I love the movie version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sure, it’s overdramatic and takes liberties with character personalities (Faramir’s decision to take the ring to his father, anyone?), but to me, the movie made better chronological sense than the book.

While I love the LOTR trilogy, you won’t find me going into the theater to watch The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve heard what they’ve done to the storylines and it ticks me off, because, well, it’s Narnia. You just can’t mess with Narnia.

Why do we have such strong feelings for alternate retellings? We love seeing a book come alive on the screen, but it comes with a price: trying to cram pages of character development into a two-hour movie. Details are bound to get lost or dropped for the sake of transferring the essence of the book onto the screen. Below we’ll look at how some stories fared in their transition.

***

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Book version: 1964

Movie version: 1971 (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) and 2005 (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

This book got the interesting distinction that not one, but two movie versions were made, the 1971 version with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, and the 2005 version with Johnny Depp. The change of title for the 1971 version isn’t by chance; Quaker Oats had bought the rights to the book and movie so they could promote their new candy line loosely based off Wonka’s creations (Laffy Taffy, Fun Dip, and of course Everlasting Gobstoppers). As such, the movie focused more on Willy Wonka and less on Charlie.

The biggest change in the 1971 version is Wonka’s using the contest to test the children to find a suitably moral heir. This is done through the character of Arthur Slugworth, who goes to each child who won a golden ticket and tries to bribe them to bring back an Everlasting Gobstopper so he can copy it and sell it as his own. Slugworth is later revealed to be Mr. Wilkinson, an employee of Wonka. Wonka’s own character also changes from merely an eccentric chocolatier to a more world-weary one that cites Shakespeare.

This moral testing meant that Charlie’s character also had to change. In the book, Charlie is the only child who doesn’t misbehave or disobey Wonka’s instructions. In the 1971 movie, he steals Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink with his grandfather, proving that he can be just as disobedient as the other children. His return to Wonka of the Everlasting Gobstopper, the top-secret candy that Wonka’s rival offered him money for, shows redemption. It leads to Wonka giving him a business contract, but what would’ve happened if all the children had returned their Everlasting Gobstoppers? What then, Mr. Wonka?

The 2005 version is considered to be more similar to the book, but there are still differences. The book and 1971 versions of Wonka are eccentrics who want to make people happy with his candy. The 2005 version of Wonka doesn’t like children at all, and is merely seeking “the less-evil” child to be his heir. He tells Charlie he can inherit the factory only if Charlie leaves his family. Charlie refuses and goes back home. The movie then shifts to a miserable Wonka going to therapy and ultimately reconciling with his own father, a dentist. Thus, family bonds, not morality, become the central theme.

***

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Audio series made: 1978

Book made: 1979

TV series made: 1981

Movie made: 2005

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has the unique distinction of having been a radio drama before it became a novel, a 6-episode TV series, and finally a movie. The storylines between the non-movie versions mostly remained the same: After the earth gets destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, reluctant adventurer Arthur Dent hitchhikes through the universe with his alien friend, Ford Prefect. The two get mixed up with fellow human survivor Trillian, and Zaphod Beeblebrox, the insane two-headed President of the Galaxy who  steals the newly-built ship, The Heart of Gold and its Infinite Improbability Drive within.

The movie falls away from the regular storyline when the group goes to visit Humma Kavula, Zaphod’s rival, in the elections. While Douglas Adams himself wrote this character into the script, his presence adds little to the actual storyline. In the movie he demands they bring him the Point-of-View gun, a new addition to the storyline whose sole purpose is to play up the love triangle between Arthur, Trillian and Zaphod, and since Kavula is never seen in the movie again, that’s rendered moot. The overall effect is to change The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from a satirical adventure story to a love story.

***

Firefly by Joss Whedon

TV series made: 2002

Movie made: 2005

Sometimes the change from story to movie doesn’t involve a novel, but a TV series. Take Firefly, a show about a group of smugglers, led by tough-as-nails Mal Reynolds, who find themselves reluctantly harboring a brilliant, uptight doctor, Simon Tam and his gifted, psychic, damaged sister, River. The series was cancelled by  Fox after only eleven of its fourteen episodes aired. The movie Serenity was made to bring back interest in the Firefly project.

When Whedon sat down to write the movie, he had to reintroduce the TV’s plot and characters so that it will hook new viewers without confusing them, while at the same time catering to the long-time fans. The result is the re-introduction of Simon rescuing River from the school that holds her captive, not unseen benefactors as in the TV show. The movie version of Simon already knows the Serenity crew and is actively using them to commit a crime which makes him more proactive, but also less innocent and naïve than he is in the TV series.

The movie also has less time to work with character development, so a couple of supporting characters, like Inara the “Companion” and Shepherd Book, get less screen time than normal while the main characters’ personalities change. This is most evident with Mal. In the show, we get to see Mal’s humorous side when he tells Simon that Kaylee, the engineer, is dead and whoops with laughter when Simon learns she’s obviously not. We see his uncomfortable side when Inara goes to “serve” her clients and he struggles with his feelings for her. We see his protective side when he hides the Tam siblings outside the ship when the evil Alliance comes looking for them.

But the movie can’t focus on the day-to-day events; we’re only presented with one side of Mal: a grim, humorless side. This Mal makes the crew tie the bodies of their friends to Serenity in order to disguise the ship as a barbarian Reaver vessel. To the uninitiated viewer, his growl, “Get to work,” would just sound like a hardnosed captain pushing his crew to obey his command. To those who know the show, however, it makes this side of Mal Reynolds horrific and disturbing. Which, if you think about it, makes the whole scene extremely effective.

***

Dune by Frank Herbert

Book made: 1965

Movie made: 1984

Forget that it’s directed by David Lynch. Forget that Kyle MacLachlan is Paul and Sting is Feyd-Rautha. Forget the Weirding modules. Forget all that and tell me something. At the end of the movie, when it rains and everyone lives happily ever after … um … isn’t water lethal to sandworms? Isn’t the entire premise of the book about the spice trade, which is produced by sandworms, which need a dry climate in order to live?

***

Tangled by the Brothers Grimm

Story made: Late 1800s

Movie made: 2010

The Brothers Grimm stories, like all fairy tales, are retold so often that no one blinks an eye when details are changed from the original. The entire storyline of Tangled bears only a passing resemblance to the original Rapunzel story. I include it here though because of the interesting way in which it’s been adapted.

When Disney first worked on the project, it was originally titled Rapunzel. However, when the last movie they did, The Princess and the Frog, didn’t do as well as they hoped at the office, they decided to change the story so that it would be more suited to everyone (read: boys). They changed the title to Tangled and gave more prominence to the male character, Flynn Rider. What came of these changes isn’t so much of a fairy tale as a musical comedy action tale.

***

Labyrinth

Movie made: 1986

Manga made: 2006

Sometimes it’s interesting to see how changes are made within the script itself before it reaches the screen. Take Labyrinth, the 1980s Jim Henson movie about a girl named Sarah who goes through an enormous labyrinth to rescue her younger brother from Jareth, the King of the Goblins. .

In the movie, she is directly responsible for Toby’s abduction. Her frustrated cry “I wish the goblins would take you away to the Goblin City. Right now,” gives the eavesdropping goblins the magical means to steal him away. In the earlier draft, Jareth comes to the house in the guise of Robin Zakar, the playwright for the play Sarah is in. He talks his way in, then takes an interest in Sarah’s crying brother, performing parlor magic tricks to make him stop crying. He then calls the goblins and they take Sarah’s brother right out of her hands.

Jareth’s character in the preliminary script is creepier than in the movie. He sees no problem going to a teenager’s house and posing as her favorite playwright to get in. He tests Sarah to see if she would make a worthy queen. At the end of the preliminary script, Sarah falls,  quite literally, into the Goblin King’s bed, where he tells her no one else had made it this far in the labyrinth, and she is worthy to become his queen.

Not only does she refuse, but she punches Jareth in the face and declares that she wouldn’t want him “if you were the last goblin on earth!” This causes Jareth to shrink into a sniveling goblin who stomps around yelling, “Nobody ever cares about what I want!” (Sound familiar?)

Why they changed from that ending in the movie, where Sarah merely recites the lines she says at the beginning of the film is hard to say. Probably the thought of a man proposing to a teenage girl in a large bed was considered too racy. Or maybe they just didn’t want to show David Bowie getting punched in the face.

***

They say there is no such thing as an original story. Stories just get retold, over and over again, in different guises. Folk and fairy tales throughout the ages are notorious for changing minute details from retelling to retelling. Movies, visual retellings of stories, follow the same rules. Movies may sacrifice a character’s personality, a few key scenes, or in some cases, absolute logic, but they also provide new ways of looking at a familiar story that we otherwise wouldn’t have considered.

The following year, in 1976, Fantastic published his short story, “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr.” This story highlighted one of Martin’s greatest strengths: the ability to see the value of the smallest character and to give that character a voice. In the midst of an epic quest, Sharra, the “girl who goes between the worlds,” meets Laren Dorr, the keeper of a lonely world. “The Lonely Songs” only captures one part of Sharra’s journey, but for Laren it is the most significant part. He is only a stop-over, a side character, a cameo role in her life, but his world revolves around her. He has waited for her and reckons his existence by her appearance. Abandoned on the world for reasons so long past that he no longer remembers them, Laren’s only solace is song.

His songs paint the world as he imagines it once was. He sings of things that are haunting and beautiful and fantastic, ephemeral things that fill Laren and Sharra with longing when the song ends. Sharra’s story is greater, but Laren’s keeps us reading. Martin paints him in a number of lights: king, god, minstrel. Only at the end do we and Sharra see him for who he is: a complex character, aware of his own flaws and hopelessly in love with Sharra.

Martin planned to return to the strong, determined Sharra, but other, award-winning stories interrupted. In 1977, he won the Locus Award for his collection A Song for Lya and Other Stories, which included “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr.” In 1980, he won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “Sandkings” as well as the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “The Way of Cross and Dragon.”

Then Hollywood began to recognize Martin’s work. His short story, “Remembering Melody,” was adapted to an episode of HBO’s The Hitchhiker in 1984, and two years later Martin was invited to write for The Twilight Zone. His novellas “Nightflyers” and “Sandkings” were adapted into a feature length film in 1987 and into an episode of The Outer Limits in 1995 respectively. In between, Martin wrote for the television series Beauty and the Beast and developed Doorways, a series based on the opening line of “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr”: “There is a girl who goes between the worlds.”

At the same time, Martin was creating, contributing to, and editing the Wild Card book series—now up to its twenty-first book. This shared-world series honed Martin’s ability to manage a wide cast of characters. He pulled on this experience when writing his massive Song of Ice and Fire novels, which are known for chapters each told from a different character’s point of view, none of whom are entirely good nor (aggravatingly) entirely bad.

Apart from the forthcoming HBO adaptation, The Song of Ice and Fire has also spawned a collectible card game, a strategy board game, role-playing games, model figures, and replicas. Additionally, an excerpt from it, “Blood of the Dragon,” earned Martin his fourth Hugo Award in 1997, this time for Best Novella. Combined with the comic book and role-playing game adaptations of Wild Cards, fans’ demand for additional material testifies to Martin’s ability to write compelling descriptions of the small details within his sweeping visions. He often describes the writing process as a journey. Martin knows where he is, and he knows where he wants to go. It’s the unknown people and unknown places along the way that make the journey and his writing fascinating.

“The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” encapsulated this writing philosophy in 1976 when its narrator said, “We have only the middle, or rather a piece of that middle. The smallest part of the legend, a mere fragment of the quest. A small tale within the greater, of one world where Sharra paused, and of the lonely singer Laren Dorr and how they briefly touched.”

She is gray-eyed and pale of skin, or so the story goes, and her hair is a coal-black waterfall with half-seen hints of red. She wears about her brow a circlet of burnished metal, a dark crown that holds her hair in place and sometimes puts shadows in her eyes. Her name is Sharra; she knows the gates.

The beginning of her story is lost to us, with the memory of the world from which she sprang. The end? The end is not yet, and when it comes we shall not know it.

We have only the middle, or rather a piece of that middle, the smallest part of the legend, a mere fragment of the quest. A small tale within the greater, of one world where Sharra paused, and of the lonely singer Laren Dorr and how they briefly touched.

***

One moment there was only the valley, caught in twilight. The setting sun hung fat and violet on the ridge above, and its rays slanted down silently into a dense forest whose trees had shiny black trunks and colorless ghostly leaves. The only sounds were the cries of the mourning-birds coming out for the night, and the swift rush of water in the rocky stream that cut the woods.

Then, through a gate unseen, Sharra came tired and bloodied to the world of Laren Dorr. She wore a plain white dress, now stained and sweaty, and a heavy fur cloak that had been half-ripped from her back. And her left arm, bare and slender, still bled from three long wounds. She appeared by the side of the stream, shaking, and she threw a quick, wary glance about her before she knelt to dress her wounds. The water, for all its swiftness, was a dark and murky green. No way to tell if it was safe, but Sharra was weak and thirsty. She drank, washed her arm as best she could in the strange and doubtful water, and bound her injuries with bandages ripped from her clothes. Then, as the purple sun dipped lower behind the ridge, she crawled away from the water to a sheltered spot among the trees and fell into exhausted sleep.

She woke to arms around her, strong arms that lifted her easily to carry her somewhere, and she woke struggling. But the arms just tightened and held her still. “Easy,” a mellow voice said, and she saw a face dimly through gathering mist, a man’s face, long and somehow gentle.

“You are weak,” he said, “and night is coming. We must be inside before darkness.”

Sharra did not struggle, not then, though she knew she should. She had been struggling a long time, and she was tired. But she looked at him, confused. “Why?” she asked. Then, not waiting for an answer, “Who are you? Where are we going?”

“To safety,” he said.

“Your home?” she asked, drowsy.

