I wrote a book and I have nowhere to put it

(to see chapter 1 of The Dark Wielder, my original manuscript, scroll down to “Chapter 1”)

I wrote a book.

Yes, a sixteen-year-old senior student in an Indian high school has written a high fantasy (Game of Thrones, Lord of The Rings-esque) novel and I am ready to put it out there, garner a readership, and pray for traditional publishing. It’s been a pretty complicated, unimaginable journey to get to this point (well, uh…a halfway point) but nonetheless, I do feel proud of myself for being able to create something tangible and ready to put out there.

So I started writing this novel in January, 2017, after having finished reading the Lord of The Rings Trilogy by J.R. Tolkein as well as A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. But I didn’t have the idea to write a predictable fantasy story with good guys versus bad guys, nor did I want to try and emulate the complexity of the Westeros world built by Martin. Instead, I wanted to create a world of characters and plot which was something unique on its own — a fantasy which pays homage to the magical elements of stories like The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, contains at least an element of the complexity and realism within Martin’s series, and, of course, the epic element of grandeur from Tolkien’s. I wanted to build a world of fantasticalism, of heartbreaks, of reasonable, almost justified villainy, of fighting, disagreements, love, hate, respect, monarchy, and death.

I wanted to build a world like no one’s ever seen before.

And at this point, I’ve managed to write 348 pages (and counting), roughly 116,000 words.

When I’d started in January of 2017, the base of my book was a previous fantasy I was writing and developing in 2015. I was 12-years-old, and of course, as with any other book written by a 12-year-old, it was nearly unreadable. However, I still wanted to take inspiration from the ideas that I’d crafted back then for the manuscript I was writing in 2017, and so I incorporated a few of the characters I’d written in the previous manuscript as well as some plot elements and the general theme of the book.

A year since, I’d managed to write about 52,000 words.

And then I stopped writing entirely.

I don’t know why I did, but I’d fallen out of love with the story that I was writing. I didn’t know where to take it, my effort was disorganised, and I felt demotivated. That was, until January of this year. I decided to get back on it, read and edit what I’d written so far, download Microsoft OneNote to organise all my thoughts, ideas, and notes, and just get on the grind. I was not going to get off my desk until I’d have finished the damn novel.

Well, I still haven’t finished it, but in four months I’ve managed to write 70,000 words and mapped out each and every chapter to come in the book on my notes folder on OneNote.

I’m due to finish the entire manuscript by the end of May or early June, and I’m looking forward to the day.

The feeling of accomplishment whence finishing it will be unparalleled for me, one can only assume.

Now, to the plot.

The title of the book is The Dark Wielder (sequels will come, but for now it’s just that) and it centralises around three characters.

Two siblings, Theren And Lothar Rolan, of house Rolan, are members of a royal family of a medieval-esque world called Erhin. Lothar is the youngest out of his four siblings, and is yet to prove himself after making a grave mistake which led to his uncle’s death. Theren is an ambitious woman who, on taking inspiritation from her grandmother, started a company of 10 spies called Rean, hidden from the official authorities. They operate incognito and pass information to the royals without ever revealing their identities.

Meanwhile, back on earth, a man with a speech disorder, estranged from his family discovers something he could never have imagined before, and before he knows it, he’s on a different planet discovering some things about himself and people around him he could never have imagined possible.

After having written 41 out of a planned 80 chapters, I finally feel that my manuscript is ready to be put out there (in parts), as I wish to collect a readership and truly allow the public to explore this world that I have been conjuring up in my brain for nearly four years.

(Do remember, this is still an early draft and not the finalised, finished edition. One or two errors may have stilled creeped up here or there.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you The Dark Wielder. :)

•This book takes place solely in three dimensions.

Ascen; Where Earth and stars and other dead planets lie.

Solan; Where the vast terrain of Erhin is explored.

Eastward; as far East as the gemboats go. Here lies Layonas.

Chapter 1; A Walk In The Mist

/Dream Earth

Walking in the midst of ash and dust and a white mist, Adi Walkman continued without a question. Though he was outside his usual environment by quite a few miles, he didn’t seem to notice much of a difference.

He walked slowly through all the piles of ash rising and falling slowly over and over again.

Black rising spots appeared everywhere amidst the white mist like burning ash on marble slate; it was very out of place. The mist didn’t irritate his eyes; he only thought of reaching his destination. Although he was in a hurry, he continued to walk at the pace of a slug by the garden.

Ashes were rising up and down, burnt animal parts, flaked animal parts, perhaps even humans’. Every time he was about to walk through one of these ash-spots, it would slowly fly away into the sky, making way for him. Among the thousand ashes, which meant nothing but eventual deaths to Adi, there were three ash-spots glowing with a whitish outline. This did catch his attention. His dreams never had this before. He was able to see all three glowing ash-spots among thousands he’d see every day in his reoccurring dreams. The etherial glows perplexed him, but he didn’t stop.

After a quarter-hour’s walk , he reached a white land just like all that had his footsteps behind him, but there was a small table made of marble placed in front of him, which was about the height of his leg upto his knee, but was decently broad. He made it after a long and tedious walk without any troubles whatsoever. He walked toward it, went down on his knee, and put his hands on the platform. He then shut his eyes. Moments later, a small girl appeared opposite to him.

