Flames of Nevyana
by Edward Willett
Publication Date: Aug 1, 2016
Publisher: Rebelight Publishing
Publication Date: Aug 1, 2016
Publisher: Rebelight Publishing
Blue Fire is both blessing and curse. A gift from the gods, its mystical light and energy powers and protects the land of Nevyana, but it also divides her people into three distinct groups. In the wrong hands, it becomes a formidable weapon. When sacred objects for channelling Blue Fire are stolen, sworn enemies Petra, Amlinn, and Jin set out to find them, and their paths converge on a collision course with the truth. Can they bridge the centuries-old divide between their communities? Or will their search for the truth and the explosive power of Blue Fire signal the end of Nevyana?
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Excerpt
The night dripped, and Petra dripped with it.
For the fourteenth time, he passed the courtyard gate where the guard had discovered the girl beneath the cabbages. For the fourteenth time, he met Cort marching in the opposite direction. For the fourteenth time, Cort’s pace quickened. He didn’t look at Petra. Petra looked at him, but somehow the water soaking his friend still failed to burst into steam. Then the night swallowed Cort again and Petra continue his endless, useless march around the Temple, “guarding” it against entirely hypothetical intruders who would promptly be fried by the Fire Curtain anyway if they were stupid enough to try to get past it. In that case, his and Cort’s entire function would be to call for Priests to cart away the charred bodies. Smaller victims they had to deal with themselves. He’d already picked up three cooked birds and a crispy rat, tossing them into the bins located at each corner of the compound for disposal in the morning. “They take them straight to the cooks,” the Priest-Apprentices joked.
At least, Petra hoped they were joking.
If he were to touch it, the Curtain would turn him into a crispy version of himself too, so he gave it a wide berth. It glowed on his right, a translucent wall of faint blue light, hissing and steaming in the rain. Every twenty feet within its ghostly glimmer stood a thick square post of black wood. On the side facing the Temple, each post bore a magical sigil, a complex symbol cut into the wood and filled with gold. From each end of a crosspiece atop each post hung a Sparkglobe, a glass sphere containing a bright tongue of Blue Fire. Supposedly the Sparkglobes lit his path around the Temple. In practice, especially in the rain, each illuminated only a small circle of ground, making the shadowed spaces between the posts appear even darker.
Occasionally, the gloom was lit by distant lightning-like flashes of blue from atop the dark bulk of the Temple. All around City Primaxis, magical Hearths took in that Blue Fire and turned it into the light and heat Petra was currently in such desperately short supply of.
As he and Cort passed each other at the gate, the rain redoubled its efforts to drown them. Even through the tin-roof patter of the drops on his steel helmet, Petra heard the Curtain hiss like a giant teakettle. Vast clouds of blue-tinged steam rose from it into the night.
The icy water poured over Petra’s helmet and down his neck. Useless and sodden, his blue woolen cloak hung heavy as lead from his mail-clad shoulders. His boots squelched with every step. His damp leather trousers chafed his thighs. He couldn’t even feel his fingers: they’d gone numb inside his soaked gloves eleven circuits ago.
They’d be nice and toasty wrapped around Cort’s neck, he thought. The fact that Cort was equally cold, wet, and miserable made his punishment a little easier to bear. Warming his fingers with a good long squeeze of his friend’s throat would have made it a lot easier to bear. But the Priests would make him do something even worse than this as punishment for murdering Cort, although he suspected they’d have a great deal of sympathy if he resorted to violence.
They all knew Cort too, after all.
He swiped his sodden arm across his runny nose as he rounded the bin into which he’d earlier tossed the burnt rat, and he started down the backside of the Temple for the fourteenth time.
He stopped.
Perhaps a hundred feet away, a patch of darkness interrupted the double line of Sparkglobes and the steaming blue wall of the Curtain.
Guest Post-The World of Flames of Nevyana
The world of Flames of Nevyana began with a simple kernel of an idea: the magic of electricity.
I was driving from my home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, to Meadow Lake (about 500 kilometres north) for a library reading/presentation, and passing the time by trying to come up with a new YA novel idea. I got to musing on what is known in science fiction circles as Clarke’s Law: Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I reflected on the fact that what we accomplish with electricity would certainly have seemed like magic to our distant ancestors. From there it was a hop, skip and jump (and another couple of hundred kilometres of driving) to the world of Nevyana, a land of magic—but one where the magic, known as Blue Fire, is essentially electricity, albeit produced and controlled through magical means.
My process of world building is a bit like an oyster crafting a pearl. There’s the initial idea—the grain of sand that irritates said oyster—and then the gradual building up of layer upon layer around that initial irritant/idea. For me, the process takes the form of a series of questions. The first question: how did the people of this otherwise medieval society learn to harness Blue Fire?