“No,” he said, so soft she could scarcely hear his voice. “No, not home, not ever home. But it will do.” She heard splashing then, as if he were carrying her across the stream, and ahead of them on the ridge she glimpsed a gaunt, twisted silhouette, a triple-towered castle etched black against the sun. Odd, she thought, that wasn’t there before.

She slept.

***

When she woke, he was there, watching her. She lay under a pile of soft, warm blankets in a curtained, canopied bed. But the curtains had been drawn back, and her host sat across the room in a great chair draped by shadows. Candlelight flickered in his eyes, and his hands locked together neatly beneath his chin. “Are you feeling better?” he asked, without moving.

She sat up and noticed she was nude. Swift as suspicion, quicker than thought, her hand went to her head. But the dark crown was still there, in place, untouched, its metal cool against her brow. Relaxing, she leaned back against the pillows and pulled the blankets up to cover herself. “Much better,” she said, and as she said it she realized for the first time that her wounds were gone.

The man smiled at her, a sad, wistful sort of smile. He had a strong face, with charcoal-colored hair that curled in lazy ringlets and fell down into dark eyes somehow wider than they should be. Even seated, he was tall. And slender. He wore a suit and cape of some soft gray leather, and over that he wore melancholy like a cloak. “Claw marks,” he said speculatively, while he smiled. “Claw marks down your arm, and your clothes almost ripped from your back. Someone doesn’t like you.”

“Something,” Sharra said. “A guardian, a guardian at the gate.” She sighed. “There is always a guardian at the gate. The Seven don’t like us to move from world to world. Me they like least of all.”

His hands unfolded from beneath his chin and rested on the carved wooden arms of his chair. He nodded, but the wistful smile stayed. “So, then,” he said. “You know the Seven, and you know the gates.” His eyes strayed to her forehead. “The crown, of course. I should have guessed.”

Sharra grinned at him. “You did guess. More than that, you knew. Who are you? What world is this?”

“My world,” he said evenly. “I’ve named it a thousand times, but none of the names ever seem quite right. There was one once, a name I liked, a name that fit. But I’ve forgotten it. It was a long time ago. My name is Laren Dorr, or that was my name, once, when I had use for such a thing. Here and now it seems somewhat silly. But at least I haven’t forgotten it.”

“Your world,” Sharra said. “Are you a king, then? A god?”

“Yes,” Laren Dorr replied, with an easy laugh. “And more. I’m whatever I choose to be. There is no one around to dispute me.”

“What did you do to my wounds?” she asked.

“I healed them.” He gave an apologetic shrug. “It’s my world. I have certain powers. Not the powers I’d like to have, perhaps, but powers nonetheless.”

“Oh.” She did not look convinced.

Laren waved an impatient hand. “You think it’s impossible. Your crown, of course. Well, that’s only half right. I could not harm you with my, ah, powers, not while you wear that. But I can help you.” He smiled again, and his eyes grew soft and dreamy. “But it doesn’t matter. Even if I could I would never harm you, Sharra. Believe that. It has been a long time.”

Sharra looked startled. “You know my name. How?”

He stood up, smiling, and came across the room to sit beside her on the bed. And he took her hand before replying, wrapping it softly in his and stroking her with his thumb. “Yes, I know your name. You are Sharra, who moves between the worlds. Centuries ago, when the hills had a different shape and the violet sun burned scarlet at the very beginning of its cycle, they came to me and told me you would come. I hate them, all Seven, and I will always hate them, but that night I welcomed the vision they gave me. They told me only your name, and that you would come here, to my world. And one thing more, but that was enough. It was a promise. A promise of an ending or a start, of a change. And any change is welcome on this world. I’ve been alone here through a thousand sun-cycles, Sharra, and each cycle lasts for centuries. There are few events to mark the death of time.”

Sharra was frowning. She shook her long, black hair, and in the dim light of the candles the soft red highlights glowed. “Are they that far ahead of me, then?” she said. “Do they know what will happen?” Her voice was troubled. She looked up at him. “This other thing they told you?”

He squeezed her hand, very gently. “They told me I would love you,” Laren said. His voice still sounded sad. “But that was no great prophecy. I could have told them as much. There was a time long ago—I think the sun was yellow then—when I realized that I would love any voice that was not an echo of my own.”

***

Sharra woke at dawn, when shafts of bright purple light spilled into her room through a high arched window that had not been there the night before. Clothing had been laid out for her:a loose yellow robe, a jeweled dress of bright crimson, a suit of forest green. She chose the suit, dressed quickly. As she left, she paused to look out the window.

She was in a tower, looking out over crumbling stone battlements and a dusty triangular courtyard. Two other towers, twisted matchstick things with pointed conical spires, rose from the other corners of the triangle. There was a strong wind that whipped the rows of gray pennants set along the walls, but no other motion to be seen.

And, beyond the castle walls, no sign of the valley, none at all. The castle with its courtyard and its crooked towers was set atop a mountain, and far and away in all directions taller mountains loomed, presenting a panorama of black stone cliffs and jagged rocky walls and shining clean ice steeples that gleamed with a violet sheen. The window was sealed and closed, but the wind looked cold.

Her door was open. Sharra moved quickly down a twisting stone staircase, out across the courtyard into the main building, a low wooden structure built against the wall. She passed through countless rooms, some cold and empty save for dust, others richly furnished, before she found Laren Dorr eating breakfast.

There was an empty seat at his side; the table was heavily laden with food and drink. Sharra sat down and took a hot biscuit, smiling despite herself. Laren smiled back.

“I’m leaving today,” she said, in between bites. “I’m sorry, Laren. I must find the gate.”

The air of hopeless melancholy had not left him. It never did. “So you said last night,” he replied, sighing. “It seems I have waited a long time for nothing.”

There was meat, several types of biscuits, fruit, cheese, milk. Sharra filled a plate, face a little downcast, avoiding Laren’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“Stay awhile,” he said. “Only a short time. You can afford it, I would think. Let me show you what I can of my world. Let me sing to you.” His eyes, wide and dark and very tired, asked the question.

She hesitated. “Well … it takes time to find the gate.”

“Stay with me for a while, then.”

“But Laren, eventually I must go. I have made promises. You understand?”

He smiled, gave a helpless shrug. “Yes. But look. I know where the gate is. I can show you, save you a search. Stay with me, oh, a month. A month as you measure time. Then I’ll take you to the gate.” He studied her. “You’ve been hunting a long, long time, Sharra. Perhaps you need a rest.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, she ate a piece of fruit, watching him all the time. “Perhaps I do,” she said at last, weighing things. “And there will be a guardian, of course. You could help me, then. A month … that’s not so long. I’ve been on other worlds far longer than a month.” She nodded, and a smile spread slowly across her face. “Yes,” she said, still nodding. “That would be all right.”

He touched her hand lightly. After breakfast he showed her the world they had given him.

They stood side by side on a small balcony atop the highest of the three towers, Sharra in dark green and Laren tall and soft in gray. They stood without moving, and Laren moved the world around them. He set the castle flying over restless, churning seas, where long, black serpent-heads peered up out of the water to watch them pass. He moved them to a vast, echoing cavern under the earth, all aglow with a soft green light, where dripping stalactites brushed down against the towers and herds of blind white goats moaned outside the battlements. He clapped his hands and smiled, and steam-thick jungle rose around them; trees that climbed each other in rubber ladders to the sky, giant flowers of a dozen different colors, fanged monkeys that chittered from the walls. He clapped again, and the walls were swept clean, and suddenly the courtyard dirt was sand and they were on an endless beach by the shore of a bleak gray ocean, and above the slow wheeling of a great blue bird with tissue-paper wings was the only movement to be seen. He showed her this, and more, and more, and in the end as dusk seemed to threaten in one place after another, he took the castle back to the ridge above the valley. And Sharra looked down on the forest of black-barked trees where he had found her and heard the mourning-birds whimper and weep among transparent leaves.

“It is not a bad world,” she said, turning to him on the balcony.

“No,” Laren replied. His hands rested on the cold stone railing, his eyes on the valley below “Not entirely. I explored it once, on foot, with a sword and a walking stick. There was a joy there, a real excitement. A new mystery behind every hill.” He chuckled. “But that, too, was long ago. Now I know what lies behind every hill. Another empty horizon.”

He looked at her and gave his characteristic shrug. “There are worse hells, I suppose. But this is mine.”

“Come with me, then,” she said. “Find the gate with me, and leave. There are other worlds. Maybe they are less strange and less beautiful, but you will not be alone.”

He shrugged again. “You make it sound so easy,” he said in a careless voice. “I have found the gate, Sharra. I have tried it a thousand times. The guardian does not stop me. I step through, briefly glimpse some other world, and suddenly I’m back in the courtyard. No. I cannot leave.”

She took his hand in hers. “How sad. To be alone  so long. I think you must be very strong, Laren. I would go mad in only a handful of years.”

He laughed, and there was a bitterness in the way he did it. “Oh, Sharra. I have gone mad a thousand times, also. They cure me, love. They always cure me.” Another shrug, and he put his arm around her. The wind was cold and rising. “Come,” he said. “We must be inside before full dark.”

They went up in the tower to her bedroom, and they sat together on her bed and Laren brought them food; meat burned black on the outside and red within, hot bread, wine. They ate, and they talked.

“Why are you here?” she asked him, in between mouthfuls, washing her words down with wine. “How did you offend them? Who were you, before?”

“I hardly remember, except in dreams,” he told her. “And the dreams—it has been so long, I can’t even recall which ones are truth and which are visions born of my madness.” He sighed. “Sometimes I dream I was a king, a great king in a world other than this, and my crime was that I made my people happy. In happiness they turned against the Seven, and the temples fell idle. And I woke one day, within my room, within my castle, and found my servants gone. And when I went outside, my people and my world were also gone, and even the woman who slept beside me.

“But there are other dreams. Often I remember vaguely that I was a god. Well, an almost-god. I had powers, and teachings, and they were not the teachings of the Seven. They were afraid of me, each of them, for I was a match for any of them. But I could not meet all Seven together, and that was what they forced me to do. And then they left me only a small bit of my power, and set me here. It was cruel irony. As a god, I’d taught that people should turn to each other, that they could keep away the darkness by love and laughter and talk. So all these things the Seven took from me.

“And even that is not the worst. For there are other times when I think that I have always been here, that I was born here some endless age ago. And the memories are all false ones, sent to make me hurt the more.”

Sharra watched him as he spoke. His eyes were not on her, but far away, full of fog and dreams and half-dead rememberings. And he spoke very slowly, in a voice that was also like fog, that drifted and curled and hid things, and you knew that there were mysteries there and things brooding just out of sight and far-off lights that you would never reach.

Laren stopped, and his eyes woke up again. “Ah, Sharra,” he said. “Be careful how you go. Even your crown will not help you should they move on you directly. And the pale child Bakkalon will tear at you, and Naa-Slas feed upon your pain, and Saagael on your soul.”

She shivered and cut another piece of meat. But it was cold and tough when she bit into it, and suddenly she noticed that the candles had burned very low. How long had she listened to him speak?

“Wait,” he said then, and he rose and went outside, out the door near where the window had been. There was nothing there now but rough, gray stone; the windows all changed to solid rock with the last fading of the sun. Laren returned in a few moments, with a softly shining instrument of dark black wood slung around his neck on a leather cord. Sharra had never quite seen its like. It had sixteen strings, each a different color, and all up and down its length brightly glowing bars of light were inlaid amid the polished wood. When Laren sat, the bottom of the device rested on the floor and the top came to just above his shoulder. He stroked it lightly, speculatively; the lights glowed, and suddenly the room was full of swift-fading music.

“My companion,” he said, smiling. He touched it again, and the music rose and died, lost notes without a tune. And he brushed the light-bars and the very air shimmered and changed color. He began to sing.

I am the lord of loneliness,

Empty my domain…

… the first words ran, sung low and sweet in Laren’s mellow far-off fog voice. The rest of the song—Sharra clutched at it, heard each word and tried to remember, but lost them all. They brushed her, touched her, then melted away, back into the fog, here and gone again so swift that she could not remember quite what they had been. With the words, the music; wistful and melancholy and full of secrets, pulling at her, crying, whispering promises of a thousand tales untold. All around the room the candles flamed up brighter, and globes of light grew and danced and flowed together until the air was full of color.

Words, music, light; Laren Dorr put them all together and wove for her a vision.

She saw him then as he saw himself in his dreams; a king, strong and tall and still proud, with hair as black as hers and eyes that snapped. He was dressed all in shimmering white, pants that clung tight and a shirt that ballooned at the sleeves, and a great cloak that moved and curled in the wind like a sheet of solid snow. Around his brow he wore a crown of flashing silver, and a slim, straight sword flashed just as bright at his side. This Laren, this younger Laren, this dream vision, moved without melancholy, moved in a world of sweet ivory minarets and languid blue canals. And the world moved around him, friends and lovers and one special woman whom Laren drew with words and lights of fire, and there was an infinity of easy days and laughter.

Then, sudden, abrupt darkness. He was here.

The music moaned; the lights dimmed; the words grew sad and lost. Sharra saw Laren wake in a familiar castle, now deserted. She saw him search from room to room and walk outside to face a world he’d never seen. She watched him leave the castle, walk off towards the mists of a far horizon in the hope that those mists were smoke. And on and on he walked, and new horizons fell beneath his feet each day, and the great fat sun waxed red and orange and yellow, but still his world was empty. All the places he had shown her he walked to; all those and more; and finally, lost as ever, wanting home, the castle came to him.

By then his white had faded to dim gray. But still the song went on. Days went, and years, and centuries, and Laren grew tired and mad but never old. The sun shone green and violet and a savage hard blue-white, but with each cycle there was less color in his world. So Laren sang, of endless empty days and nights when music and memory were his only sanity, and his songs made Sharra feel it.

And when the vision faded and the music died and his soft voice melted away for the last time and Laren paused and smiled and looked at her, Sharra found herself trembling.