‘Death.’ She said.

‘What?’

‘All people die, some by our hands, some by our enemies’.’

‘Enemies?’ He asked the little girl Olivia.

’You will understand, with time to come,’ she spoke the words of a sage on the mountains, ‘shall we start for the day?’

‘Yeah, let’s start.’ He responded.

She picked up a black bag with a blue zipper kept on her side, and placed it on the round table surrounded by nothing but ash-spots in the white mist. He’d done this a thousand times over, with very little varying every time although today was quite different than usual. He opened it and looked into it, and, as he expected, nothing was inside. Of course that is only until he put his hand inside the bag; he could feel the shapes of many different objects. He took out a diary and sat behind the stone table. He opened a fresh page in his diary in which he kept an account of all their talks together.

’What is time?’ She asked. He opened a fresh page in the notebook and wrote something down.

‘Time is… uh, something that we uh…use to measure a sequence of events in the past, present, and future.’ He answered back.

‘Yes!’ She said playfully, leaving her mature persona and getting excited for a moment, acting her age. ‘And in how much time are you going to kill me?’

He felt a shock and frowned at what she just said, but she just smiled back at him. He quickly forgot about it and just smiled back at her — he didn’t want to upset her. But something didn’t seem right to him. He felt the aura of the discussion take a change for the unexpected.

Her skin slowly started to darken, and there were a few crack sounds audible as her shoulders began to jut out. Her smile disappeared, and all of her hair fell off in piles. He started to get very scared — he’d never seen something of the sort — but he didn’t get up. He trusted her. One of her eyes started to twitch, as did her head. Her shoulders kept growing with sudden jerks and crack sounds, and, after a few twitches, her face became completely black and stony. She grew extremely tall and not ladylike at all.

‘Olivia!’ He called out. She stopped twitching completely, lowering her head. She slowly raised it towards him. He’d thought she was a threat at first, when she started to transform into the ugly monstrosity, but as she turned her head, he saw something behind. It was all fuzzy and blurry, but from what he could make out, beings her size started to walk their way, dark like her, some even light. There were flares in the skies, the white mist had been broken, and the three glowing ash-spots rose. He looked closely at them and saw the faces of three dearly close people. People he loved.

By now he’d realised that these ash-spots represented the soon to die, and so after seeing the glowing ash-spots in the air, with small and translucent shadows of three very well known faces, he started screaming ‘no!’ Over and over, without stopping. Tears trickled down his cheeks, which he couldn’t feel as soon as he woke up, gasping as if he was out of breath.

He raised his head and frowned with his heart thumping harder than a butcher’s hammer on dead meat. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and stopped gasping. He got out of his bed and looked disappointed for some reason. He’d always felt like his dreams lasted an eternity, so much so that he’d sometimes not be able to tell the difference between reality and his dream world for a few minutes, and, sometimes with bad luck, for an hour or so. He was living in a decently sized condo. Not too big, not too small. He wasn’t making a living, of course. No work, nothing. In fact, he believed in his dream realm more than the real world. He liked Olivia more than his brother, more than his parents, more than anyone he had ever even remotely made any contact with in the real world. For him, everything that he cherished was within his dream realm, and there was nothing to care about in reality.

He started pondering about what he had seen towards the end of his dream. The three bright spots had the faces of people he’d never met in his life, yet in his dreams he’d known them for a full lifetime. He walked towards the mirror in his bedroom, which was to the right of his bed, He looked at himself, frowning, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his face had a blank expression. He had fallen asleep in a pair of underwear which he took off as he entered his bathroom, a few footsteps away. He got into the shower and bathed for a few minutes. Water trickled down his long, smooth golden hair, always fell upon his right shoulder. He had a short nose and thin lips. Bushy yellow eyebrows to complement it all, and his eyes were hazel in colour, like his mother’s.

When he got out, he didn’t dry himself, but instead just wore the dirty pair of underwear again, the one he slept in. Thoroughly soaking wet, he walked out of the bathroom, back into the bedroom. It was a small room, with a small bed. He never required much room on his bed while sleeping, he would always remain still, too concentrated in his dreams. He walked in and got a grip on reality, realising he wasn’t dreaming. At first, he had a blank, totally clear impression as he would in his dreams. But then he started to frown again. He slowly walked towards his bed and sat down on the edge, dangling his legs and shaking them, with his hands by the side of his thighs and he had his head bent downwards, staring at the floor.

Olivia, please. Come here. He thought. Tired and sad. He felt horribly lonely. He had no one to go to in this town.

He wanted to go out and meet his parents, he missed them. He quickly turned his head and looked over to the closet, getting up and scurrying over. He opened the right door of the closet and looked into the mid-section. There was a safe there. He typed in the numbers, ‘2,1,2,3’, and the digital sign on the front of the safe read ‘Opened’. The safe’s mechanical lock opened. Adi, feeling excited,

quickly opened it, on the brink of a smile.Though as soon as he opened it, his smile faded away, he found nothing but 200 dollars, which he always would, every time he opened the safe. He didn’t have the money to go to Scotland, where his family is, and they never came to visit.

‘Oh Olivia, why couldn’t you be real?’ He turned his head down and shed a tear or so.