Fifth Empire Cycles takes away a bit of the mystery of the Æther War. Now when I do start on that series, it will come off more like a prequel to all these books I’ve already finished rather than the base from which everything else springs from. Anyway, given the plots of Everyday Magic 3 and Nagareboshi Tennyo, it seems like a good time to provide a somewhat comprehensive overview of the singular figure who is so pivotal to all the goings-on in the New Earth Empire from the immediate pre-Æther War era and beyond. The short “Say Hello to Mother” provides a primer for all this. Although I’m not going to reveal her true identity just yet, the entity known as Tara Ma is the source of all magic (which the Empire would call ‘Arcana’ to make it sound slightly more respectable). Tara Ma emits a unique energy that was dubbed “æther”, originally meant to be a placeholder label that ultimately stuck. This æther was later subdivided into three different types based on its effects. Alpha-type æther (also known as “neutral æther”) is the basic medium by which the Arcana operates. Much as light through a prism, it can be filtered into different elemental types, not only the classic four elements of Greek and Buddhist thought but others as well, which often results in the “element” label being dropped in favor of the more all-encompassing term “aspect”. Beta-type æther (“living æther”) acts as both a catalyst and something of a preservative for biological processes, which proves useful not only for terraforming but also as a method of juvenation and life extension therapy. Gamma-type æther (“transforming æther”) affects change in living organism, which produces the “Others” (think fantasy creatures and whatnot) which are better optimized to process æther. One key aspect of æther is that it can only be generated and processed by organic matter, specifically living organisms, though some inorganic matter can serve as conduits and receptacles of æther energy.

Tara Ma’s æther emissions only had an effective range of about 25,000km, which meant that access to the Arcana was limited to close proximity to Tara Ma. The objective was then to expand this range. Attempts were made to artificially generate æther to no effect, so attention then turned to duplicating Tara Ma herself. Although there were some experiments with breeding Tara Ma, the more effective strategy was mass cloning. They could not match the output of the original, but they were not subject to the same temperamental fluctuations in power either. These clones became the core of the Æther Drives that were used not only to power warships, starbases and the like but also to serve as the Core Units of offworld colonies, dramatically accelerating the process of terraforming worlds. How dramatically? Think along the lines of the Genesis Device in Star Trek. A process that would normally take over a hundred years could be completed in under a decade. This was a massive boon to the Empire’s expansion as it jockeyed with the Martian Alliance and the Jovian Federation for supremacy in the galaxy.

The Skyfall Calamity brought an end to the Empire’s Æther Drive-fueled dominance. Tara Ma fully broke free of her induced state of dormancy and summoned her far-flung “daughters” throughout the Empire to her. Planetary Core Units could not answer the call to Reunion and they along with any other Æther Drives that were prevented from returning to Tara Ma were put to sleep by Tara Ma herself. This devastated worlds reliant on the Core Units with events such as the Cataclysm on Altamira, the Days of Fire and Forgetting on Bellator and so on. These disasters manifested themselves in different ways, showing signs of variance among the different Core Units. The Core Units that went dormant largely continued to passively maintain the ecosystems they helped create and emit æther. Vague memories of them would persist in various myths, such as the Maid of Life of Miravel and the extinct cult of the Earth Mother on Bellator.

