Aragorn and Arwen (Lord of the Rings)

Given the theme of the week, I looked through my future projects for one that had married characters.  Apparently, I don’t really have anything like that unless I want to go for heavy spoilers.  Instead, I’ll mention these two ideas that are still in the note stage.

Long ago, I created Windemere and started putting various governments in there.  Ralian had the Serab kingdom and then the various wilderness regions.  Shayd had the Chaos Elves and Canst’s Fields had isolated villages with no central government.  Then there’s Cerascent, the island region.  I threw in so many kingdoms that it struck me as odd that there were so many of them.  Then ‘Tiara War’ and ‘Sword of Bone’ came to mind to explain it all.

There was a central government of Cerascent, but it only works if there is a King and Queen.  There hasn’t been a King in centuries and the Queens have been mentally unstable because of their initiation.  So they’ve been rather ineffective and ignored by the island kingdoms.  It doesn’t help that the advisers, knights, and every royal employee spend most of their time keeping the castle together.  It has been this way every since an assassination took out the entire royal line.

‘Tiara War’ was influenced by watching a bit of Battle Royale and hearing from friends about Hunger Games.  Basically, the Queen is chosen when the Princess’s of the small kingdoms go to an island for a battle to the death.  This is all volunteer and the main character is a lesser known Princess who wants to win to rule with her childhood friend.  We’ll get to him in a bit.  I haven’t thought much more than this because of the close association with Battle Royale/Hunger Games.  Free for all death matches have become popular and it may take some major thinking to retain the essence with a different tactic here.  Figured the ‘volunteer’ thing would work since they are willingly entering this competition.

‘Sword of Bone’ started as a poem about a mountain island of bones that had a magic sword at the top.  Whoever claimed the sword would become King and they don’t have to be royalty.  I saw how it would work with ‘Tiara War’ pretty quickly and noted a few more about the idea.  The mountain grows with every death because it absorbs its victims’ bones.  Nasty creatures and traps are found here, which the main character sets off to defeat.  I was thinking of making him a caster instead of a warrior or thief.  I thought this would make him more of a thinker than a sword swinger.

Aside from the mentioned problems, I’m not sure how to pull this off exactly. ‘Sword of Bone’ might be too short for its own book.  So these might end up being combined where each chapter switches between their stories.  Either that or make it a two-pack novel.  It’s still in the note stage and I’ve already dropped the short story collection that showed the recruitment of the knights.  Each one was going to be a different were-creature, but I couldn’t get it to work.  At least not yet, so it might return.