In the aftermath, the kingdoms of the Norfolk, and the Dornan empire to the south, must find a new balance with the power the Ascension unleashed. New, wild talent is appearing all across the world, uncontrolled and unpredictable. The Council Of Regulators strives to protect the Norfolk by harnessing the talented and teaching them to use their abilities for the common good. Meanwhile, in the south, the armies of Dorna Major rally under a new Council of Seven to bring holy war on the heretics in the north, courting the power reserved for the Gods.
Between them, in the broken, floating island called Skan Merdol, a secret waits. A brooding threat, the focus of dozens of prophecies, that demand an answer to the question all fear to ask.

What waits in the chrysalis? What power caused the Ascension? And, what lies in store for the future on world of Maredran?

The Dowager Shadow is a serialised web novel which will be published in segments spanning between five hundred and twelve hundred words daily, Monday through Friday, until its completion. As such, it is best read from the beginning, and subscribing to the RSS feed may be a good idea.

Here are a few key links to help you on your way to discovering the secret hidden by the Ascension.

Prologue – Shadow Hunter
Prologue Two – Blackfang
By Volume:

• Volume One – Welcome, Friends, To The Lockwood Academy (In Progress)
• Volume Two – The Great Fire (Not yet published)
• Volume Three – The Birth of a New God (Not yet published)
• Volume Four – The Ivory Dragon (Not yet published)

The RSS Feeds – Updated as new posts or comments are made available. Most posts publish at 8:00am, Central time.
RSS – The Dowager Shadow (posts)
RSS – The Dowager Shadow (comments)

The Dowager Shadow is the first in a series of epics based on the fictional world of Maredran. The world itself was an experiment, born partly from the fallout of the end of my roleplaying days. In mid-2002, when the collaborative freeform roleplay ended on the server I used to frequent, I was left with just over three thousand pages of logs – character descriptions, scenes played out with as many as twenty or more people writing in sequence, a timeline spanning nearly seven centuries of game time, with entire dynasties and kingdoms being born and having fallen. I, and a few others, took custody of these logs and intended to do something with them. And we did, some of us; one of the other players and I have been developing another world, named Araegos, which has its own history largely based on the old logs, and almost a dozen manuscripts have been outlined running through the history of that world.

But this is about Maredran. When this other player and I formulated the very fluid setting from the old servers into Araegos, a lot of details were left out. Araegos became very much a dynamic meritocracy, nearly eliminating the magic seen so commonly in other fantasy settings and replacing it with a personal magic that fit the setting. This meant that many of the characters which had been integral to plot points in what became Araegos could no longer function in their original habitats, which left us at an impasse.

That’s where Maredran was actually born. It was originally an experiment, a thought-work to see what I could do with a world, fully formed, that was actually the moon of a ringed gas giant. How would these people behave? What would they see as the divine? And better still, what would happen if this gas giant – this great luminary, which would eventually become called Jag Har’Oah, were a source of the potent, literal magic seen in so many fantasy settings? By extension, what if this magic were so powerful, so integral to the workings of the world itself that a threat to the luminary could become a threat to the world?

When this thought experiment finished I knew I had a home for these orphaned characters, and the perfect story for them to tell. By 2005, when the original roleplaying community was set up on LiveJournal, the story, the characters and the progression were all well-formed (I’ve kept the setting overview on my personal site). All that was needed was the work itself. Which failed. I managed to recruit half a dozen well-conditioned players, schooled them in the setting and set them loose on the world – only to see the guided hand of the game squeeze the fun out of it within six months. It made me a bit sad.

But Leila stuck around. She had helped me do abit of the formulating of Maredran before the game began, and we continued the work after the game fell apart. By 2008, when the principal writing for NaNoWriMo began, the world’s elements that either of us concieved were inseparable. The vast rewrite of the material began, and by the end of the month we had passed the goal of the event by more than 13%, leaving us with a half-finished plotline and a lot of holes to fill.

Which brings us up to today. As I write this (which will be edited later, I’m sure) there are mere weeks before NaNoWriMo 2009, and almost one hundred days until the full launch of The Dowager Shadow as an online novel. We’ll be breaking our backs in November with NaNo for the second year in a row, and spending the intervening two months afterwards putting the finishing touches on the mosaic we’ve built so it’s ready for you to start reading at the beginning of February.

The epic of Maredran is soon to begin.