While hundreds of Lost Worlds were dealing with the collapse of civilization, the Empire collapsed into in-fighting as various factions vied to claim the throne. Once the situation stabilized and the Empire was in a position to reassert itself, work was already well underway to salvage the Æther Drive concept while reducing the risk of another incident like the Skyfall Calamity. The basis for the Hybrids featured in such stories as NagaTen and EM3 are the Alpha Type, a modified version of the Generation 1 clones of Tara Ma with some genetic modifications to reduce receptivity to Tara Ma herself with minimal interference to æther emissions, though they are not intended for active deployment but rather as a source for genetic material to produce other Hybrids to complement the limited stock of available tissue samples from Tara Ma herself. The Beta Type only has 50% of the genetic material of Tara Ma and an equivalent potential relative to the Alpha Type. Because of the perceived danger they represent, they are typically kept under containment and are only used as relays in the “Æthernet” that connects all Hybrids and allows for superdimensional communication. The Gamma Type has a 25% portion of Tara Ma genetic material and is often the “big gun” of deployed Hybrids, as seen with Major Yang in NagaTen. The Delta Types, at 12.5%, are the most powerful Hybrids typically deployed, while the Epsilon Types at 6.25% are seen as more of the standard-issue Hybrid. While a Zeta Type (3.125%) classification exists, they do not typically have much advantage over mid-level Arcanists and are not generally produced (though their reliable manifestation of Arcana potential makes the concept serve as a sort of emergency resolve should doctrine shift to favor mass deployment of Arcanists). At the level of the Eta Type (1.5625%), the manifestation of Arcana potential becomes uncertain, as does the ability to connect to the “Æthernet”, so experiments at further dilution of Tara Ma’s genetic material were abandoned.

While the above represents the mainline development of Tara Ma Hybrids, there are many other types of experimentation, which you will see in such stories as Candidate 03 and Seasons’ Seasons. Among the objectives of these various projects are increased output, greater stability, and risk reduction. Results are varied, but none of these projects have seen the same widespread adoption as the mainline Hybrids. Of course, issues with the Hybrids in the mid-8th Century, as demonstrated in NagaTen and EM3, would at least temporarily put an end to the activities of the Hybrids as we know them. Action yields reaction and the risk of a second Skyfall Calamity sufficiently spooks the higher ups. The lure of Tara Ma’s power is too great to abandon, so we don’t see a total purge, but the Hybrids do find themselves put on ice for a good long while.

I could delve deeper into the details, but I think this is more than enough for one post. I may cover certain points in greater detail later if the mood strikes me. For now, we’ll leave things here and let the rest of EM3 and NagaTen play out. Stay tuned.

Addendum:

If you were wondering if the æther produced by Tara Ma functions differently from æther as described in the Tellus Arc, the answer is no. It’s no coincidence either as the Cross Arc is so named because it was intended as a cross of elements from the Tellus Arc and the Space Arc. What I’ve talked about here actually spoils some elements of stories I haven’t brought into production yet, but you won’t have the full context until those stories are released (unless I decide to just go ahead and talk about it here on the blog prior to their release). You might be wondering if it’s too convenient that the æther label just happens to refer to the same thing, but that isn’t the case. The same thought process is at work even if the people involved are separated by thousands of years. Admittedly, the Imperial scientists who initially used the “æther” label were doing so out of a bit of poetic whimsy, but tapping into the stuff of myths works out when those myths become reality.

Sturla gets his origin in the same dream that served at the basis for Chapter 1 of CeleKing2. It gave me his basic settings as a superficial charmer and clever manipulator whose overwhelming confidence was backed by genuine skill. For his appearance, I draw inspiration from Prince Zorzal of the anime GATE, but the resemblance ends there. Now, I can’t remember if it was a sleeping dream or a daydream that gave me Yasuko’s confrontation with Sturla at the end of CeleKing2, but this gave me a midpoint in the overall narrative and so I had to fill in the blanks.

Let’s start with his personal history. He’s the son of Lord Grima Markusson and Princess Yingli, the elder sister of Crown Prince Wupeng. As his mother has a higher status than his father, he uses her name, though she wasn’t much of an influence on his life. While his father was an effective politician, it’s not enough to explain how Sturla turned out the way he did. He had looks, physical prowess, a keen intellect, and the utter ruthlessness to achieve his goals. It was at a young age that he set his sights on the throne and began laying the groundwork right away. He began making contacts both in the public sphere and in the underworld, which served him well when he worked his way into the ranks of the Capital Police. His position in the Capital Police afforded him full access to the apparatus of the surveillance state, which allowed him to not only cover his own tracks but also to build up plenty of blackmail material to wrap the nobility around his little finger. Everything was coming together nicely when a convenient pawn presented herself. Yasuko’s infiltration of the Capital provided him an opportunity to move his timetable forward. Although she proved to be difficult to handle, she did ultimately pave his way to the throne. From there, he was going to smash the Empire’s stasis, subdue the surface and then expand beyond Erdi. Of course, the stasis existed because the founders of the Empire were trying to escape the notice of the New Earth Empire and keep both the Celestials and Infernals occupied, so if the New Earth Empire hadn’t shown up when it did, it would’ve just been a matter of time.