“Thank you,” he said softly, with a shrug. And he took his instrument and left her for the night.

***

The next day dawned cold and overcast, but Laren took her out into the forests, hunting. Their quarry was a lean white thing, half cat, half gazelle, with too much speed for them to chase easily and too many teeth for them to kill. Sharra did not mind. The hunt was better than the kill. There was a singular, striking joy in that run through the darkling forest, holding a bow she never used and wearing a quiver of black wood arrows cut from the same dour trees that surrounded them. Both of them were bundled up tightly in gray fur, and Laren smiled out at her from under a wolf’s-head hood. And the leaves beneath their boots, as clear and fragile as glass, cracked and splintered as they ran.

Afterwards, unblooded but exhausted, they returned to the castle, and Laren set out a great feast in the main dining room. They smiled at each other from opposite ends of a table fifty feet long, and Sharra watched the clouds roll by the window behind Laren’s head, and later watched the window turn to stone.

“Why does it do that?” she asked. “And why don’t you ever go outside at night?”

He shrugged. “Ah. I have reasons. The nights are, well, not good here.” He sipped hot spice wine from a great jeweled cup. “The world you came from, where you started—tell me, Sharra, did you have stars?”

She nodded. “Yes. It’s been so long, though. But I still remember. The nights were very dark and black, and the stars were little pinpoints of light, hard and cold and far away. You could see patterns sometimes. The men of my world, when they were young, gave names to each of those patterns, and told grand tales about them.”

Laren nodded. “I would like your world, I think,” he said. “Mine was like that, a little. But our stars were a thousand colors, and they moved, like ghostly lanterns in the night. Sometimes they drew veils around them to hide their light. And then our nights would be all shimmer and gossamer. Often I would go sailing at startime, myself and she whom I loved. Just so we could see the stars together. It was a good time to sing.” His voice was growing sad again.

Darkness had crept into the room, darkness and silence, and the food was cold and Sharra could scarce see his face fifty long feet away. So she rose and went to him, and sat lightly on the great table near to his chair. And Laren nodded and smiled, and at once there was a whooosh, and all along the walls torches flared to sudden life in the long dining hall. He offered her more wine, and her fingers lingered on his as she took the glass.

“It was like that for us, too,” Sharra said. “If the wind was warm enough, and other men were far away, then we liked to lie together in the open. Kaydar and I.” She hesitated, looked at him.

His eyes were searching. “Kaydar?”

“You would have liked him, Laren. And he would have liked you, I think. He was tall and he had red hair and there was a fire in his eyes. Kaydar had powers, as did I, but his were greater. And he had such a will. They took him one night, did not kill him, only took him from me and from our world. I have been hunting for him ever since. I know the gates, I wear the dark crown, and they will not stop me easily.”

Laren drank his wine and watched the torchlight on the metal of his goblet. “There are an infinity of worlds, Sharra.”

“I have as much time as I require. I do not age, Laren, no more than you do. I will find him.”

“Did you love him so much?”

Sharra fought a fond, flickering smile, and lost. “Yes,” she said, and now it was her voice that seemed a little lost. “Yes, so much. He made me happy, Laren. We were only together for a short time, but he did make me happy. The Seven cannot touch that. It was a joy just to watch him, to feel his arms around me and see the way he smiled.”

“Ah,” he said, and he did smile, but there was something very beaten in the way he did it. The silence grew very thick.

Finally Sharra turned to him. “But we have wandered a long way from where we started. You still have not told me why your windows seal themselves at night.”

“You have come a long way, Sharra. You move between the worlds. Have you seen worlds without stars?”

“Yes. Many, Laren. I have seen a universe where the sun is a glowing ember with but a single world, and the skies are vast and vacant by night. I have seen the land of frowning jesters, where there is no sky and the hissing suns burn below the ocean. I have walked the moors of Carradyne, and watched dark sorcerers set fire to a rainbow to light that sunless land.”

“This world has no stars,” Laren said.

“Does that frighten you so much that you stay inside?”

“No. But it has something else instead.” He looked at her. “Would you see?”

She nodded.

As abruptly as they had lit, the torches all snuffed out. The room swam with blackness. And Sharra shifted on the table to look over Laren’s shoulder. Laren did not move. But behind him, the stones of the window fell away like dust and light poured in from outside.

The sky was very dark, but she could see clearly, for against the darkness a shape was moving. Light poured from it, and the dirt in the courtyard and the stones of the battlements and the gray pennants were all bright beneath its glow. Puzzling, Sharra looked up.

Something looked back. It was taller than the mountains and it filled up half the sky, and though it gave off light enough to see the castle by, Sharra knew that it was dark beyond darkness. It had a man-shape, roughly, and it wore a long cape and a cowl, and below that was blackness even fouler than the rest. The only sounds were Laren’s soft breathing and the beating of her heart and the distant weeping of a mourning-bird, but in her head Sharra could hear demonic laughter.

The shape in the sky looked down at her, in her, and she felt the cold dark in her soul. Frozen, she could not move her eyes. But the shape did move. It turned and raised a hand, and then there was something else up there with it, a tiny man-shape with eyes of fire that writhed and screamed and called to her.

Sharra shrieked and turned away. When she glanced back, there was no window. Only a wall of safe, sure stone, and a row of torches burning, and Laren holding her within strong arms. “It was only a vision,” he told her. He pressed her tight against him, and stroked her hair. “I used to test myself at night,” he said, more to himself than to her. “But there was no need. They take turns up there, watching me, each of the Seven. I have seen them too often, burning with black light against the clean dark of the sky, and holding those I loved. Now I don’t look. I stay inside and sing, and my windows are made of night-stone.”

“I feel … fouled,” she said, still trembling a little.

“Come,” he said. “There is water upstairs, you can clean away the cold. And then I’ll sing for you.” He took her hand and led her up into the tower.

Sharra took a hot bath while Laren set up his instrument and tuned it in the bedroom. He was ready when she returned, wrapped head to foot in a huge fluffy brown towel. She sat on the bed, drying her hair and waiting.

And Laren gave her visions.

He sang his other dream this time, the one where he was a god and the enemy of the Seven. The music was a savage pounding thing, shot through with lightning and tremors of fear, and the lights melted together to form a scarlet battlefield where a blinding-white Laren fought shadows and the shapes of nightmare. There were seven of them, and they formed a ring around him and darted in and out, stabbing him with lances of absolute black, and Laren answered them with fire and storm. But in the end they overwhelmed him, the light faded, and then the song grew soft and sad again, and the vision blurred as lonely dreaming centuries flashed by.

Hardly had the last notes fallen from the air and the final shimmers died than Laren started once again. A new song this time, and one he did not know so well. His fingers, slim and graceful, hesitated and retraced themselves more than once, and his voice was shaky, too, for he was making up some of the words as he went along. Sharra knew why. For this time he sang of her, a ballad of her quest. Of burning love and endless searching, of worlds beyond worlds, of dark crowns and waiting guardians that fought with claws and tricks and lies. He took every word that she had spoken, and used each, and transformed each. In the bedroom, glittering panoramas formed where hot white suns burned beneath eternal oceans and hissed in clouds of steam, and men ancient beyond time lit rainbows to keep away the dark. And he sang Kaydar, and he sang him true somehow, he caught and drew the fire that had been Sharra’s love and made her believe anew.

But the song ended with a question, the halting finale lingering in the air, echoing, echoing. Both of them waited for the rest, and both knew there was no more. Not yet.

Sharra was crying. “My turn, Laren,” she said. Then: “Thank you. For giving Kaydar back to me.”

“It was only a song,” he said, shrugging. “It’s been a long time since I had a new song to sing.”

Once again he left her, touching her cheek lightly at the door as she stood there with the blanket wrapped around her. Then Sharra locked the door behind him and went from candle to candle, turning light to darkness with a breath. And she threw the towel over a chair and crawled under the blankets and lay a long, long time before drifting off to sleep.

It was still dark when she woke, not knowing why. She opened her eyes and lay quietly and looked around the room, and nothing was there, nothing was changed. Or was there?

And then she saw him, sitting in the chair across the room with his hands locked under his chin, just as he had sat that first time. His eyes steady and unmoving, very wide and dark in a room full of night. He sat very still. “Laren?” she called, softly, still not quite sure the dark form was him.

“Yes,” he said. He did not move. “I watched you last night, too, while you slept. I have been alone here for longer than you can ever imagine, and very soon now I will be alone again. Even in sleep, your presence is a wonder.”

“Oh, Laren,” she said. There was a silence, a pause, a weighing and an unspoken conversation. Then she threw back the blanket, and Laren came to her.

***

Both of them had seen centuries come and go. A month, a moment; much the same.

They slept together every night, and every night Laren sang his songs while Sharra listened. They talked throughout dark hours, and during the day they swam nude in crystalline waters that caught the purple glory of the sky. They made love on beaches of fine white sand, and they spoke a lot of love.

But nothing changed. And finally the time drew near. On the eve of the night before the day that was end, at twilight, they walked together through the shadowed forest where he’d found her.

Laren had learned to laugh during his month with Sharra, but now he was silent again. He walked slowly, clutched her hand hard in his, and his mood was more gray than the soft silk shirt he wore. Finally, by the side of the valley stream, he sat and pulled her down by his side. They took off their boots and let the water cool their feet. It was a warm evening, with a lonely, restless wind, and already you could hear the first of the mourning-birds.

“You must go,” he said, still holding her hand but never looking at her. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” she said, and the melancholy had touched her, too, and there were leaden echoes in her voice.

“My words have all left me, Sharra,” Laren said. “If I could sing for you a vision now, I would. A vision of a world once empty, made full by us and our children. I could offer that. My world has beauty and wonder and mystery enough, if only there were eyes to see it. And if the nights are evil, well, men have faced dark nights before, on other worlds in other times. I would love you, Sharra, as much as I am able. I would try to make you happy.”

“Laren …” she started. But he quieted her with a glance.

“No, I could say that, but I will not. I have no right. Kaydar makes you happy. Only a selfish fool would ask you to give up that happiness to share my misery. Kaydar is all fire and laughter, while I am smoke and song and sadness. I have been alone too long, Sharra. The gray is part of my soul now, and I would not have you darkened. But still …”

She took his hand in both of hers, lifted it, and kissed it quickly. Then, releasing him, she lay her head on his unmoving shoulder. “Try to come with me, Laren,” she said. “Hold my hand when we pass through the gate, and perhaps the dark crown will protect you.”

“I will try anything you ask. But don’t ask me to believe that it will work.” He sighed. “You have countless worlds ahead of you, Sharra, and I cannot see your ending. But it is not here. That I know. And maybe that is best. I don’t know anymore, if I ever did. I remember love vaguely, I think I can recall what it was like, and I remember that it never lasts. Here, with both of us unchanging and immortal, how could we help but to grow bored? Would we hate each other then? I’d not want that.” He looked at her then, and smiled an aching, melancholy smile. “I think that you had known Kaydar for only a short time, to be so in love with him. Perhaps I’m being devious after all. For in finding Kaydar, you may lose him. The fire will go out someday, my love, and the magic will die. And then you may remember Laren Dorr.”

Sharra began to weep, softly. Laren gathered her to him, and kissed her, and whispered a gentle “No.” She kissed back, and they held each other, wordless.

When at last the purple gloom had darkened to near-black, they put back on their boots and stood. Laren hugged her and smiled.

“I must go,” Sharra said. “I must. But leaving is hard, Laren, you must believe that.”

“I do,” he said. “I love you because you will go, I think. Because you cannot forget Kaydar, and you will not forget the promises you made. You are Sharra, who goes between the worlds, and I think the Seven must fear you far more than any god I might have been. If you were not you, I would not think as much of you.”

“Oh. Once you said you would love any voice that was not any echo of your own.”

Laren shrugged. “As I have often said, love, that was a very long time ago.”

They were back inside the castle before darkness, for a final meal, a final night, a final song. They got no sleep that night, and Laren sang to her again just before dawn. It was not a very good song, though; it was an aimless, rambling thing about a wandering minstrel on some nondescript world. Very little of interest ever happened to the minstrel; Sharra couldn’t quite get the point of the song, and Laren sang it listlessly. It seemed an odd farewell, but both of them were troubled.

He left her with the sunrise, promising to change clothes and meet her in the courtyard. And sure enough, he was waiting when she got there, smiling at her, calm and confident. He wore a suit of pure white; pants that clung, a shirt that puffed up at the sleeves, and a great heavy cape that snapped and billowed in the rising wind. But the purple sun stained him with its shadow rays.

Sharra walked out to him and took his hand. She wore tough leather, and there was a knife in her belt, for dealing with the guardian. Her hair, jet-black with light-born glints of red and purple, blew as freely as his cape, but the dark crown was in place. “Good-bye, Laren,” she said. “I wish I had given you more.”

“You have given me enough. In all the centuries that come, in all the sun-cycles that lie ahead, I will remember. I shall measure time by you, Sharra. When the sun rises one day and its color is blue fire, I will look at it and say, ‘Yes, this is the first blue sun after Sharra came to me.'”

She nodded. “And I have a new promise. I will find Kaydar, someday. And if I free him, we will come back to you, both of us together, and we will pit my crown and Kaydar’s fires against all the darkness of the Seven.”

Laren shrugged. “Good. If I’m not here, be sure to leave a message,” he said. And then he grinned.

“Now, the gate. You said you would show me the gate.”

Laren turned and gestured at the shortest tower, a sooty stone structure Sharra had never been inside. There was a wide wooden door in its base. Laren produced a key.

“Here?” she said, looking puzzled. “In the castle?”

“Here,” Laren said. They walked across the courtyard, to the door. Laren inserted the heavy metal key and began to fumble with the lock. While he worked, Sharra took one last look around, and felt the sadness heavy on her soul. The other towers looked bleak and dead, the courtyard was forlorn, and beyond the high icy mountains was only an empty horizon. There was no sound but Laren working at the lock, and no motion but the steady wind that kicked up the courtyard dust and flapped the seven gray pennants that hung along each wall. Sharra shivered with sudden loneliness.