I decided that the magic had been bestowed upon them by their gods. Thinking of gods led me to think of how, in Earth mythology, there are often gods of specific aspects of nature: a God of the Earth, a God of Lightning, a Goddess of Wisdom, etc. I ended up with three gods, survivors of a war among the gods that devastated the original home of the people of Nevyana and drove them to a secluded valley, where they have built a new kingdom over the ensuing centuries. I made the three surviving gods the gods of Earth (Vekrin), Sun (Arrica), and Moon (Ell). Then I began thinking about how each of those different gods might approach benefiting their followers.
Vekrin, being of the Earth, would naturally want his people planted and stationary, so I decided he gave his followers access to Blue Fire through the Godstones, massive sources of power (generators, in other words) that cannot be moved and around which the twelve Cities of Nevyana naturally accreted. Arrica, being of the Sun, would naturally want her people to move across the face of the land as does the Sun. As a result, her followers, the Free Folk, obtain Blue Fire through Sunscales—magical versions of solar panels—which collect energy from the Sun during the day and store it for use at night. And Ell, being of the Moon, the ever-changing Moon, chose to change her followers, turning them from ordinary humans into furred, fanged-and-clawed, near-feline Nightdwellers, who cannot bear the light of day, and whose own measure of magic is focused on hunting and hiding.
With those basic ideas in place, the world of Nevyana took shape: a world in which Citydwellers hide inside walls, clustered around the Twelve Godstones strung the length of the Kingdom; the Freefolk of Arrica travel freely through the wilderness, using the Blue Fire they draw from the sun during the day to power a protective, glowing-blue Fence at night; and the Nightdwellers, long alienated from the others, who seek out and kill any followers of Vekrin or Arrica they find in their forests at night. My main characters are three teenagers, each a member of one of these three groups: Petra, a Priest-Apprentice of Vekrin, Amlinn, granddaughter of a leader of one of the Freefolk clans, and Jin, an apprentice Scrollkeeper of the Nightdwellers. They all have reason to mistrust or even hate each other (among other things, Nightdwellers killed Amlinn’s parents when she was a toddler), but they must work together to save their Kingdom when the sacred secrets of Blue Fire are stolen by a renegade priest and a scheming prince and turned toward conquest.
It’s a complex world that all began with a single thought on a long autumn drive northward, and I’m rather astonished myself how much came of that first inkling of an idea. But that’s what makes writing so exciting, for both authors and (I hope) readers.
Biography Edward Willett is the award-winning author of more than fifty books of fiction and non-fiction for children, young adults, and adults. He lives in Regina with his wife, Margaret Anne; their teenage daughter, Alice; and their Siberian cat, Shadowpaw.
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Excerpt
The night dripped, and Petra dripped with it.
For the fourteenth time, he passed the courtyard gate where the guard had discovered the girl beneath the cabbages. For the fourteenth time, he met Cort marching in the opposite direction. For the fourteenth time, Cort’s pace quickened. He didn’t look at Petra. Petra looked at him, but somehow the water soaking his friend still failed to burst into steam. Then the night swallowed Cort again and Petra continue his endless, useless march around the Temple, “guarding” it against entirely hypothetical intruders who would promptly be fried by the Fire Curtain anyway if they were stupid enough to try to get past it. In that case, his and Cort’s entire function would be to call for Priests to cart away the charred bodies. Smaller victims they had to deal with themselves. He’d already picked up three cooked birds and a crispy rat, tossing them into the bins located at each corner of the compound for disposal in the morning. “They take them straight to the cooks,” the Priest-Apprentices joked.
At least, Petra hoped they were joking.
If he were to touch it, the Curtain would turn him into a crispy version of himself too, so he gave it a wide berth. It glowed on his right, a translucent wall of faint blue light, hissing and steaming in the rain. Every twenty feet within its ghostly glimmer stood a thick square post of black wood. On the side facing the Temple, each post bore a magical sigil, a complex symbol cut into the wood and filled with gold. From each end of a crosspiece atop each post hung a Sparkglobe, a glass sphere containing a bright tongue of Blue Fire. Supposedly the Sparkglobes lit his path around the Temple. In practice, especially in the rain, each illuminated only a small circle of ground, making the shadowed spaces between the posts appear even darker.
Occasionally, the gloom was lit by distant lightning-like flashes of blue from atop the dark bulk of the Temple. All around City Primaxis, magical Hearths took in that Blue Fire and turned it into the light and heat Petra was currently in such desperately short supply of.
As he and Cort passed each other at the gate, the rain redoubled its efforts to drown them. Even through the tin-roof patter of the drops on his steel helmet, Petra heard the Curtain hiss like a giant teakettle. Vast clouds of blue-tinged steam rose from it into the night.