I brought up the themes of sexuality during my coverage of Yasuko and Sturla factored heavily into that. With Sturla I was looking to portray animal magnetism and unrestrained hedonism. He cares only about satisfying his own lusts but he doesn’t let them rule over him. He denies himself no pleasure except when it will interfere with the greater pleasure of fulfilling his ambitions. This mix of indulgence and self-control makes for an intriguing dichotomy. As we primarily see this in his relationship with Yasuko, we’ll talk more about it there.

Let’s look at a few of the major relationships in Sturla’s life and what they show us about his character.

1. We see the most of Sturla through his interactions with Yasuko. From the moment she infiltrated the Capital, she caught his interest. A wild Infernal in the Capital certainly would. He kept a close eye on her, so that when she was invited to entertain the Emperor, he was prepared to respond when she killed him. Likely even if she hadn’t done the job herself, he would’ve stepped in and things would proceed much the same way, though he probably wouldn’t have had as much confidence to turn her into an assassin. Anyway, the more he got to know Yasuko, the more he became fixated on her. Her resistance to his will, her relative prudishness when it came to sex, these drew him to her all the more strongly. He wanted to break her, make her yield to him, though if she actually had given into him, he would have quickly tired of her. His decision to cut her loose after the assassination of Prince Wusheng was an example of him denying smaller pleasures for the sake of his ambition. However, once he found out Yasuko managed to survive, his obsession with her became all the stronger, likely tying into his downfall. My father always warns villains not to play with their food, and this is another example of why he says that.

2. Compared to her daughter, Masako didn’t nearly manage to capture Sturla’s interest. Theirs was a wholly political arrangement. Sturla, like Masako, was the child of an Imperial princess married to a lord of minority descent and so was in a poor position for his ambitions. Marrying into a comital house wouldn’t normally be the most advantageous pairing, but House Suzuki enjoyed residual prestige carrying over from Lord Kunihiko, and the connection to Princess Feifang was also beneficial. Once Masako delivered a legitimate heir for him, she had served her purpose. He only did a little experimentation with exploring her boundaries but did not find much promise, so he didn’t make her a project like he was doing with Yasuko. As a result, their relationship is distant and impersonal, like so many political marriages. Perhaps if he didn’t have so many alternative outlets, Masako would have had to put up with more from him, so his inattentiveness after Snorri’s birth was surely a blessing.

3. Sturla was always looking to test his boundaries in all fronts, and on the martial front, who better than one of the most celebrated swordsmen of the Imperial Guard? That would be enough, but the fact that Batista is the first husband of his wife, it brings out the sadistic side of him. Sturla knew he could use Batista’s pride and jealousy against him, but to Batista’s credit, his commitment to his duty reined him in. The fact that Sturla was busy at work corrupting Batista’s daughter added to the interest he took in the swordmaster. You might think the honors Sturla heaped on Batista were insincere, but there was genuine respect there, even if Batista was seen as a pawn, just as Sturla saw everyone around him. Still, that sadistic side of Sturla was definitely at work when he pitted Batista against Yasuko, so it was fitting that it got turned against him in the end.

I’ve said on other occasions that I enjoy writing villains and Sturla was definitely fun to write, especially when he was bantering with Yasuko. I almost wish I could’ve seen what might’ve happened if he had a little more time to pursue his grander ambitions. I consider him one of my more stand-out villains and I hope the readers agree. And with that, I don’t know who I’ll cover next, but I may do a different kind of commentary post next time instead of a Character Spotlight. Stay tuned.