Laren opened the door. No room inside; only a wall of moving fog, a fog without color or sound or light. “Your gate, my lady,” the singer said.

Sharra watched it, as she had watched it so many times before. What world was next? she wondered. She never knew. But maybe in the next one, she would find Kaydar.

She felt Laren’s hand on her shoulder. “You hesitate,” he said, his voice soft.

Sharra’s hand went to her knife. “The guardian,” she said suddenly. “There is always a guardian.” Her eyes darted quickly round the courtyard.

Laren sighed. “Yes. Always. There are some who try to claw you to pieces, and some who try to get you lost, and some who try to trick you into taking the wrong gate. There are some who hold you with weapons, some with chains, some with lies. And there is one, at least, who tried to stop you with love. Yet he was true for all that, and he never sang you false.”

And with a hopeless, loving shrug, Laren shoved her through the gate.

***

Did she find him, in the end, her lover with the eyes of fire? Or is she searching still? What guardian did she face next?

When she walks at night, a stranger in a lonely land, does the sky have stars?

I don’t know. He doesn’t. Maybe even the Seven do not know. They are powerful, yes, but all power is not theirs, and the number of worlds is greater than even they can count.

There is a girl who goes between the worlds, but her path is lost in legend by now. Maybe she is dead, and maybe not. Knowledge moves slowly from world to world, and not all of it is true.

But this we know: In an empty castle below a purple sun, a lonely minstrel waits, and sings of her.

© 1976 by George R. R. Martin.
Originally appeared in Fantastic Stories.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

We corresponded with Erikson in late January, before the release of The Crippled God, and asked him about the experience of writing such a massive series, as well as questions on his cultural creations.

***

How does it feel to be finished with a ten book series, one you’ve been writing for a couple decades?

Well, there was exhaustion, and in that exhaustion there was satisfaction, and in that satisfaction there was relief, and in the wake of that relief, there was an absence of pressure, a pressure I had been living with for so long I’d either forgotten it was there, or had come to believe it was a natural state. Suddenly, there was empty silence, a strange vacuum, and it was six weeks before anything creative even stirred—my longest break from writing since my archaeology days.

Even with Gardens of the Moon having been written in the early ’90s, your rate of output has been phenomenal, with nine hefty novels written in the last, what, twelve or thirteen years? How have you managed to not burn out on the Malazan world, given how much of your life you’ve now spent in it?

Each novel was a single chapter in a vast story, a mega-novel if you will, which made each of them integral to the telling of that grander tale. Also, I made a point of varying tone, structure, and voice—through multiple points of view, mostly—to define and make distinct the intent of each novel. Knowing where it all had to end up, there was never any sense of losing interest or burning out. Instead, my main battle over these years has been keeping my reins tight, the beast well collected beneath me, and not succumbing to impatience. If anything, the greater the pressure to rush forward, the more measured I became. But in all honesty, it was savage and it took a lot out of me.

Knowing that some of the characters and settings date back to your shared gaming world with ICE [Ian Cameron Esslemont] in the ’80s, I wonder how much those characters or the overall story have changed since you started work on the books. Have your characters managed to change the story as you’ve been writing it, or vice versa?

Using characters from our gaming campaigns always felt like returning to the side of an old friend. Now that being said, there was always plenty of room for fleshing out their backgrounds and personalities, and then moving them forward, beyond their static existence in our memories; beyond the game world, in other words. Roleplaying a character is, if done mindfully, a fictional exercise, but so much of roleplaying is nonverbal and subtle: all the things people do in a social situation. Writing them as characters in stories meant going back to those times and kind of deconstructing them, all with the benefit of hindsight, of course. It’s too easy to decide on a character and then stick to it through hell or high water; the truth of all people, real or fictional, is that they are malleable, often comfortable holding contradictions in thinking or belief, and on occasion entirely unpredictable. The gaming taught us to respect the willfulness of characters, so we were always ready to run with things. There needs to be room, always, for spontaneity.

You and ICE have so many characters and plotlines woven through all your books—how do you keep track of everything? How do you keep the continuity consistent, across your own books and ICE’s? How do you make sure you’re picking up all the loose threads?

Well, remember, much of that “history” was gamed together. Interestingly, we often do not remember those sessions in quite the same way; so a lot of our communication these days is to confirm our recollection of events.

Of course, so much of that gamed history ended up providing the foundation stones for the houses we started building: Plot-wise, and especially now with the later books, we were each free to invent and elaborate as we wished. The challenge then was in assuring that neither of us overtly contradicted the other. Most of our discussions relate to repercussions and resonance. We stand with a pool of water between us and toss in stones, then study how and where the ripples collide, cross, and create perturbations.

Finally, we’re not afraid of loose threads left dangling (how I adore this jumble of metaphors). Life’s like that, and so is history. There’s no real beginning and no real end; it just goes on (until it becomes something else).

Following up on that, the timeline for the Malazan universe is simply massive. Are there any special challenges or pleasures you’ve found in telling a story spanning hundreds of thousands of years?

I think the answer to this question relates back to what I said earlier about resonance. We were both archaeologists. Resonance doesn’t just exist between objects; it projects through time as well. The question of where do things come from—things like attitudes, belief systems, faiths, combined with the misshaping effects of vast spans of time on knowledge—these subjects naturally fascinate us. As archaeologists, we dug to find out, and then we let our imaginations loose. It is, in a sense, a profession of empathy. Well-suited to translate into fiction, I think.

The challenge (and pleasure) as always lies in electing what details to choose, which ones are relevant, and how much weight can they carry? As much as possible, one hopes.

Nomadic tribes seem to be a major focus in the Malazan universe. Honestly, early on I had trouble keeping them all straight! While nomads have shown up in other fantasy worlds, it’s rare for them to play as prominent a role as they have in your stories. What’s behind that prominence?

Most of human prehistory and a fair chunk of its history is characterized by the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and later animal husbandry. It’s probably fair to say that we’d still be, one and all, hunter-gatherers, if we didn’t run out room and if we didn’t kill off most of the available game. It’s a common belief (blame neo-Marxist thinking on the hierarchy of cultural evolution) that the transition to farming was some kind of “advance,” with all the moral superiority implicit in that idea, and a product of enlightened choice. But if you look to where agriculture first emerged on this planet, you’ll quickly see (with a little digging) that these regions were ecologically fragile, and once the game was gone it was starve or improvise: and the one improvisation that worked was control: control of the game (domestication of animals) and then control of plant forage (domestication of wheat, etc). In that sense the only real difference between hunter-gathering and herding-farming, is one of control. In the former, one is mostly at the mercy of nature; for the latter, one ends up as the purveyor of nature. The notion of whether this was an “advance” is, I think, yet to be answered.

To answer your question: Why wouldn’t we fill our world with “nomads”? It’s a world where industrial progress has to a large extent been supplanted by magic; yet populations are still expanding, and entire cultures find themselves in the troubled hinterland of transition. Never a nice place: People will resist change even with a sword hanging over their heads. [Look at us: The climate’s heading into chaos but we still drive our cars, still package everything in plastic, still extract non-renewable resources at a prodigious rate, and on a day to day basis, our behavior has not changed one iota. So, we have an entire species with its collective head stuck in the tarsands.] My point is not this rant, however. Rather, it’s to say that cultures in transition are always intrinsically more interesting than stagnant ones. Look at every place of conflict globally and you’ll find cultures in transition. It’s all ugly, but it makes for great fiction (which, really, isn’t fiction at all, is it?).

Along the same lines, the relationships between “civilized” expansionist societies and “barbarian” indigenous societies figure in your stories many times. But you seem to work hard to keep from glorifying or romanticizing either side in their conflicts—for example, Hull Beddict seems at first to be a heroic figure for his willingness to fight his own people in order to defend the native tribes the Letherii exploit, but he turns out to be enabling another evil in Rhulad’s Tiste Edur. What drives this portrayal?

It’s far too easy to glorify the progressives when you are one, while romanticizing the sorry victims even as you trample all over them to get at their land and resources: People, to put it another way, who are struggling to cope or adapt to a new world order (said world order invariably imposed upon them through implicit or explicit violence—take your pick, both have and are happening even now). Although it’s probably a natural inclination for us to repeatedly (and maybe retrogressively) categorize our world, and world-view, all as an exercise in simplification, because most of us are, given the choice, intellectually lazy. If we weren’t, our heads would explode. But there are obvious risks in that simplification—it arrives like a final coat of paint hiding countless layers of significant detail. Worse, intellectual laziness is addictive, and has a hardening effect: namely, the fostering of prejudice and dogma.

While it’s scarier to advocate complexity, at least it’s a humbling exercise, and the person who lacks humility is incapable of compassion.

I saw in the conversation between you, ICE, and commenters on Tor.com that you’ve got a title for the first book of the Kharkanas series, The Forge of Darkness. Does that mean it’s your next project? Have you started writing it?

I’m about five chapters into it, yes.

Do you have any plans for writing outside the Malazan universe?

Sure, but apart from some early short fiction soon to be resurrected, and a couple non-fantasy novels already out there, it all comes down to time.

These last three questions are just ones I couldn’t resist asking when given the chance! Are you ever going to run out of Braven Tooth-style Malazan soldier names?

I’m sure there’s a finite limit to the number of Malazan recruits finding themselves under Braven’s tutorage and thus subject to his naming conventions but we have no intention of finding it.

Why do you keep killing Toc the Younger?

Toc the Younger and his fate is the more “humanized” corollary to Rhulad Sengar. What happens to a soul when it dies and is repeatedly resurrected?

Is there anything Karsa Orlong can’t kill?

His self-confidence.

***

Thanks go out to Mr. Erikson for his time and thoughts—be sure to check out his novels if you haven’t already.

Beginning with her first short story—a darkly humorous slice of weird fiction called “Eustace” from The Ninth Pan Book of Horror Stories in 1968—she has created a wide body of work spanning multiple genres including horror, fantasy, historical fiction, romance, science fiction, and various amalgamations of these. One could argue that  she is the definition of a true “cross genre” author. In addition to writing various genres, she demonstrates further range by writing for both adults and children. Since the publication of her first short story, she has gone on to publish more than seventy novels and 250 short stories.

In The Flat-Earth Cycle, for which she is perhaps best known, Tanith Lee created a fully realized fictional world of massive scope. Thanks to the sheer size and ambition on display in these books, they are often favorably compared to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. Like in her story “The God Orkrem”—which appears this month in Fantasy Magazine—her Flat-Earth Cycle showcases a world in which gods directly interact with the lives of men, sometimes in terrible and frightening ways.

In her story, “The God Orkrem,” we see Tanith Lee stretching her writing muscles between genres yet again. While on the surface the story is a second-world fantasy, in some ways it is also a tale of cosmic horror. It could even be read as a very human and very real philosophic or theological meditation on the nature of suffering and pain itself. Heavy stuff for fantasy, a genre all too often unfairly derided as escapist by nature.

Below, Tanith Lee answers some of my questions concerning “The God Orkrem” and provides insight into her writing process.

***

Your literary career to date has been quite prolific and spanned many genres. What is the secret source of your seemingly endless inspiration? In particular, where did “The God Orkrem” originate?

I love writing, and ideas, thank goodness, seem everywhere around. My husband (writer/artist John Kaiine) is also an ideas factory! And several of the motivations of stories written in recent years owe something, or sometimes a lot, to inspirational elements he has thought of. Not this particular story however. It simply arrived, as they so often do. There was no special trigger. Just suddenly the angry and bitter voice of the hero was in my mind, ready to tell me all.

While a fantasy, “The God Orkrem” deals with some pretty heavy subject matter in the theology and worldbuilding as presented. This is a thought-provoking dark fantasy that pulls no punches. Yet it is also highly entertaining. How do you balance philosophy and the need to propel a narrative? What is the best way to transmit ideas without losing sight of a satisfying story arc?

I have to say, truthfully, I really don’t know. The structure of a tale, along with all its parts, including the characters, turns up adjacent to the first idea. I can’t analyze my work, or barely. I think reading a lot of all types of literature has helped me grasp some of those things you mention. I agree with you though. Not for the first time, I found elements of what I was writing quite shocking.

Crones figure prominently in “The God Orkrem.” They point the way forward and provide cryptic warnings for the future. What is it about crones that make them such an enduring figure in fantasy, folklore, and legend?

Crones fascinate me, and they haunt many of my books and shorter works. Some are mad old hags, others evil to their last grey hair. But mostly I tend to see them as the archetype of the Wisewoman, ancient in a mediaeval or earlier time-frame, probably about the age I am now—60s—witches and healers, powerful and potentially removed from the everyday of the (then) female life—mating, reproducing, caring for males and children. (There is a strong group of these in my LionWolf Trilogy, The Crarrowin, whose older members are true crones.) Maybe it is, too, they’re being finally enabled to stand outside the virgin-wife-mother career, given all or most of their gender that points them up as powerful. They are, ”useless” and still alive. They had better have a purpose, and/or a power. They represent (seemingly, one wonders how truly) the Sexless Woman (as also the Maiden can, at the opposite pole). Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.

Speaking of crones, were the crones in this story inspired by any specific crones from literature? If so, which ones?

They may have been, but I don’t recall if so. They, like the rest, simply appeared before me, as before the hero.

Ultimately, “The God Orkrem” was an examination of the very nature of pain itself. It is explained that in the world of this story that pain is necessary and unavoidable, much like in our own world. Why use a fantasy setting to examine pain?

