Old Beginnings to New Endings

I often wish I still had the original map for Swords of Fire. It was a monstrous thing, drawn on the stiff paper covering for a double bed matress. When it was folded it was as thick as a book. I had hung it on my wall as a reference while I wrote.

It is gone now. Someone, perhaps even myself, tossed it one day while cleaning. It wasn't always on the wall, you see. The stiff brown wrapping paper must have looked no different than than any other packaging material to whoever was cleaning. (Statistically speaking, the likelihood I would have been cleaning was minimal. I'm just not that neat.)

I'm not even sure the original story remains. I remember the title: The White King of Ladondo. Perhaps it still lies hidden in one of the big computer boxes down in the utility room with all my other writing memorabilia. Most of the original Swords of Fire work is there. Some of it has been lost forever.

The map was not. I had been looking at it for so long I knew most of it without thinking. So, I redrew it. But it wasn't the same. I didn't have giant paper to work with. The White King of Ladondo was to be abandoned. My thinking was it was to be merely an interruption. I was progressing with it, and I even had an audience who pretended to listen rapturously while I read installments. (That's something I haven't done in thirty years.) But the story had awakened in me a desire to know about the history, and I found myself going backward in time to write a prequel. That led to me going back further, and further again.

I tried going back to the Beginning. I thought maybe that was what was needed. I wrote about Kensington, Draem and Zenophone, the first the Children of Fire who came to the Sea. I wrote about the birth of dragons, and unicorns and the other creatures which, by the time of Flames of Hatred, are viewed (at least, by Khirsha's family) as mythological, or historical at best. I wrote of Zenophone's descent into darkness, and his efforts to take control of the Sea to himself. I wrote of the Great War, in which most of the mythical creatures were destroyed, and the Sea itself came near to utter ruin. But this was not the beginning I needed. It was not the story begging to be shown to the world.

In time, I realized the best place to begin the world's education on the Great Sea was at the time Madatar (the One prophesied by the High King himself) and Shatahar (Zenophone's top Warlord) began to 'heat up' their fight to control the Great Sea. Which brought me to Khirsha, through who's eyes we would see this battle unfold.

It meant a new world. The one I had drawn first no longer fit. For many years, though, I still planned that the original world would come into play. Now I am not so sure. Events, as they have unfolded, have made that very unlikely. While I can see how to get characters to that world, I can find no reason to do so. Until they have a reason for going there, they cannot go.

That's the problem with starting over at an earlier point. One runs the risk of eliminating 'great' passages, places and events. My original ending for Book I was lost. The original Book I, Prophecies of Madatar, eventually was split into two books, Flames of Hatred and Prophecies of Madatar. But as the story unfolded the ending which filled me with such joy no longer had a place. It went to the computer boxes in the utility room. Amazingly, just a few months ago, I was inspired to see how that ending could be revived - in the very last book when the story finally closes. I hope to live to write it.