Today we’ll be looking at Lady Masako, the third member of our less than happy little family from the CeleKing series. Masako’s origins lie with the original concept that would be fleshed out to form the basis of Erdi society. You have Celestials above and Infernals below, but then a Celestial is cast down. What then? I was starting to develop the idea of the Imperial court and its intrigues, which made for an easy setup. We take a militarily accomplished and politically influential nobleman (married to an Imperial princess, no less) from a hated minority group and the plot practically writes itself. From his limited screentime, we see Masako’s father Lord Kunihiko as a reserved sort of parent who only grants his daughter an indulgence like a portion of his beloved bonsai garden as a reward for having proven herself discerning enough to be a worthy steward of it, not as a free gift. Unfortunately, the story didn’t lend itself to featuring Masako’s mother, Princess Feifang, but you can get some idea of the sort of parent she was based on how Masako herself acts as a mother in Volumes 2 and 3. Masako was raised to be stoic and duty-bound, but due to her age and circumstances in Volume 1, we see more of a different side of her. She is very much a sheltered 17-year-old girl who is ill-equipped for the situation she finds herself in. Her pride is her shield, but that shield isn’t enough to protect her. For much of Volume 1, there is very little she can do but rely on Batista, but we she her start to rise to the challenge as Batista finds himself unable to shoulder all of the load by himself. The experience changes her, of course. She learns a little humility and gains a bit of grit as she spends time among the people she never paid a second thought to in her years at the Capital and Liuyiyuan. Then there’s the matter of the love that blooms between her and Batista, which shapes her fate for good and for ill in the years to follow. Let’s look at a few of the most significant relationships in her life and how they affect her.

1. From the start, Batista had a knock for drawing out conflicting emotions in Masako. She was of course grateful to him for saving her and dependent on him for protecting her afterward, but a rough man like him who pays little heed for rank flew in the face of all her social conditioning. Because she couldn’t play the role of the spoiled, pampered princess around him, she had to toughen up sooner than she would have otherwise. Their initially belligerent relationship giving way to romance is pretty common, but in light of how she would act later in life makes it a bit ironic that she was willing to forsake her duty and responsibilities to be with him. As you know, they eventually came to the compromise of him becoming her knight, allowing for a less disadvantageous marriage, yet one that still would have led to the extinction of the main line of House Suzuki as far as the norms of the court were concerned. The birth of Yasuko brought them closer still, but it was after the assassination attempt that drove Batista to place Yasuko in the care of Tío Jorge that their relationship broke. It could not be help as Batista was reassigned to the Expeditionary Forces and both of their efforts to remain in touch with each other were blocked. Physical separation led to emotional separation and even when Batista was allowed to return to the Capital, they had precious few opportunities to reconnect. Had they been allowed more than a handful of meetings, they might have managed something, but Batista’s jealousy over her marriage to Prince Sturla and longstanding arguments would have made it difficult. In the end, though, he was the man she loved first and best, so his loss hit her the hardest.

2. Next up is Yasuko. It might have been interesting to have seen a few episodes of Masako as a mother to Yasuko when she was younger. I see Masako as having been more of a doting mother than her own mother was, not being so cold and distant as you see when mother and daughter are reunited. It was actually a fine bit of acting on Masako’s part, but suppressing the emotions welling up inside of her was hard on her. She had to fall back on the example of her own mother for Yasuko’s protection. Although she did not have a complete grasp on Yasuko’s plot against the Celestials, she knew that it was imperative for her to mask Yasuko’s Infernal side and get her integrated into Celestial society as soon as possible. Things moved too quickly after that for her to ever get close to her daughter, though you do have the one episode in Volume 2 after Yasuko’s fight with Hongxia, which is the one scene of intimacy they were granted. While Masako wanted Yasuko to be happy, she wanted her to be safe first, and if that meant sacrificing a close relationship with her daughter, it was a price she was willing to pay. Now, it was bad enough that Masako thought she lost her daughter once, but the second time nearly did her in, hence her somewhat desperate ploy to impregnate herself with a clone of Yasuko, knowing that it wouldn’t be the same person. It was her clumsy way of trying to do it right the second time. Then you have Yasuko come back from the dead as a traitor to all Erdi with the blood of not only Sturla but also Batista on her hands. While Yasuko dismissed any possibility of mending the relationship with her mother after what she had done, she was selling her mother short. Masako wouldn’t easily overcome the gulf that had opened up between them, but I believe she would have tried. However, since Yasuko went off on her own, Masako made the painful decision to stay away, thinking she was respecting Yasuko’s wishes. Ultimately, it was a case of mother and daughter thinking on similar terms, that one wouldn’t forgive the other and so neither one tried to patch things up. It’s a shame, but Yasuko rejected the possibility of any healthy relationships, considering herself unworthy of them, and Masako couldn’t muster the force of will to drag her back kicking and screaming if she had to to show her otherwise.