I didn’t, and don’t, set out to examine any theme in quite that way, ever. Yet, as you moot it, why shouldn’t fantasy provide the setting? Fantasy should be as ”real” and lifelike as a contemporary novel or story. In some respects, possibly, a little more so. The only way you’d have a fantasy world without pain, examinable or not, is if that place were deliberately designed—not by the writer, necessarily, but by the characters—to be a pain-free environment. Meanwhile, of course pain exists, and tends to get reflected into almost everything. One of the ways, no doubt, we try to cope with it. On the other hand, the fact of pain being necessary is debatable—and certainly so in “The God Orkrem.”

Thank you so much for answering my questions! Just one last thing: What’s next for Tanith Lee? Do you have any upcoming publications or appearances you would like to announce for your readers?

Thank you for asking such interesting ones.

New Lee things coming out are the on-going re-releases of all the Flat Earth books from Norilana, and also the Birthgrave and Storm Lord Trilogies ditto. I’m also working on a new Paradys collection of short novels and novellas. I’ll have more news on that when it’s done. Aside from these some of my contemporary novels (which are, I always say, much weirder than my fantasy) are being launched by Immanion Press. The first, Greyglass, will be around, I think, in about a month.

For me then, and also now, only one word any more can exist:

God.

The god Orkrem.

***

I think three seasons had fled over the lands, and by then I was far away from anything I had ever known. The leaves were falling thick and red as blood when the old woman met me on the path.

“Where you go, warrior?” she asked, flirting with her old eyes as crones do, as if she is your mother, or your aunt.

“North,” I said.

“Oh,” said she. “To the mountain towns.”

It was beyond the towns I was heading, but I nodded. Then she said, “Watch for lizards, warrior.”

“Yes, then.”

“Never be impatient,” she said, “with any that would help. Watch for lizards.”

“Thank you, pretty auntie,” carefully I said. For even then, sometimes I would take care.

But she only scowled. Behind her face of tree bark and black pearl eyes, I glimpsed a maiden with skin like snow and a rose for a mouth.

Then she was gone, and so was I.

Winter was coming on, and I had reached again another land when I met the second woman. And she was so ancient she made the first like a girl. She had no hair and her flesh was lacquered ivory. She was formed of bone and briar.

“Well then, warrior,” she said. “These mountains are high enough.”

I was past all the towns by then. The clouds often descended and touched the ground. I stood now in a cloud with her, and she and I peered at each other. Her eyes were not black pearl but the heads of white vipers—also blind she must be.

“Not quite so high,” I found I said.

“So you must go still higher? Only the sky is there.” I offered nothing. Then she said: “But the upper air is a country too. Beware of lions as you go.”

Out it came before I had rein on it. “Not lizards then. Lions.”

“Oh, there are lizards,” she said. “But there are lions too.”

“They will be no worse than life.”

“Only one thing is worse,” she softly said.

This was no question, nor did I answer. But in my head a voice spoke loudly as a beaten metal shield. The god is worse.

He. Orkrem is worse.

And she nodded, the ancient woman, as if she heard. And then she said, “If you were my grandson I would lesson and warn and train you, I would. But he died.”

“Men die.”

“And women die too,” she replied. “The earth is all to die in, not to live. Not many know. But you have learned that, warrior?”

“Yes.”

“Be on your way then, son.”

I was not her son, nor her grandson. But her words cut me with the sharp blade of a terrible and unexpected tenderness. Kindness I did not want at all.

In the labyrinth of agony, no beauty must ever enter, not one single whisper of compassion. Or steel breaks like glass.

***

The mountains climbed like the crested backs of dragons, and I strove on. I knew very well where I must get to, if it were real.

Oh, since I was an infant I had heard them preach and sing of it.

In the stone temple I had sat with the other children, and by us our own true gods, our fathers and our mothers, all our kin. There we were instructed by the priests.

The world had been made for us by gods, of whom Orkrem was the greatest and the most inventive. He it was who had formed the clay of the earth, and dressed it with cunning pits and traps and varied dangers. He it was too who had fashioned humankind out of some supernal wax, forming our ancestors with slow, spiteful pinches of his fingers that had viciously hurt them. So that, ever after, we knew pain first and best, and our own babies were borne in pain, screaming and weeping even before they had the water for tears in them.

Orkrem was a harsh god.

Not a single priest said why—or knew not why to say. But the earth was to be our school of being harmed. We were to suffer here, and endure suffering. Other lesser gods, it was well known, had tried to make the earth beautiful, adorning it with charming and reassuring things—the loveliness of forests and seas, dawn and sunset, moon and stars, music of birdsong, flowers, honey and wine, and even the best gift of all, which was love. Animals too they had assembled in the world. But Orkrem, when he saw that, decreed animals must then feed on each other, and humankind must feed on the animals. To ensure the needfulness of that, Orkrem next adapted us so that we should have a physical necessity to devour meat, without which mostly we would not be healthy. Therefore even the animals came to harm and pain, and usually through us. Meanwhile Orkrem made certain otherwise we might not often, on any account, enjoy the beauties of the earth. He sent us diseases and anguishes; he sent us suspicion and jealousy and dread and murder. Even love he soured, turning it like cream, so it should fret us, and drive us mad in loss or denial. Suffer we must, and endure we must, and in the end die we must, most often in extremes of horror and agony. For pain was what we entered the earth to know, in all its forms, of body, mind and soul. Pain and despair.

And all the while, from screaming weeping birth to weeping shrieking death, we must praise, worship and bless Orkrem, who was easily offended. So that any slight wrong-doing we committed, even as a reaction to his evil woundings, or in desperation, having no other recourse once his will was enacted on us, we should after death be punished for.

With such awareness I grew up. As all have grown who live upon this earth.

Though, when young, incredulously, I doubted it. I have no notion as to why, the proofs were already before me. But I was in my spring. My blood-red fall, my winter, still to come.

So Orkrem, the Great Artist, set on to show me the veracity of priestly teachings.

At seven years of age I saw my sister, along with others, perish of a scabrous plague. At ten I watched my mother die in childbirth, and the baby within her. At twelve an enemy came and destroyed our village. I witnessed my father’s death. I and one brother were dragged away as slaves. In another place we were brutally versed in the arts of battle. We, like fools, and having no choice, allowed this, and came to shine. For these our conquering enemies then we grew up to fight as their champions, and helped win for them great renown. Freed at last due to our value, we achieved riches. We lived friendly among them, making ourselves forget they had slain our kin and were our foes. One day, I saw a young woman in the fields, gathering the sky-blue flowers for garlands. When she turned and gazed at me our hearts began to beat with the same tempo. It was the gift of the other god, who had brought love into the world, and at that time I so credited his power. Her skin was like snow and her mouth a rose, but her eyes were like the blue cornflowers. For her heart, Orkrem had made it. It was wax.

A few months after our wedding, she told me she was with child by me. And I rejoiced.

But as it happened, it was the child of my brother, since at him too had she gazed. And their hearts had also beaten as one. And this not fifty days after first I had her.

There are always those who will see and tell. They had seen, and soon they told. When the baby struggled out into the world it had the color of his hair, not mine. I let it live, as it screamed and tearlessly wept. Nor, as she screamed and shed her tears like a waterfall, did I kill her. Him though, my brother, him I meant to kill. But at the last I could not do it. I had killed so many men in my trade of war. And I had pictured his death, my brother’s, too well and too often. There is some other lesser god who creates this magic. His name is weakness.

Then I must run. I ran.

Some while after, in another place again, I worked the land, and with the horses, and going one day to a temple I confessed my crime of hateful blasphemy. For this they did not punish me. They had no need. They told me Orkrem would himself see to it, since I had cursed his name. The world was made to torture men, and they must suffer it all and always bless him. One step from this path, and he would chastise them worse, during life, and after life, forever.

Later, I went on my way from that country. For years I kept my wandering course.

One other woman I met in that time, and loved. She was unlike the other, being dark, and her eyes the color of good beer. We lived in some pleasure with each other half a year, before the scabrous plague came on in those parts. Walking back beside me from the field one night, she suddenly fell down without a prelude, and was dead by daybreak. I saw to her funeral and went away. From the moment I had met with her, I believe by then, I guessed she and I would not have long.

I suffered, and all other men suffered, and sometimes, if only briefly, I or they prospered. And as I went on through all of that, I noted how most other men, and women too, proceeded always in the same fashion. All told, you could not press a slender stick between them for the misery and injustice to which they fell prey, and which in turn they dealt. We were all of us equal. We were damned.

Finally, about my thirtieth year, I reached a temple of another sort. They took me in when, all vitality spent, I dropped like the dead at their threshold. And they were kind to me—kindness which, even at that hour, not yet had I learned was the cruelest and sharpest of life’s blades to cut and disable.

Presently the priest said quietly, “For us, we believe in that one god who brought love on to the earth. Believe in him, and nothing can defeat you.”

“What of death?” I asked him.

“Death least of all,” he told me. So sweet his face, and inwardly clean, as if his inmost soul had been washed in purest water. But less than a year after, I saw that face transfixed by a black-bleeding arrow, and all about a robber horde besieged the sacred house. I held him as in agony—what else—he died. And his weeping forgiveness of his god, the god of love, shattered what was left of any heart inside me.

When all had fallen then, black and burned, I fought away from the scene. And so went on with my wandering, going always north, and ever upward on the sloping land. For they had taught us in my youth that the master god, Orkrem, resides on the floor of the skies.

And Orkrem was, at that last, my only destination. If ever I had had any other goal, or could have done, seeing the ruling god is this world, any and all of it, the beginning and the end.

***

The tops of the mountains rose above the cloud, which I had not expected. The mountaintops were gray as sightless mirrors, and the skies, now winter began to stir its iron wings, far grayer.

Below, by day, those lower clouds yet nestled like forests of gray ash.

Above, by night, the stars were the razor tips of knives and swords, burnished and pointing through, every one hungrily focused on some human heart.

When last I had seen a green tree it had made me think of sickness, plague. When blue I had seen, the sky reminded me of faithless eyes.

And red was blood.

***

A last old woman met me on the track. And she was so old she had been wiped of anything, like as if she might have been a baby stretched like a string, and so peculiarly tall. Though her eyes were like dull yellow coins.

“None otherwhere to go, warrior,” said she, “but up in the sky.”

“Then that must be my road, granny,” I told her. “No use to warn you then,” she said. “For you were warned of lizards and lions and paid no heed.”

“Nor have I seen a single lizard since. Let alone any lion.”

She spat on the earth, but her spit was wholesome, and only like a drop of bright water. It was almost like a courtesy when she spat. A tenderness that had no kindness, and could be borne.

“There have been lizards aplenty,” she said. “They have run under your feet, and over your body as you lay sleeping. And through your body they have run, as if through a long cave or a deserted house, and through your brain they have run and in and out your dreams, as if through a high room in a tower. And many their lions have followed you, smearing the waste of their kill in your footsteps, and breathing their hot stinking breath into your nose and mouth when you slumbered, and stood on you they have, heavy as mill-stones, and torn your skin with their claws.” She sighed, rustily. “But you saw and heard and felt nothing of any of it. The heavens crashed on your head and you missed it. The sea came up the hill and drowned you and you never even felt its wet. Go on then. Go up the sky.”

“I shall, granny.”

“I am never your grandmother. I am only the very final thing of humankind you will see before you meet your god.”

Then she was gone, and so was I.

But I had learned not one thing from her, as nor had I from the other two.

***

No man can climb up the sky.

Yet I reached the topmost peak and stood on its flat table, staring upward.

All round, beneath, the lands fell away together, but they were like a game-board, with their colors of plague and faithlessness and blood. The world no more real for me.

In the sky the higher clouds ascended like a stairway. I stretched up my arms, and for hours on end I bellowed, till my voice was gone. I called his name: Orkrem! Orkrem! And then I whispered his name: Orkrem.

Night bloomed its black poison-flower and the stabs of the stars pierced out.

Then a wind woke in the core of the sky.

It came forth on me like a giant bird, a dragon. Roaring, it clutched me, and whirled me off the peak.

No longer, me, with a voice to blaspheme him, only my whisper to say now he would dash me to earth and break me. But this was not the way of it.

The sky wind thrashed me not down but upward, through the cloud and through the basement of the sky itself, and flung me headlong on the floor of a huge echoing chamber that was black as the void, yet lit as if with torches.

And when the wind was gone, and the noise of it emptied from my ears, I looked and saw I was in some colossal place like a temple of pillars, but carved out of the night itself. Far away down a long avenue, the slender moon was rising, on its side like a white boat. Swollen planets the colors of sickness and betrayal and war moved slowly through the vault.

I was in Orkrem’s house. The house of the god.

He did not come in for a while. Or he may have been there anyway, unseen and unfelt. He might have hung in the tiniest drip of moonlight, like a spider in its web. Or curled about the pillars like a sort of night mist, visibly invisible to me.

But then he did come in.

He made no sound. He did not even manifest—appear, as a flame would, struck all at once on a lamp. He was not. Then he was.

I pulled myself off the floor of his house, which was a solid floor, like marble—but it was air. I stood and looked at him, in his face.

He was high as the house, wide as the house. Yet too he was only the height of a gigantic man, not that much—a span or two—taller and bigger in frame than I. But he was the lizard, and the lion. I can describe him no otherwise. I fail to be able to describe him. Only for that—lizard and lion—or that his face was a shout like the rumble of an earthquake. And his eyes put out the light of the razor stars.

And then my voice returned.

Did he give it me? For he spoke to me, and he asked What do you want of me?

And then I bellowed once more at him, bellowed as out on the mountain before the wind lifted me up.

“Orkrem—give me my life!”

The conflagration of his eyes flickered.

You live.

“No,” I answered. I knew how to speak it. I had rehearsed my words so long. “No human thing can live in your world. Your world is death-alive, but life it never is. We are born into death, and live in death, until we die—in death—and if, after all these dyings, we are with you—then still it is death. Death through eternity, agony and anguish, terror and despair. Orkrem—give me my life.”

When I grew silent I heard how the temple house rocked and rang from my uproar, and from my rage and grief, that too. No single man, even one lifted into the sky, could make such a passion and din. Instead it seemed I had brought with me the outcry of every human thing, and every beast, all the complaint of the earth that Orkrem had made for us to suffer horror in.

