Returning to the Winter Kingdoms
7th July 2016
How does it feel to come back to writing in my Chronicles of the Necromancer series?
The short answer is: it’s like coming home.
It’s been five years since The Dread, the sixth novel in my Chronicles of the Necromancer/Fallen Kings Cycle series set in Margolan, one of the Winter Kingdoms. That series, which began with The Summoner and The Blood King, charted the story of Tris Drayke, the second son of King Bricen. When Tris’s half-brother, Jared, kills the king and the rest of their family in a coup, Tris and a few friends barely escape with their lives.
And as Tris struggles to learn how to control his newly-risen power as a necromancer, he needs a guide and a bodyguard to get to safety and elude the assassins Jared’s sent after him.
Jonmarc Vahanian is the perfect choice, and he’s got his own reasons for wanting vengeance on Foor Arontala, the blood mage behind Jared’s rise to power.
Tris Drayke might be the main character in the Chronicles series, but Jonmarc is a close second, and Tris owes his life and his rise to the throne to Jonmarc’s reckless bravery and insolent loyalty. By the end of the story arc, Tris and Jonmarc are close as brothers, and it’s clear their fates are inextricably tied together. It’s Tris’s saga, and the story of his rise from exile and fledgling mage to king and powerful necromancer is the focus of the action. But even so, Jonmarc’s redemption from bitter smuggler with a dark past to brigand lord and the most fearsome warrior of his generation runs in parallel, since neither story could happen without the other.
In Dark Haven and Dark Lady’s Chosen, readers got more glimpses of Jonmarc’s background. Jonmarc’s actions and choices not only affect his own life and the lives around him; but also the fate of the Winter Kingdoms. In The Sworn and The Dread, as Tris battles foreign invaders and a powerful dark mage, Jonmarc steps into the role of Queen’s Champion in neighboring Principality, risking his life to keep events from sending the seven kingdoms into a disastrous war, and we discover a few more tidbits about the bloody, painful past he has tried so hard to leave behind him.
I didn’t get to tell Jonmarc’s full story in those books because Tris was the main character. But I’d always wanted to write Jonmarc’s books, because his back story was vivid in my mind. So I started to bring out short stories – the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures–that are really serialized novels about what really happened to craft the Lord of Dark Haven and the fearsome fighter we saw in the books.
Solaris, publisher of the Chronicles of the Necromancer, asked to do a collection of the first ten stories as well as an exclusive eleventh one written especially for The Shadowed Path. Of course, I said ‘yes’.
The Shadowed Path starts at the beginning of the events that shape Jonmarc Vahanian and forge his future. The stories begin fourteen years before The Summoner, in a small fishing village in the Borderlands area of Margolan, where a fifteen year-old blacksmith’s son has no idea his actions will someday influence the rise and fall of kingdoms.
If you’ve read the Chronicles of the Necromancer and the Fallen Kings Cycle, you’ll recognize many of the people in The Shadowed Path. Here, you’ll meet them under different circumstances, see them through a different lens. I’ve had a blast writing about these secondary characters in the short stories, many of whom take on a much larger presence than they had in the books.
If you’ve read the novels, then reading The Shadowed Path will cause some deja vu, but you’ll find plenty of little Easter Eggs of tidbits that make things in the novel mean so much more. And if you haven’t read the novels, starting with The Shadowed Path puts you at the very beginning of the story, so it’s a win either way!
The Shadowed Path is out now!
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