Guest Post: Gareth Hanrahan — Starting at the End

After the death of Lord Bone, the eight who yet lived gathered amid the ruins.

Lath, the orphan of the woods, was much afraid, for he thought that now the deed was done and evil defeated, his companions would each return to their homes. He asked if the company of the Nine was now broken.

“Nay,” said Thurn, “here in the north my people dwell, and here I shall remain.”

“Nay,” said Blaise, “there is yet much to be done. For though Lord Bone is gone, his evil lingers on, above and below.”

The Lammergeier replied, “I shall keep watch on those below, and no horror from the Pits shall pass while I guard the door.”

“Aye, who but those who slew Lord Bone can meet this challenge?” asked Berys.

Answered the Princess Laerlyn. “’Tis plain that it is our duty to guard the city of Lord Bone from those who would use his works to work evil.”

Then the dwarf Gundan laughed, and said: “I once dreamed of a warm bed, and good food, and a mountain for a roof. But if you are all intent on staying, I shall not be the one to break this friendship. When this quest began, nine of us swore an oath not to turn back or fail. Now there are but eight, and the quest is done. Let us swear a new oath to our common purpose!”

“To the Intercessors who guided us,” prayed Jan, “may they bless this oath.”

“To friendship!” cried the dwarf.

“To freedom,” said Thurn.

“To wisdom,” said Blaise.

“To the future,” said Laerlyn.

“To brighter days,” said Berys.

“To the Nine,” said Lath.

The most fictional part of any story is the ending. The author has to choose a point, and after that everything gets blurred out. And they lived happily ever after, as the cliché goes, with a subtext of and nothing interesting happened again. Until they all died, of course, because that’s the only real end-point to the story of a single life. If you’re writing a fictional history, then endings become an exercise in editorialising. You pick the stopping point, and declare everything after that point to be beyond the scope of your story. You wrap everything up and send the characters on their way, off to their reward or punishment.

The real world doesn’t work like that, of course. Lives have second acts. History doesn’t end; events flow into each other. One climatic struggle for the fate of the world sows the seeds of the next.

So, I wanted to write a story that took one of those big, epic endings and picked it apart. In the backstory of The Sword Defiant, nine heroes slew the dark lord and saved the world. The story follows how one of them, Aelfric Lammergeier, discovers that evil is rising again, so he goes to get the band back together – only to discover that it’s twenty years later, and his friends have other things to do than adventure. I took a line from Tolkien as my starting point. “The real war (WW2) does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron, and Barad-Dur would not have been destroyed but occupied.” So! The city of the Dark Lord occupied, and his chief weapons turned against him. Barad-Dur as 1960s Berlin, with a wall down the middle.

I knew I wanted one of the original heroes to be my main viewpoint character (another inspiration was just feeling a bit old and adrift from my friends during covid and child-rearing), which meant he had to be a bit…well, thick. Alf had to buy into the simple, unambiguous version of the original ending, so we could discover the more complex, messier truth through him. So, I made the weapon of the dark lord into a talking sword, which gave Alf someone clever to guide him, but was also untrustworthy, always trying to drive a wedge between Alf and his friends.

The other surviving members of the Nine each embody some aspect of that mess, some problem or need that could be overlooked during a life-or-death struggle against the dark lord, but rose up again in the wake of that victory. My one rule was that none of the heroes could ever stop being heroes – each of them had to remain true to the ideals that motivated them in the first place. None of them could turn out to be secretly evil all along.

To get away with cramming a fat trilogy’s worth of backstory into the book, I leaned heavily on fantasy tropes. Wizards! Clerics! Paladins! Thieves! Dark Elves who do nasty rituals in their spooky city, and Wood Elves who do nice stuff in the forest! Dwarves in the mountains and ogres and zombies and dragons. All of them get a twist, but superficially they behave as expected. Rather horribly, I appear to be zeroing in on the metaphor of “90s TSR novels as  lubricant”, and I’m going to end this paragraph now and bleach my brain for a bit.

As I write, I’m in the early stages of working on Book 3 of the trilogy, which presents the hilarious paradox, “how do you end a story that takes as its starting point the thesis that things don’t really end?” If the story begins after the happily ever after, it can only end with more stories – or death.

And in a fantasy story, even death isn’t always the end…

Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan is a writer and game designer. Originally qualified as a computer programmer, he took a three month break to see how “this writing thing” would go. More than fifteen years later, he’s still on that break. The writing thing seems to be going.

Gareth’s most recent novel, The Sword Defiant, is available to purchase now from all good bookstores. Check out a sample in the Kindle widget below!