Time passed when I was done. But time, though still somewhat it seems I had measured it, meant nothing to me.

A moment or an hour or a night or a season went by.

And then the god was beside me, so near I might have stretched my hand and touched his lizard-lion form, or his face of earthquake and volcano.

I never touched.

But he put up one hand, or as it might be one scaled and taloned paw. He passed this once across the visage of his godhead.

And then I saw. What…what did I truly see?

I saw his boiling and frustrated anger and his wretched hurt, I saw his tears that dropped like blazing rains. I saw into his mouth to his tongue bitten through in agony beyond bearing.

To me then, soft as snow, he said this:

“Your life I gave you, nor therefore can I give you it again. But as you have seen, and dared to tell me, my task I have Failed at. For this then, you shall have my task. You shall be me. You shall be a god. You shall make and plan and direct and rule and correct and master the world. It is all for you to do. To change as you will, to repair as you can, to alter hate to love and misery to happiness. To make a paradise on earth. It is with you. And now, at last, at last, I shall have peace.” With this he left me. But not I him.

A vast while I balanced there on heaven’s floor, between aether and earth. Enormous metamorphoses shook me, with a hideous gentleness. Yet as I took on the mantle and the sacraments of the immortal life he had cast off on me, I must consider what I had been shown.

Judging by what was evident in his wounds, and his wild prolonging sorrow, it must seem he had writhed in that way for aeons. He had not then, surely, as our teachings had it, begun with ill intent to us—or why mourn so, as if at the ruin, not the glory, of his work. Worse, it must seem he had been unable to put anything right, however the ruin had occurred. More likely I felt it to be, that at the start of all, he had tried to make all perfect in the world, and we perfect also, that we could be glad, and create there nothing ourselves but fine things.

Yet some happening there was—either in him, through the exhaustion of all his ceaseless care and labor, or even in us independently of him. And from that came the worm that gnawed on the honeycomb, till all was wormwood ever after. And he, god though he was, could not heal such sores.

That much I had sensed in the single instant when he uttered his ultimate word, which had been peace.

I have no means to grasp, even now I have not, if this were some ending trick he played on me. Or some beginning trick of my mind, transformed so fast from clay to supernal fire.

Nevertheless, just as my huge shout had done, that subtle ending word echoed on and on, here in the god house which is now mine, and which I have grown already great to fill.

***

I stand on the sky and the planets turn and the stars rip their long rents through the night. The moon will sink. The sun will rise.

I am the god.

I am the maker and master.

Before me I behold multitudinous possibilities, vista on vista, world on world. But so then, once, must he too have seen them, and tried them—maybe even to the giving of the gift of love—but he had failed. And then he wept and screamed and had bitten through his tongue. Until, finding me, he has taken me up, and shed on me the whole of what he could not do.

Such power is mine. Will I then work success here, where Orkrem never could, now I am Orkrem?

I am God.

I am Almighty.

I am afraid.

We, as (presumably) humans, working our way through the workaday world with its taxes and wars and dishes that need to be washed or else there’s going to be science in the kitchen….

We want out. You know it, we know it, and big famous writers know it, too. This is why so many of them craft vastly detailed worlds which could never exist, full of people who could never exist, and then open the doors wide to the rest of us.

Who hasn’t thought of shooting out the eyes of the deserving with an Elven bow? Or of casting a bitching firestorm spell which takes out all your enemies in one crispy fwoosh? Or, hell, kicking back with some applejack and some seriously mellow….uh. Pipeweed? We’ve all been there. But you should actually be really, really glad you haven’t been there at all.

Here’s why.

***

1. Bad Things Happen To Good People. Like, Even More Than Usual.

Sure, we all know about the ancestral homes being destroyed, and the bosom companions being tragically-but-not-too-messily killed on the epic journey, and the shocking betrayals, and the terrible monsters who all want to eat you, and the epic journey itself being kind of ass—

Are you listening? No?

Well, let’s take George R. R. Martin’s unfinished series A Song of Ice and Fire. You’ve got your immense and fascinating world full of exciting people and tantalizing powers and frightening creatures—dun dun dun—from beyond the grave.

And you’ve got the upright, moral, mostly likable central family being, in one case quite literally, broken to messy bits. You’ve got your crippling falls, your unjust imprisonment, your terrible beatings, your life sentence of fear and pain and endless labor. Hell, you even have a dead puppy.

Do you want your puppy to die? Do you?

Not a good person? Well, you’re screwed, too. One guy gets his hand chopped off. Another gets molten gold poured down his screaming throat. People lose teeth—and not in the dentist way. Assassins get bound to incredibly violent little girls. Soup is used in ways I simply cannot recommend. Seriously, there’s just no good in fantasy.

And then there’s the fact that—

***

2. You’re Probably Not Going To Get Laid For A Long, Long Time.

Now, we know, we know, there’s such a thing as imagination, and pants—happying things happening off-screen, but let’s get real, people:

Epic journeys? Are epic.

Meaning they have a lot of miles, or in the parlance of the genre, leagues in them.

Meaning they take a long, long time.

Tolkien’s Fellowship may have only lasted a few months, and Frodo’s journey only a little less than a year (officially, and, no, we don’t buy it, either), but there was still the journey back home for everyone, and the clean-up process, and the wedding planning.

Yes, wedding planning. If you’re like most people, you get uncomfortable when you hear the Bridezilla theme music. How in Sauron’s name do you think you’ll feel when an elf asks you to be patient because everything has to be just right? The most famous couple in the The Lord of the Rings was Aragorn the mortal man and Arwen the elf. On their wedding day, Aragorn was ninety and Arwen was over three thousand years old. The two of them had been engaged for over thirty years.

Remember, kids: Old-school fantasies loved them some virgin brides. You do, too, don’t you?

Next!

***

3. And You Think Religion Causes You Problems On Earth?

You can’t swing a dead cleric without hitting a novel in which the Church, whichever Church it happens to be, has seized control of entire continents. Hell, entire races.

To put that in perspective, take a moment and think of the worst, most unjustly repressive church you know and imagine having to be a member of it from the time of your birth until you finally kick. Your entire family are members. All of your friends are members. That cute boy with the glasses? A member. That chick from the other side of the world who trades quilting patterns with your best friend? A member. You can leave the church just as soon as you want to…so long as you also leave your entire species behind, too.

That’s what happens with Drizzt Do’Urden, from R.A. Salvatore’s many popular novels set in the Forgotten Realms campaign universe, when he decides he has enough of the species-wide Lolth worship. For those of you not familiar with Lolth, she’s a bloodthirsty, evil spider goddess who commands her subjects not only to hunt down and sacrifice members of other sentient species, but also to sacrifice members of their own families to her—the more torturously, the better. So, you know, go Drizzt! He had the courage of his convictions, and when it came right down to it, he left.

His entire species.

Forever.

Except for the ones who decided to hunt him down for his apostasy. Yeah, that’s a thing.

Good luck with that, buddy.

***

4.You’re Probably Going To Become A Horrible Person.

Some people think that being dropped into a fantasy realm is an excellent excuse to immediately enrich themselves by hook or by crook. Others use it as an excuse to make war on innocents, and ravish the first comely lass they spot. We’ve all read stories in which people choose the second option, and tend to pat ourselves on the back for not being like that. Odds are if you’re put in a world of fantasy, you are not going to be a better person for it. By the time you get home—if you get home—you may not even recognize yourself. And other people might not, either.

Let’s kick it old-school, people: Lemuel Gulliver, of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, is the hero of arguably the first fantasy novel written in the English language. He begins his adventures as a cheerfully optimistic young man. He’s happily married and considers his employment as a seafaring surgeon a life of pleasant adventure.

After Gulliver thinks he’s made friends with the Lilliputians, he makes the mistake of refusing to help them invade and conquer their neighbors. For this crime he is charged with treason and sentenced, by the tiny conquistadors, to have his eyes put out and starved to death. The Brobdingnagians, the giant inhabitants of his next would-be sanctuary, place him in his very own freakshow and make him perform so much he nearly dies. He does find a nearly perfect society among the Houyhnhnms, nature worshipping horses, but then he’s exiled by them simply for having a human shape. And it’s not just the fantastic beings he’s the first European to meet who break him down. Over the course of the novel, he’s marooned, attacked by pirates, and mutinied against. After each voyage he finds himself increasingly cynical until even his own family sickens him.

Nobody wants to grow up to be the recluse who hates other humans so much that they spend their days chatting up horses—or, you know, their fifty or sixty cats—and being considered crazy by members of their own species.

Did we mention that no one’s going to believe you about the talking horses? Because they so totally won’t.

***

5. You’re Probably Going To Die. And So Are All Your Friends. Seriously. All Of You.

What’s an epic fantasy without epic battles against epic enemies with epic numbers?

A war is even more epic than a battle, because wars have lots of battles. And since evil is attractive (the leather alone!), it’s completely understandable that the bad guys may have a lot more soldiers. Really powerful soldiers, even.

Not everyone is gonna survive these battles.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Deadhouse Gates, the second book in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Humans die. Shapeshifters die. Wizards die. Women die. Children die. And, because Erikson’s apparently an…egalitarian, gods and immortals die.

One of the plot points of the book is that due to an uprising, a collection of refugees must be led by a small, hard-bitten force of soldiers across the length of a country in order to reach the one safe place in the world. Early in the journey, several wounded soldiers are sent ahead by boat.

Every last one of the rest dies. Every. Last. One.

They’re hounded by enemy soldiers. They’re forced to ration food and water until they starve or drop from thirst. And when, after all their suffering, the survivors make it to their destination, hundreds die within sight of the city they were trying to reach. Excuse me, within bowshot of the city they were trying to reach.

Sure, you might make it to the afterlife, or get resurrected, or even skip gaily past death into godhood (we’re almost sure that’s how it works), but you’re still not safe. Ghosts die.

Yeah, we said it. You step into fantasy, and you’re not even safe as a ghost.

Here, have our copy of Goodnight, Moon. Why don’t you start over again?

Stories of werewolves date back to ancient literature. Lycaon, an archetypical werewolf, shows up in Greek mythology. Herodotus, in The Histories, relates the story of the Neuri, a tribe whose members would shift from wolf and then back again during certain days of the year. What do you think it is about werewolves that make them such an enduring and popular figure in folklore and legend?

We have all had the experience of being so angry that we say something or do something that hurts the people that we love. I think the idea that we have the potential for a monstrous self is very compelling. And the motif of animal transformation is one that exists in folklore the world over because of its resonance and flexibility. The story of a werewolf can be a story of getting in touch with our passionate selves, our inner selves, our instinctive selves, or our monstrous selves. The same legends, in fact, can be told and retold from all those angles.

While writing “The Dog King,” did you draw upon any particular werewolf legends for inspiration? If so, which legends?

There is a legend about a nobleman whose people are being ravaged by a wolf. He goes off with some of his best hunters looking for the beast. They come upon it eventually, and although it gets away, they are able to cut off its paw. The nobleman tucks it away in a bag and goes home. When he arrives, he learns that his wife is ill. Going into his chamber, he finds her hunched by the fire. When he gets close, he sees that she’s missing her hand and trying to staunch the bleeding.

“The Dog King” is as much a story of dysfunctional relationships as it is a dark fantasy. In fact, the true terror in this story comes not so much from the beasts themselves as it derives from humanity’s relationship with the beasts. Was there a real-world correlation you had in mind while writing this story?

This was a story that I knew for a long time—the characters were part of a novel I started years ago, so they themselves seemed very real to me. In fact, the story was hard to write because unlike other stories where I discover who the characters are as I go along, I felt like I was trying to tell a story I already knew so well that I became afraid that all I knew would overwhelm the story.

Speaking of dysfunctional relationships, there is a very real human element present throughout the narration. When writing fantasy, how should one utilize real world feelings to create an identifiable realism while working within such fantastic settings?

I think that the more real we can make certain elements—the emotion, the motives, the dirty and messy and complicated parts—the more real the fantastical setting will seem.

Just one last question: What’s next for Holly Black? Do you have any upcoming publications you would like to announce?

I had a new book come out this year, White Cat. It’s the first book in a new series, The Curse Workers, and the second book, Red Glove, comes out this April. They’re a little different for me. They focus on a kid named Cassel, a grifter from a family of grifters in a world where magic is illegal and controlled by the mob. I’m calling them my mobster fairy tale books.

When whole towns are found empty in the spring, doors ajar, bed linens smeared with dirt and fur, cups and plates still on the tables, white bones piled in the hearth, people say these things and many other things besides.

But in the city of Dunbardain, behind the high walls and iron gates, ladies wear bejeweled wolf toes to show boldness and advertise fecundity. Men have statues of wolves commissioned to grace their parlors. And everyone cheers for wolves at the dog fights. City people like to feel far from the little towns and their empty, dirt-smeared beds.

Each year, wolves are caught in traps or, very occasionally, a litter is discovered and they are brought to the city to die spectacularly. Arn wolves are striking, black and slim as demons, with the unsettling habit of watching the audience as they tear out the throats of their opponents. City dwellers are made to feel both uneasy and inviolable by the dog fights; the caged wolf might be terrible, but it is caged. And the dog fights are majestic tented affairs, with the best bred dogs from all parts of the world as challengers. Expensive and exotic foods perfume the air, lulling one into the sense that danger is just another alluring spice.

Not to be outdone by his subjects, the king of Dunbardain obtained his own wolf pup and has trained it to be his constant companion. He calls it Elienad. It is quite a coup to have one, not unlike making the son of a great foreign lord one’s slave. The wolf has very nice manners, too. He rests beneath the king’s table, eats scraps of food daintily from the king’s hand, and lets the ladies of the court ruffle his thick, black fur.