3. Prince Sturla came along at a time when Masako was at her most vulnerable since the death of her father. Although she didn’t flaunt her marriage to an Infernal, it was widely known and normally no one of Sturla’s standing would consider such a match, but once he made it clear that his offer of marriage was genuine, she made what she thought was the best move for herself and her family. Her original idea in marrying Sturla was that it would give her the security to call Yasuko back from the surface, but by that time, Tío Jorge had been killed and Yasuko had begun her wanderings. If you look at how Sturla treated Yasuko, you might think Masako went through something similar, but that wasn’t really the case. We’ll be covering his perspective on their marriage later, but after an initial phase of testing the waters a bit, Sturla became a rather distant husband. Theirs was a political marriage, so Masako wasn’t expecting much more than that. As she intimated to Yasuko, she found him charming and physically attractive yet emotionally unfulfilling. However, she was raised to regard marriage as a duty, so it only took her a little time to adjust her mindset away from the aberration that was her marriage to Batista. She knew Sturla was using her for his own ends, so she did so in turn, focusing her attention on raising their son to meet his potential.

4. Speaking of Masako and Sturla’s son, Snorri was doted on even more than Yasuko when she was young. Part of it is the “little emperor syndrome” and part of it was Masako overcompensating for the loss of Batista and Yasuko and the emotional distance between her and Sturla. Fortunately, Snorri was quite unlike his father in terms of personality and wasn’t on track to become a little Joffrey Baratheon, though you could easily see him going down that route. He’s a case of being spoiled sweet instead of spoiled rotten. As you might imagine, he became quite the mama’s boy as a result. Masako rightly feared him being corrupted by his father, but it was a small mercy on Sturla’s part that he allowed Masako the time to spoil their child and Snorri the time to be spoiled until he was to be shaped into Sturla’s proper heir. We may visit this in a later story, but Snorri would grow up devoted to Masako and supporting her amid her bereavement and the challenges of adjusting to the new authority in the Empire. He actually becomes a doctor, and him turning out as such a decent person is almost entirely due to Masako’s influence. Even more so after the fall of their Empire, Masako focuses on not making the same mistakes with Snorri that she made with Yasuko and the two of them enjoy a much healthier relationship for it. Being freed of the expectations of becoming the next Emperor removes a massive load from both their shoulders and gives her the opportunity to be just a mother.

Since I’ve given you a peek into Snorri’s future, I’ll tell you a bit about what happens to Masako as well. Of course she has to renounce her title as Empress and Countess of House Suzuki when the New Earth Empire takes control of Erdi, but she does manage to secure a place in the transitional authority, which secures a role for her in planetary politics. Much as she had done at other points in her life, she takes the option she sees as best for her family, and indeed her cooperation is what keeps herself, Snorri and Eiko (the clone of Yasuko she gives birth to after the events of CeleKing3) from being purged as threats to the new order. It’s ironic that Yasuko allows herself to be reviled by her fellow paisanos for collaborating with the Empire when she rejected the benefits of doing so, while Masako, for all her pride, takes what she can get, but Masako’s pragmatism is one thing her daughter never inherited. Think what you will of her, but Masako always seeks to play the field to her advantage, which is what you had to do to survive in Celestial society. As much of a survivor as Yasuko was, her own pride consistently made her life more difficult for her. Sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree.