The icy water poured over Petra’s helmet and down his neck. Useless and sodden, his blue woolen cloak hung heavy as lead from his mail-clad shoulders. His boots squelched with every step. His damp leather trousers chafed his thighs. He couldn’t even feel his fingers: they’d gone numb inside his soaked gloves eleven circuits ago.
They’d be nice and toasty wrapped around Cort’s neck, he thought. The fact that Cort was equally cold, wet, and miserable made his punishment a little easier to bear. Warming his fingers with a good long squeeze of his friend’s throat would have made it a lot easier to bear. But the Priests would make him do something even worse than this as punishment for murdering Cort, although he suspected they’d have a great deal of sympathy if he resorted to violence.
They all knew Cort too, after all.
He swiped his sodden arm across his runny nose as he rounded the bin into which he’d earlier tossed the burnt rat, and he started down the backside of the Temple for the fourteenth time.
He stopped.
Perhaps a hundred feet away, a patch of darkness interrupted the double line of Sparkglobes and the steaming blue wall of the Curtain.
Guest Post-The World of Flames of Nevyana
The world of Flames of Nevyana began with a simple kernel of an idea: the magic of electricity.
I was driving from my home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, to Meadow Lake (about 500 kilometres north) for a library reading/presentation, and passing the time by trying to come up with a new YA novel idea. I got to musing on what is known in science fiction circles as Clarke’s Law: Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I reflected on the fact that what we accomplish with electricity would certainly have seemed like magic to our distant ancestors. From there it was a hop, skip and jump (and another couple of hundred kilometres of driving) to the world of Nevyana, a land of magic—but one where the magic, known as Blue Fire, is essentially electricity, albeit produced and controlled through magical means.
My process of world building is a bit like an oyster crafting a pearl. There’s the initial idea—the grain of sand that irritates said oyster—and then the gradual building up of layer upon layer around that initial irritant/idea. For me, the process takes the form of a series of questions. The first question: how did the people of this otherwise medieval society learn to harness Blue Fire?
I decided that the magic had been bestowed upon them by their gods. Thinking of gods led me to think of how, in Earth mythology, there are often gods of specific aspects of nature: a God of the Earth, a God of Lightning, a Goddess of Wisdom, etc. I ended up with three gods, survivors of a war among the gods that devastated the original home of the people of Nevyana and drove them to a secluded valley, where they have built a new kingdom over the ensuing centuries. I made the three surviving gods the gods of Earth (Vekrin), Sun (Arrica), and Moon (Ell). Then I began thinking about how each of those different gods might approach benefiting their followers.
Vekrin, being of the Earth, would naturally want his people planted and stationary, so I decided he gave his followers access to Blue Fire through the Godstones, massive sources of power (generators, in other words) that cannot be moved and around which the twelve Cities of Nevyana naturally accreted. Arrica, being of the Sun, would naturally want her people to move across the face of the land as does the Sun. As a result, her followers, the Free Folk, obtain Blue Fire through Sunscales—magical versions of solar panels—which collect energy from the Sun during the day and store it for use at night. And Ell, being of the Moon, the ever-changing Moon, chose to change her followers, turning them from ordinary humans into furred, fanged-and-clawed, near-feline Nightdwellers, who cannot bear the light of day, and whose own measure of magic is focused on hunting and hiding.
With those basic ideas in place, the world of Nevyana took shape: a world in which Citydwellers hide inside walls, clustered around the Twelve Godstones strung the length of the Kingdom; the Freefolk of Arrica travel freely through the wilderness, using the Blue Fire they draw from the sun during the day to power a protective, glowing-blue Fence at night; and the Nightdwellers, long alienated from the others, who seek out and kill any followers of Vekrin or Arrica they find in their forests at night. My main characters are three teenagers, each a member of one of these three groups: Petra, a Priest-Apprentice of Vekrin, Amlinn, granddaughter of a leader of one of the Freefolk clans, and Jin, an apprentice Scrollkeeper of the Nightdwellers. They all have reason to mistrust or even hate each other (among other things, Nightdwellers killed Amlinn’s parents when she was a toddler), but they must work together to save their Kingdom when the sacred secrets of Blue Fire are stolen by a renegade priest and a scheming prince and turned toward conquest.
It’s a complex world that all began with a single thought on a long autumn drive northward, and I’m rather astonished myself how much came of that first inkling of an idea. But that’s what makes writing so exciting, for both authors and (I hope) readers.
Giveaway Information: Contest ends November 4, 2016
- Two (2) winners will received a physical copy of The Flames of Nevyana by Edward Willett (US/Canada)
- Five (5) winners will receive a digital copy of The Flames of Nevyana by Edward Willett (INT)
- a Rafflecopter giveaway
1 comment:
A great concept & cover.
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