***

The velvet drapes of the tablecloth hang like bed curtains around the wolf who lolls there among the satin and bejeweled slippers of courtiers and foreign envoys.

Under the table of the king is a place of secrets. Letters are passed, touches are given or sometimes taken, silverware is stolen, and threats are made there, while above the table everyone toasts and grins. But the king has a secret, too.

The wolf watches, and his liquid eyes take it all in. This dark place is nothing to the magnificent glittering ballrooms or even the banquet hall itself with its intricate murals and gilt candelabras, but here is his domain. He knows the lore of under the table and could recite it back to anyone that asked, although only one person ever does.

A woman sitting beside Lord Borodin reaches her hand down. A fat ruby glistens as she holds out a tiny wing of quail. Grease slicks her fingers.

Once, Elienad took a bitter-tasting rasher of bacon from Lord Nikitin and was sick for a week. He knows he should learn from that encounter, but the smell of the food makes his mouth water, and he takes the wing as gently as he can. The tiny bones crunch easily between his teeth, filling his mouth with the taste of salt and marrow. It wakes his appetite, makes his stomach hurt with the desire to tear, to rend. The woman allows him to lick her hand clean.

***

There is a boy who lives in the castle of Dunbardain, although no servant is quite sure in which room he sleeps. He dresses too shabbily to be a nobleman’s son; he does not wear the livery of a page nor has he the rags of a groom. His tutors are scholars who have been disgraced or discredited: drunks and lunatics who fall asleep during his lessons. His hair is too long and his breeches are too tight. No one has any idea who his mother is or why he is allowed to run wild in a palace.

***

When they start dying, it is the master of the dog fights who is first accused. After all, if he allowed one of the wolves to get free, he should have let the guard know. But he claims that all his wolves are chained in their cages and offers to show anyone who doesn’t believe him. Even as he stands over the body of the first child, with her guts torn out of her body and gobbets bitten out of her flesh, he argues that it can’t be one of his wolves.

“Look at all these partial bites,” he says, pointing with a silver cane as he covers his nose with a scented handkerchief. “It didn’t know how to kill. You think one of my wolves would win if they hesitated like that?”

His assistant, who is still young enough to become attached to the dogs when they are pups and cries himself to sleep when one of them dies, walks three steps off to vomit behind a hedgerow.

With the second child, there are no hesitation marks, nor with the third or the fourth. Stories of dark, liquid shapes outside windows and whispers through locks spread through the city like a fever.

“Whosoever kills the beast,” the king proclaims, “he will rule after me.”

There are a group of knights there at the announcement, one of whom the king favors. The king knew Toran’s father and has watched over the boy as he grew into the fierce looking young man standing before him. Toran has killed wolves before, in the north. Everyone knows the king hopes it will be Toran who kills this wolf and takes the crown.

As the others are leaving, Toran walks toward the king. The king’s wolf bares his teeth and makes a sound, deep in his throat. The knight hesitates.

“Stop that, Elienad,” the king says, knocking his knee into the wolf’s muzzle. Courtiers stare. Everyone thinks the same thought and the king knows it, flushes.

“He is always with you, is he not?” Toran asks. The king narrows his eyes, furious, until he realizes that Toran is giving him a chance to speak without a protestation seeming like a sign of guilt.

“Of course he is,” says the king. “With me or locked up.” This is not true, but he says it with such authority that it seems true. Besides, the courtiers will tell one another, later, when the king is gone. Besides, the king’s wolf would be seen slipping back into the palace. The king’s wolf would surely have killed a nearby child. The killer could not be the wolf they have fed and cosseted and stroked.

Elienad sits, chews on the fur around one paw like it itches. His gaze rests on the ground.

Toran nods, unsure about whether he should have spoken. The king nods too, once, with a slight smile.

“Walk with me,” the king says.

The two men walk together down one of the labyrinthine hallways with the wolf trotting close behind.

***

“It is time to send him away,” the king’s chamberlain said softly. He is old and always chilled; he sits close to the fire, rubbing his knuckles as though he is washing his hands over and over again. “Or fight him. He’d make a good fighter.”

“Elienad hasn’t killed anyone,” the king said. “And he’s useful. You can’t deny that.”

The chamberlain served the king’s father and used to give the king certain looks when he was being a particularly obstinate child. The chamberlain gives him one of those looks now.

The king is no longer a child. He pours himself more wine and waits.

“Only commoners have been killed, yet,” the chamberlain finally says with an exasperated sigh. “Were a noble to die and it to come to light just what it is you’ve been keeping—”

The king takes a long drink from his cup.

The old man looks at the fire. “You should never have kept him for so long. It has only grown harder to part with him.”

“Yes,” the king said softly. “He is nearly grown.”

“And those tutors. I have always said it was too great a risk. And for what? So he can write down the things he overhears?”

“A well-informed spy is a better spy. He understands what to listen for. Who to follow.” The king rubs his mouth. He’s tired. He wishes his chamberlain would leave.

“The story you told me, years back, when you brought him here. Tell me again that it was the truth. That you didn’t know what he was when you bought him. That you bought him.”

The king is silent.

He does not know that his wolf lies on the cold stone outside of the door, letting the chill seep up into his heart.

***

The boy’s room is hidden behind curtains and a bookcase that shifts to one side. Only a very few people know how to find it. Inside the room is a carved bed, a boy’s bed, and now Elienad has to bend his knees to fit his legs inside of it. There are no windows and no candles, but his liquid eyes see as well here as they do beneath the table or in the labyrinth of the castle.

When the king comes in, he opens the bookshelf and lets light flood the little room. “What did you learn?” he asks.

“The pretty woman with the curls. Her name starts with an A, I think, and she likes to wear purple. She wants to poison her husband.” As he speaks, the boy carves a small block of wood. He has skill; the king can make out the beginning of a miniature crest.

“Who taught you how to do that?” the king demands, pointing to the knife.

Elienad shrugs slender shoulders. “No one.”

Which seems unlikely, but there is no reason for that to bother the king. Yet it does. The boy has recently turned thirteen and when the king thinks back on that age, he remembers telling many lies. Elienad’s jaw looks firmer than it did a year ago, his soft limbs turning into the lean, hard arms of an adult. Soon the king will know even less about what he does.

“Does she mean to do it?” he asks, “or is it just talk?”

“Amadine,” the boy says. “I remember her name now. She’s bought powder and honey to hide the taste. She says it will seem like he’s getting sick. Her friends are very proud of her. They say they are too frightened to kill their own husbands.”

The boy looks up at him, hesitating, and the king thinks that if Elienad were a human boy, it would be abominable to raise him as a spy with no companions save drunk scholars and the king himself.

“Go on,” the king says. “You have something else to tell me?”

The boy tilts his head to one side. His hair has gotten long. “Who was my mother?”

“I don’t know,” says the king, shaking his head. The boy asked for this story over and over again when he was very young, but he hasn’t asked in a long time. “I’ve told you how you were brought to me by hunters and I bought you from them.”

“Because I licked your hand,” the boy said. “I was the last of a litter. The other pups died of exposure.”

The king nods slowly; there is something new in the boy’s voice, something calculating.

“That’s not a true story,” he says.

The king thinks he should be angry, but what he feels is panic. “What do you mean?”

The boy is very calm, very still. “I could hear it in your voice. It isn’t a true story, but I can’t tell which parts are false.”

“You will not question me,” the king demands, standing. “I will not be questioned.” He thinks of Elienad, lying beneath tables, listening to the inflections of lies. Watching the hesitations, the gestures, the tensed muscles. Learning a language the king was unaware he even spoke.

“Did my brothers and sisters go to the fights?” the boy asks, and his voice hitches a little. He drops the wood and the knife on the bed and stands. “Was it you that found me? Maybe you shot my mother? Please just tell me.”

The king is too afraid to answer, afraid some movement will give him away. He stalks from the room. When he looks back, Elienad has not followed him.

“I won’t be mad,” the boy says softly as the door shuts.

The king’s heart is beating so loudly that he thinks everyone in the hall must hear it. To him, the sound is the dull thudding of something chasing him, something that speeds the faster he runs from it.

***

Late that night, the boy leaves his room and pads barefoot to the great hall where the throne is. He sits on the velvet and runs his hands over the carved wood. He imagines himself no longer cowering under a table. He imagines looking every one of the courtiers in the eye.

***

Every evening the knights ride out into the town and hunt. They patrol the streets until dawn and come back empty-handed.

One night, as the courtiers spin in a complicated dance that looks like cogs in a delicate machine, Toran walks into court, his armor wet and red. At the sight of the blood, ladies shriek and the wheels of spinning dancers come apart.

The king is flushed with exertion. “How dare you?” he demands, but Toran seems to ignore him, sinking down on one knee.

“The monster attacked me,” the knight says, his head still bowed. “We fought and I managed to slice off one of its paws.”

He opens a stained woven bag, but inside is no gory paw. Instead there is a slim hand with long, delicate fingers, pale save for the hacked flesh and severed bone at one end. And one finger is circled with a fat ruby ring.

There are more screams. Elienad smells blood and fear and the commingling of those scents wakes something coiled inside of him.

Toran drops the bag, rises, backs away. “Your majesty,” he stammers.

Elienad pads closer. Courtiers shrink from him.

“This hand came from a wolf?” the king asks, still hoping that somehow it has not come to this.

One of Toran’s party, all of whom idle near the doorway, not bold enough to interrupt the king, steps forward. “It was. We all saw it. That thing killed Pyter.”

“The rumors are all true! The creatures walk among us!” Lady Mironov says before swooning to the floor. She is practiced at swooning and is caught easily by her husband and his brother.

“It is gravely wounded,” says the king. “It will be tracked and destroyed.” He hopes it will be killed before it can be interrogated. He does not want to hear the things of which the creature might speak. His kingdom must have the illusion of safety, even at the cost of truth.

He does not remember the ring or the woman who wore it, but Elienad does. He recognizes the red stone and remembers the hand he licked clean under the table.

***

Elienad finds her by smell, behind Lord Borodin’s stables. The horses shift and whinny in their pens as he passes. Her blood has soaked the icy ground around her and dotted the snow with bright red holes, like someone scattered poisonous berries. She is wrapped in a horse blanket, stiff with gore. Her hair is tangled with dirt and twigs.

She has never seen him with a human face, but she knows him immediately. Her pale mouth curves into a smile. “I didn’t know they let you out of the palace,” she says. She is very beautiful, even dying.

“They don’t,” he says and kneels beside her. “Give me your arm.”

He ties his sash around it as tightly as he can and the bleeding ebbs. It is probably too late, but he does it anyway.

“It is a hunger never ending, to be what we are. It gnaws at my stomach.” Her eyes look strange, her pupils blown wide and black.

“Where did you come from?” he asks her. He doesn’t want to talk about the hunger, not with the smell of her blood making him dizzy.

“From the forests,” she says. “They caught my son. I thought it would be easy to find him. I had never even seen a city.”

He can’t help hoping. “Like me. They brought me—”

She sees his face and laughs. It is a thin rattling sound. “He’s dead. And you never came from any forest.”

“What do you mean?” he asks. He has brought a sack with men’s clothes. They are too loose for her in some places and too tight in others, but they are warm and dry.

She struggles to get the shirt over her head. Her shoulders are shaking with cold. “You were born here, in this city. Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t understand.” Part of him wishes she would stop talking because he feels as he does when he’s about to shift, like he’s drowning. The rest of him only wishes she would speak faster.

“A mirror would tell you more than I could.” Her sly look bothers him, but he still doesn’t know what she means.

He shakes off the questions. “We have to get you inside. Somewhere warm.”

“No. I can care for myself.” Her hand slides under her body. She holds out a knife. Toran’s knife. “I want you to take this and put it into the chest of the king.”

His eyes narrow.

“Have you been to the dog fights? Have you seen how we are set against each other, how we are kept in stinking pens?”

“You murdered those children,” he says softly. “And then you ate them.”

“Let them know what it is to have their babies snatched from them, what it is to be afraid and then find that they were killed for amusement. For amusement.” Her face is so pale that it looks like the snow. “You are not the only wolf he has kept, but the first one was grown when he got her. She died rather than become his pet. You are nothing but an animal to him.”

“I see,” he says. “Yes, you are right.” Elienad takes the knife from her cold hand. He looks at his face in its mirrored surface, and his features look as though they belong to someone else. His voice is only a whisper. “He must think I am an animal.”

***

The king leaves his court late and stumbles tipsily to his rooms. The court will continue to celebrate until they collapse beneath tables, until they have drunk themselves so full of relief that they are sick from it.

The king lights a lamp on his desk and begins to write the speech he will give in the morning. He plans to say many reassuring things. He plans to declare Toran his heir.

He hears a laugh. It is a boy’s laugh.

“Elienad?” the king asks the darkness.

There is silence, then the sound of laughter again, naughty and close.

“Elienad,” the king says sternly.

“I will be king after you,” the boy says.

The king’s hands begin to shake so hard that the ink on his pen nib spatters the page. He looks down at it as though the wet, black marks will tell him what to do now.

The boy moves into the lamplight, his face lit with an impish smile, showing white teeth.

“Please,” says the king.

“Please what, father?” The boy blows down the glass of the lamp and the light goes out.

In the darkness, the king calls the boy’s name for the third time, but his voice quavers. He remembers his age, remembers how stiff he is from dancing.

This time when he hears the boy’s laughter, it is near the door. He hears the footsteps as bare feet slap their way out the door and down the dark hall. Like the court, the king feels sick with relief.

Later, when the king lights the lamps—all of them—he will think of another woman, now long gone, and of her liquid eyes staring up at him in the dark. He will not sleep.

In the morning, he will make his way to the throne room. There, he will find courtiers gathered around a young boy with black hair in need of cutting. Beside the boy will be a corpse. The dead woman’s hand will be missing and her throat will be cut. Dimly, the king will remember that he promised the kingdom to whosoever killed the wolf. And the boy will smile up at him as the trap closes.