Anyway, that will do it for our look at Masako. Next time, we’ll be turning our attention to Prince Sturla. Stay tuned.

Yasuko got her start in a dream, what would become Chapter 1 of CeleKing2. I had this clear image of this young woman’s daring infiltration of an orbital facility via space elevator (which I had mistakenly identified as a skyhook before further research revealed the difference). I knew she was there for revenge, but the why and how had to be developed later. I believe I developed the trigger for her revenge plot before I had considered establishing Tío Jorge’s role in CeleKing1. The dream had identified her as the daughter of a common-born Imperial Guard (Batista) and a noblewoman (Masako), so when came to explaining why she was down on the service, being put in the care of her father’s extended family seemed like a natural choice. From there, abuse by the ruling Celestials leading to the death of one or both adoptive parents made for an easy justification for revenge. In other words, it didn’t take much effort to sort out the pieces provided to me by my subconscious, so with that out of the way, let’s review the character by the numbers.

Yasuko’s name (寧子) is in honor of Lord Ninghe, who helped Batista and Masako in CeleKing1. (You see the same characters read as “Neko” for the lead female in Brynhildr in the Darkness, but for those of you who are unaware, there are multiple readings for characters in personal names.) The child of a Celestial and an Infernal, she was in an awkward position from birth, ineligible to succeed her mother as head of House Suzuki barring a special dispensation from the Emperor. Although Batista had been knighted when he was inducted into the Imperial Guard, the fact that he was an Infernal would have haunted Yasuko had she been raised in the Capital. In a way, the assassination attempt that resulted her being put in Tío Jorge and Tía Nayeli’s care was ultimately to her benefit. It didn’t last long, but the time she had with Tío Jorge and Tía Nayeli was probably the best of her life. Even after Tía Nayeli died of tuberculosis, Tío Jorge did a pretty good job of taking care of her until he was killed. Now, the choice between being despised in the Capital and the hard-scrabble life she lived after Tío Jorge’s death is less clear. At very least, the experience toughened her up, both mentally and physically, which would prove essential to her survival, but it also fed her more self-destructive tendencies. For six years she did whatever it took to survive, relying on the kindness of strangers when she could but never setting down roots or making any real attachments. She studied ways to fight, learned what she could in various fields to help her put her plan for revenge into action. However, Yasuko is more of a tactical thinker than a strategic one. She can be rather clever in the pursuit of short-term goals yet blind when it comes to seeing the bigger picture. You see this in her occasional reflective moments when she thinks about how she never clearly sorted out the details of how she intended to exact her revenge and to what extent. This gets exploited by Sturla, who uses her impulsiveness to bring her under his power. Though she isn’t without moral sense, it’s been warped by her experiences and her lust for revenge. I can imagine she garners little sympathy with some readers because of this, but that’s partially by design. She is at least fairly self-aware of her shortcomings, not that the sting of her conscience is enough to stop her in most cases.

One point which may be controversial is how much Yasuko’s sexuality factors into her character. She definitely stands out compared to pretty much any other character of mine in that regard. Her age puts her at a stage of development where she isn’t fully matured mentally or physically, which opens up a lot of confusion that is exacerbated by Sturla and how he uses her. The perversity of Celestial society heightens this further. Because of her single-mindedness, Yasuko never really worked to sort out the issues related to establishing her sexual identity, shunning intimacy in all forms in favor of pursuing her goals. This left her extremely vulnerable to someone like Sturla, who uses sex as one of his many weapons. To this end, there are four particular relationships that highlight Yasuko’s struggles.

