Introducing my new WIP: A Tale of Gods and Glory

 

(images via Pinterest, I take no credit for them)

So I'm finally going to be introducing you to one of my secret WIPs (I decided to hold off on announcing the other till I have gotten just a tad more along in it). And no, you did not read incorrectly, this book is indeed set in the same world as Rage Like the Gods. Ruskhazar is an expansive world, housing multiple series and now at least one standalone. There will be other books introduced farther down the line (as in another one I need to introduce probably next month), but AToGaG is the first. So let's delve into it a little bit...

A Tale of Gods and Glory

The name of Lord Taliz the Champion of Coldhaven is one that almost everyone in Rhuskhazar knows... but the story? Well the story is less well known. Now I'm not talking about the tale that is sung in every tavern across Ruskhazar. I'm talking about what really happened.

This is the story of Lord Taliz and his sister Lady Sofarynn, they are exiles from the same desert land that Dagmy is from. After a potentially deadly scandal in the court, Taliz and his sister flee to Ruskhazar for a new start, instead they find themselves wholly unprepared for life in the mountains.

Taliz is not the hero you believe him to be, oh he did the things the bards claim. He charmed monsters, rose in status, saved Coldhaven, and then burned it all to the ground. But he was just an ordinary man, like you and me. In fact, if there was anything extraordinary about him it would be his luck. He never once experienced the good kind.

Taliz, in trying to impress a Highlander girl accidentally ends up making himself a member of a werewolf pack, and they want to make him just like them. Meanwhile Sofarynn finds herself caught up trying to unravel the mystery of magic, something that no one outside of Ruskhazar possesses. And then a pair of mercenaries show up to drag the siblings back to face charges in their homeland. However, all of that is simply an inconvenience compared to the shapeshifting monster that is hunting down and killing all of the werewolves in Taliz's pack.

So how did an ordinary man, a foreigner no less, come to be revered as a hero and champion  of the very city he destroyed? Well, I suppose if you trust the bard's accounts its because there was a worse fate than the fire, but if you ask me... the bards got it all wrong.

This story is actually going to be released before RLtG. I'm shooting for January. Like any good standalone it does not need to be read to understand RLtG and vice versa however there will be Easter Eggs and possibly guest appearances so I would probably read both if I were you. I'm also challenging myself to try and speed write this whole book in two months making it the shortest amount of time it has ever taken me to write a first draft (the current best is three months). I'm curious to see if I will succeed because I judge this story will probably be anywhere from 80-120k words long.

Taliz is shaping up to be quite a chaotic main character. He means well I mean, kind of sort of, sometimes he does. He just doesn't always think through all of his decisions and if you ask him consequences are like the boogy man, made up to scare children into behaving.

Basically this story is the true accounting of a widely known legend of Ruskhazar, it takes place probably about seven years before the events of RLtG, it's the story of what really happened in Coldhaven.