© 2010 by Holly Black.
Originally appeared in The Poison Eaters and Other Stories.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Speaking of which, for the last three years, Fantasy Magazine has been edited by the team of Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo. Sean, who is also the publisher of Prime Books and Fantasy Magazine, will stay on as publisher but will be stepping down as co-editor. Cat, meanwhile, will be stepping down in order to focus on her writing, which should be a cause for celebration, as she’s quite a talented writer (one I’ve published twice over at Lightspeed).

Starting with this issue, all the fiction you read in Fantasy Magazine will have been selected and edited by me. But that won’t be the only change. By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed the site’s redesign, done by web-wizard Jeremiah Tolbert. And we’ve also brought a new nonfiction editor on board, Esther Inglis-Arkell, who will be working hard to bring you the best articles and interviews pertaining to the fantasy genre.

So we’ve got a new look and a new editor, but also a new publishing approach—one that brings Fantasy in line with our sister-publication, Lightspeed. Like Lightspeed, every month Fantasy will:

• Offer all of its content for free on the web
• Sell ebook editions of the magazine (including back issues)
• Sell ebook subscriptions through Weightless Books
• Publish four short stories (two originals and two reprints)
• Publish three nonfiction articles, closely tied to the fiction, plus one feature interview
• Publish two fiction podcasts, produced by award-winning producer and narrator Stefan Rudnicki
• Publish interviews with Fantasy Magazine authors (a/k/a “Author Spotlights”)

(If you’re looking for older content from Fantasy, fear not, it’s all here! It’s all still accessible via the search box located in our banner, and we’ll have it all listed in its respective categories soon. Also, all your old bookmarks should still work, so if you follow an old link, it should still take you to the story or article you’re looking for.)

With that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

March 7

In “The Sandal-Bride,” Genevieve Valentine gives us a quiet tale of a traveling spice merchant who learns his desert trading route is actually fertile ground for amazing stories—once one lonely woman teaches him to listen.

Hardship and long journeys are the features of our article “Three Historical Figures Who Embarked on the Hero’s Journey,” where Graeme McMillan digs into the lives of three fascinating world-travelers. Sometimes truth really is more remarkable than fiction.

March 14

In Holly Black’s “The Dog King,” the nobles of Dunbardain revel in the pageantry of wolf-fighting and wolf-themed regalia. But when it comes to court intrigue, it becomes clear that while a dog might be man’s best friend, a pet wolf is nothing but trouble. (Reprint)

Ever dreamed you could slip inside your favorite fantasy novel and live out a more exciting life? Te Jefferson & J. Corbeau might convince you otherwise in their article “Five Fantasy Worlds that Prove You Never Want to Enter a Fantasy Realm.”

March 21

Most people are willing to accept the fate the gods deal them. But in Tanith Lee’s “The God Orkrem,” injustice spurs one man to confront his very creator.

With February’s release of The Crippled God, Steven Erickson has concluded his Malazan Book of the Fallen series, a twelve-year adventure whose creation was an adventure in itself. Andrew Bayer presents this month’s feature interview with the epic fantasist.

March 28

Loss drives the heroine of our next tale, George R. R. Martin’s “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr,” to travel between worlds and across years.  But when she meets Laren Dorr, his heartbreak and melancholy touch her in surprising ways. (Reprint)

LaShawn Wanak turns our attention to stories and the remarkable ways they can be reshaped and retold in her article “From Story to Screen.” Find out how some of your favorite books and tv shows were literally re-envisioned in their silver screen incarnations.

That about does it for our fiction and nonfiction selections for March, but be sure to also look for our author and artist spotlights, and keep an ear out for our podcasts of “The Sandal-Bride” by Genevieve Valentine and “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” by George R. R. Martin, along with a resyndication of Podcastle’s production of Holly Black’s “The Dog King.”

So that’s our issue this month. If you don’t want to wait for the content to be released on the site throughout the month, or if you’d just like a handy, downloadable version of the magazine on your favorite reading device, you can now purchase ebook editions of Fantasy, which are available directly from our publisher, Prime Books, in DRM-free ePub format, and in a variety of formats from a variety of third-party channels, including: Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Smashwords, Sony Reader, Fictionwise, Wizard’s Tower, and Weightless Books. Or, if you’d prefer to subscribe, you can do so via Weightless Books.

Thanks for reading!

What inspired “Guinevere”?

“Guinevere” was inspired by a book cover done by Cliff Nielsen. He’s a great designer and his covers always catch my eye. Besides that, the latest King Arthur movie portrayed Guinevere as a warrior woman.

Where do you typically look for inspiration?

Today I look to the bookstore shelf to see what’s hot and what moves me. Sometimes it’s a sprawling spacescape; sometimes it’s a compelling figure in a moody setting.

Is there a storytelling component in your art?

I have always studied illustration. Even while studying classical art I’m drawn to the paintings that tell a story. Pretty pictures of flowers do nothing for me. An illustrator’s job is to tell a story with an image. The viewer must be drawn in to study what’s going on in the picture. It’s that interaction with the audience that I find compelling.

Is it a different experience for you when illustrating on commission versus producing art for yourself?

It depends on weather I’m creating a portfolio piece or a painting for a gallery. My portfolio work is designed to reel in new clients so it has the same feel as the commissioned work but without the restrictions of the editors and art directors. There has been a marked divide between my commercial and private work in recent years. The publishing industry isn’t interested in fine art anymore. They want something that looks like a movie poster, and that’s fine. The new trends present their own challenges. I do try to keep my hand in painting fine art. I feel like it compliments my digital work, and you never know if the industry will swing back in the other direction.

You’re also a photographer, and on your site, you say: “Light is the brush with which the photographer paints his masterpieces.” It seems light also plays a large role in your illustrations—why is light so significant to you, as an artist?

All a painter is doing is rendering lighting effects. Beyond that as an illustrator I use negative and positive space (light and dark) to create drama and composition. As a photographer I look and wait for the right light. In the studio I can mold the light to my will. That’s where I feel the most like an artist with a camera.

How do you think your experience as a photographer has altered your artistic style?

Artists have used photographic reference since photography was invented. I’ve been shooting since college to gather reference material, but with the development of digital cameras I was able to develop my photography skills much more quickly and I started shooting professionally. The heavy use of a photographic style in my illustrations is dictated by trends in the publishing industry. I always felt a little stupid trying to fake a painted look to my digital work anyway. It’s so much more pure this way.

How did you first get into making art?

My father was a commercial artist and I’ve always had all the encouragement and art supplies I needed. Since I could hold a crayon I always considered art my profession.

What have some of your favorite projects been, and why?

I love that Ace books hires me to do space opera pieces since it’s so outside my normal style. I thrive on challenge. The Conan The Hour of the Dragon piece I did last year for Prime is one of my favorite projects because I’ve always wanted to do a Conan cover.

I put my heart into making that cover both contemporary and at the same time a tribute to the classic Conan art I grew up with.

You were Chair of the Fine Arts/Photography Dept. at Adelphi Academy. Was this a teaching position? If so, did you enjoy teaching art and design?

I do enjoy teaching and I still do it through various private art schools and the Nassau County Museum of Art. The Adelphi position was a bit of a nightmare because I taught pre-K through twelfth grade. I did learn a lot about communicating the theory of art to a huge range of ages. I also feel like it’s a tribute to the great mentors I’ve had to pass on the knowledge.

What advice would you give to aspiring fantasy artists?

Study. Use reference. Tell a story. Don’t copy—instead, be inspired. In my book, The Art of the Mythical Woman: Lucid Dreams, from SQP was written with the fantasy art fan and art student in mind. The first half covers commissioned work and how an artist completes an assignment. The second half is personal work and I delve into art theory.

Ibn Battuta

Battuta was a Moroccan Muslim who left his home at age twenty-one and went on to travel the truly staggering distance of 75,000 miles over the next twenty-nine years, across Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and throughout Asia. Spending the majority of the time between 1325-1354 in transit, Battuta eventually visited the equivalent of forty-four modern countries throughout his life, far surpassing other travelers of the time.

Constantly risking death from attacks by Bedouin and local thugs and pirates—not to mention all manner of illness—his travels brought him into contact with holy men, rulers and, above all else, history; among his many adventures, he ran afoul of the Mongol Invasion, became an ambassador to Yuan Dynasty China, married into royalty in the Maldive Islands and lived through the period in which the Black Death tore through Syria, Palestine and Arabia.

Battuta believed he was assisted by good fortune that came from a higher power, as he explained in his recollections:

“That night, while I was sleeping on the roof of the cell, I dreamed that I was on the wing of a great bird which was flying with me towards Mecca, then to Yemen, then eastwards and thereafter going towards the south, then flying far eastwards and finally landing in a dark and green country, where it left me. I was astonished at this dream and said to myself ‘If the shaykh can interpret my dream for me, he is all that they say he is.’ Next morning, after all the other visitors had gone, he called me and when I had related my dream interpreted it to me saying: ‘You will make the pilgrimage [to Mecca] and visit [the Tomb of] the Prophet, and you will travel through Yemen, Iraq, the country of the Turks, and India. You will stay there for a long time and meet there my brother Dilshad the Indian, who will rescue you from a danger into which you will fall.’ Then he gave me a travelling-provision of small cakes and money, and I bade him farewell and departed. Never since parting from him have I met on my journeys aught but good fortune, and his blessings have stood me in good stead.”

After twenty-nine years of travel and adventure, Battuta—aged fifty and settled in Morocco—was ordered by the Sultan to make a record of his stories so that they could last for future generations and impress others as they did him. Battuta did so by dictating what he could remember to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar he had met years earlier, and the two spent a year creating a manuscript known as A Gift To Those Who Contemplate The Wonders of Cities And The Marvels of Traveling—or, as it’s become more commonly known, “The Journey”—a remarkable record of a remarkable life, made all the more enjoyable by the occasional embellishment from its unreliable narrator or an editorial note from its transcriber.

Having traveled the world and lived to tell the (tall) tale, Battuta sank into obscurity with “The Journey” remaining relatively unknown for the next five centuries until occupying French forces found complete manuscripts in Algeria during the 1830s. Once authenticated, translated versions of Battuta’s story brought the explorer the credit he deserved as one of the greatest travelers of all time.

Marco Polo

One of the world’s most celebrated travelers, Polo had relatively humble beginnings. The son of a merchant, he grew up essentially an orphan; his mother was dead, and his father was in Asia, making deals and, unwittingly, creating circumstances that would go on to change history. Polo didn’t even meet his father until he was in his mid-teens, when his father, Niccolo, and uncle, Maffeo, returned from China.

Years earlier, in 1266, when Marco was just around twelve years old, Polo’s father and uncle had become the first Europeans to meet the feared Mongolian ruler Kublai Khan in Beijing, China. Khan proved to be interested in learning as much as possible about Europe, whether it be the legal, political or religious system of what was, to him, a mysterious and unknown land. Khan charged them to ensure that an envoy of the Pope brought him the oil of the lamp in Jerusalem, and the Polo brothers returned to Venice around 1269 to deliver the request. By the time Niccolo and Maffeo set out to fulfill Khan’s request, Marco—then seventeen years old and finally reunited with his father—was accompanying them and setting out on a journey that would take him more than 15,000 miles and twenty-four years to complete.

After more than three years of travel by sea and by land, Marco and his family arrived and, after delivering the oil to a pleased Khan, spent years exploring and learning about China. It was a good thing that they enjoyed their time there, because Khan had decided that they were to be forbidden to leave. It wasn’t until 1292 that they would have a chance to escape, having been allowed to leave the country as part of an official party to find Khan’s great-nephew a wife in Persia. The official party sailed first to Singapore, then around the southern tip of India before crossing the Arabian Sea and landing at Hormuz (better known today as the Kingdom of Ormus), giving Marco and his family their chance to escape over land.

Upon return to Venice, Marco was immediately imprisoned as part of the ongoing Venice-Genoa war. While imprisoned, he told fellow inmate Rustichello da Pisa about his experiences, and those recollections eventually became the book The Travels of Marco Polo. Polo never again left Venice, but his story inspired many great explorers, including Christopher Columbus, as well as the development of European cartography.

Alexandra David-Néel

In a life full of astonishing events, one of the most astonishing is that the Belgian-French writer Alexandra David-Néel isn’t far better known than she is. Born in France during 1868, wanderlust and exploration were clearly in David-Néel’s blood. Not only does a famous anecdote depict her as deciding to leave home at age five (her parents and a need for dinner quickly put paid to that idea), but by her eighteenth birthday, she’d already traveled alone to England, Spain, and Switzerland, and by 1891 had added India to her list of conquests.

Although a lack of money brought her back to France, David-Néel refused to stay still: In 1899, she wrote an anarchist treatise that was eventually published in five languages, and a year later met the man she would later marry (although, by 1911, she’d left him to return to India and continue her study of Buddhism). It was in India that she met Maharaj Kumar Sidkeon Tulku, a member of the Indian royal family, to whom she became the self-styled “spiritual sister” (and, rumors would insist, lover). During her time in India she would also meet the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who would encourage her studies.

That encouragement led to David-Néel’s embracement of a life of full-on magical realism. She spent two years living in a cave along the Tibetan border, perfecting what she termed telepathy. She would later claim to have created, her own tulpa, a spirit born from the mind and will of a human being. She later had to dispel it when it turned evil.

She befriended a young monk who would later become her adopted son. Illegally trespassing into Tibet, at that time still forbidden to outsiders, she managed to get deported and moved to Japan for some years. She later returned to (trespass into) Tibet again in 1924 before returning to France to write her best-known work, Magic and Mystery in Tibet.

She returned to Tibet one final time in 1937, staying for years as World War II made international travel unsafe. There she continued her spiritual study. Eventually, David-Néel returned to France in 1946, where she lived and worked for another twenty-three years. Her work has been listed as an influence on beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the latter of whom credited her with converting him to Buddhism.