1. Prince Sturla is bundle of physical and psychological abuse, but as much as he’s basically everything Yasuko hates about the Celestials, she can’t deny her attraction to him. I wanted to explore the concept of physical attraction in spite of whatever a person might think rationally. Of course Yasuko had to deal with the occasional would-be predator during her years on the streets, but she had never been the focus of such concentrated attention in such an (unwantedly) appealing package. The fact that he can so thoroughly dominate her physically adds to that paradoxical appeal. There is an unconscious part of her that seeks submission, which is sharply at odds with her fiercely independent and rebellious personality. A part of her knows this and it only adds to her anger. Now, if you think this undermines Yasuko’s strength as a character, that’s your call, but we have a number of impulses and unconscious drives and what matters most is how we consciously deal with them. In the end, it isn’t the unconscious impulses but the conscious will that drives her to her final confrontation with Sturla. Even though she needed her father’s help to overcome Sturla physically, I would say that she had already won the psychological battle with him. Do with that what you will.

2. Hongxia is in some ways an extension of Sturla’s abuse, but her rivalry with Yasuko puts her in her own category. Compared to the inexperienced and uncertain Yasuko, Hongxia is fully couched in her sexuality and its use as a weapon. She has the task of instructing Yasuko in the tools of her trade, but there isn’t the slightest trace of an amiable master-apprentice relationship. Yasuko’s unwillingness to do what’s demanded of her, her defiance, and Sturla’s interest in her all fuel Hongxia’s anger and jealousy. Yasuko’s prudishness is seen as a slap in the face to the courtesan’s open sexuality and her refusal to submit is an affront to her supposed position of authority over her. As Hongxia takes special pride in being one of the few partners able to keep pace with Sturla in the bedroom, the last thing she wants to do is train up a potential replacement. With such a twisted knot of a relationship, it’s little wonder how messily it ended. (Certainly there’s plenty that can be read into their fight.)

3. Yoon-hee is a more positive example but still tainted by the corruption around Yasuko. As noted before, Yasuko eschewed all forms of intimacy during her years of wandering, so the closeness afforded by a personal attendant was something quite alien to Yasuko. The one time Yasuko put the moves on her was more about her finding an unhealthy outlet for her frustrations than anything else. I’ll leave it to the audience to debate whether Yoon-hee is evidence of Yasuko being bisexual, bicurious, or simply in a romantic friendship. The waters are deliberately left muddy. Of course, whatever Yasuko’s feelings, the power imbalance casts a bit of a shadow over the relationship. Yoon-hee is thoroughly conditioned for obedience, so even what she would claim to be her own feelings may not accord with her heart of hearts. Of course, we don’t get to explore the possibilities further as Yasuko sends Yoon-hee away for her safety. How might things have developed otherwise? Who knows?

4. Lowen and Yasuko don’t spend all that much time together, but they represent a common pattern of attraction forming amid traumatic circumstances. Lowen was the closest to Yasuko in age among the survivors of his crew and he had the most interaction with her and the closest. The feelings were mutual and we saw how far Yasuko was prepared to go had Sigma no intervened. However, even if they would have had sex with each other, it wouldn’t have changed the final disposition of their relationship. The materials were there for something to be built, but Yasuko’s personality simply won’t let other people get close for long. This was exacerbated by the circumstances at the end of CeleKing3, having been responsible for the death of her father and the betrayal of her mother. Having lost the most fundamental relationships a person has, of course she would reject any others, particularly when she’d already spent a large chunk of her life pushing others away. Now, in another universe, it’s possible that Lowen might have had a stabilizing affect on her and maybe she could have had a more well-adjusted life, but that isn’t the universe we got.

With all her internal contradictions and conflicts, Yasuko proved to be an interesting character to write. She’s not the first character of mine to be primarily motivated by revenge, but her path was probably the most overrun with brambles and thorns. I know it’s a common moral that revenge does more to harm the avenger than the object of vengeance, but definitely in Yasuko’s case, her pursuit of revenge cost far more than she gained. Things didn’t work out so well for her, but are the paisanos she allegedly fought for better off on account of her efforts? Many of them think otherwise, as seen by the epilogue of CeleKing3, but if I had to wager, I’d say the people of Erdi got a better deal. Maybe not by much depending on who’s in charge at the time, but people have all sorts of opinions about such things.

Now that we’re done with Yasuko for now, I think I’ll go ahead with the idea I floated before to feature Masako and Sturla next. Stay tuned.