Greetings and welcome, all!
How kind and brave of you to enter the dark recesses of my twisted mind! I hope your visit will be satisfactory.
Writing this introduction feels horribly awkward. It’s the first time I’m doing anything of the sort, but my editor (and good friend) has badgered me into it, so here we go:
First of all – and this is important – this is a work of fiction. Repeat slowly after me: This. Is. A. Work. Of. Fiction! Do that ten times – then we can proceed. Shit is not going down the way I describe it in my writing! Sure, I try to use as many real-world elements as I can, to maintain a certain suspension of disbelief – including conspiracy theories and supposedly secret occult traditions. I know there are plenty of people who actually believe that stuff like this is real – I’ve met my fair share of them – but that doesn’t mean my writings have anything do do with reality. At all. There – good to have that out of the way!
So what the heck is my writing about? I don’t really know, to be honest. I’m not aiming to win prizes or have my literary works known all over the world. What I do have is a pretty messed up setting, where some even more messed up characters mess around, mostly making the situation worse.
I’m not trying to tell some Grand Epic Tale of the war between Law and Chaos or some such stuff. I’m much more interested in the poor little ants running around between the legs of the battling elephants.
I’ve been playing pen and paper role-playing games for thirty years, and one of the things I’ve always wondered about when playing is how things look from the other point of view. That tribe of goblins, for instance, living snugly in their caves, bothering no one except for a few greedy merchants rolling their caravans through goblin territory – what is it like for them when the so-called “heroes” the merchants have hired invade their caves with genocide and a thirst for experience points in their eyes? Obviously, I’m not the first to enjoy that perspective, but be warned: If you’re looking for heroic dark elves with dancing scimitars and an overpowered cat companion, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m more inspired by the classic Hellenic concept of the Tragic Hero than Hollywood.
Speaking of inspiration – I can’t imagine it’s a major challenge to see where I’ve taken much of my inspiration from. As the great Mark Rein-Hagen once wrote – “Creativity is hiding your sources.” While I’ve been careful to avoid using trademarked names (more because it makes for poor writing than for legal reasons), it won’t be hard to realize just how much I’ve been inspired by White Wolf’s World of Darkness. Less obvious, perhaps, is the influence Magic: The Gathering and its setting has had on my writing (mostly because those chapters got left on the cutting-room floor), and I also acknowledge being heavily influenced by authors like Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker, and countless others (of course without comparing the quality of my work to that of their genius).
So – without further ado – I bid you enter the dark and dangerous world of Elisabeth and her kin.
I hope you’ll enjoy the first two installment of what obviously is a larger story. I chose to publish them this way, in bite-sized chunks, mostly due to lack of patience. I really can’t be arsed to sit and write a two-thousand-page phonebook before showing anything to anyone! Instead, you’ll get these thirty-thousand word episodes, suitable for an afternoon of lazy reading.
For now, please enjoy the first volume of the Books of Future Darkness, “Frost Moon,” and its sequel “Prodigal Queen”.