Cover Art by Jason Pedersen
How to explain Path of the Traitors? This entry into Legends of Windemere is the third of the added trio. The other two helped me with Yola Biggs the Chaos Goddess and Delvin Cunningham. This one is where Trinity the Chaos Elf Queen gets a spotlight that she really deserves. Of course, this led to a bunch of other events that fixed up a few other issues.
The main reason Path of the Traitors was a surprise entry was because I didn’t expect to keep Trinity in the series for as long as she did. I really expected to kill her off earlier, but she acted as a great foil/rival/frenemy/something with Nyx. They made each other grow enough that I felt she deserved her own story. Her existence changed the chaos elves too, so that added to the eventual creation of a redemption book for Trinity. I now had my evil elves being slaves to the real villain and their heartless Queen being a villain in order to prevent her people from being wiped out. Having this side-story get more attention and grow leading into the last volume couldn’t be resisted.
Since Trinity didn’t have her own group and I wanted her to have a companion, I created Quail the Mapper. This was a chaos elf who was raised by gnomes. He became a jumping point for me to introduce more about chaos elf culture and Windemere history. His job is called ‘Mapper’, which is exactly what you would think. He travels the world to rewrite the maps since things are always changing. Through Quail, I got to show more of the Frost Barrens and introduce other regions. He wasn’t much of a fighter too, which made him unique since I tended to give all of my characters combat abilities up to this point. This put more on Trinity’s shoulders.
There were three (four?) other allies, but the other one (two?) that stood out is another long returning character. Since he left the series, I had be slipping Nimby (Luke’s first best friend) into the background. He would either really show up or be noted in some fashion, but he was around. Being able to bring him back and set him up to be a part of the final battle was something I didn’t think I could pull off. Yet, I did it and he brought another character along . . . the Lich possessed part of his body. So, I got to do this little comedy duo between Nimby and the Lich while making them both effective and work towards their own redemption. I did fear I was going too far with the redemption arcs, but Trinity, Nimby, and the Lich all had a little twinkle of possibility. At least in my mind.
Path of the Traitors had a timeline challenge too. Events had to wrap up in time for the survivors to be involved in the battle. Yet, they started right after Ritual of the Lost Lamb, which meant I had to either write in a delay of the champions or have this book run alongside the final volume. I went with the latter and had to throw in a few events and interactions to show how things were playing out. They were more for myself than the audience since I wanted to make sure I had the timeline right in my head. Not sure if a reader would notice Trinity getting to the final battle too early or late. Better safe than sorry and it doesn’t hurt anything.
I’m not going to wonder if I would change anything. This book was a surprise joy to dream up and write. The outline helped, but it was a lot of flying by the seat of my pants in terms of details. I changed stuff a lot, especially when a character I introduced on a whim to handle one event got adopted by the group. Starting to notice that this happens a lot in this series. Oh well.
Some questions to consider:
- What do you think of redemption arcs in general?
- If a character knowingly does evil to protect others, can they ever earn redemption?
- How would you handle having a body part possessed by a mouthy, undead wizard?
