The seed

This story actually has a pretty interesting starting point.  Back in the summer of 2007 a group of friends and myself decided to create a tabletop RPG.  I was new to the whole world of role playing games.  Only a few months earlier I'd been asked to participate in a few indie RPG sessions.  They were good fun and a great creative outlet.  So when I was asked to be involved in starting a large scale ongoing campaign I jumped.

A group of around five friends and myself got together around a bonfire with a couple bottles of wine and some notepads.  We chatted about our goals for creating this world.  We discussed settings, and themes, and aesthetics.  I won't claim to be the person who first brought it up, but I do remember being a loud voice in the conversation.  The idea was, sword and sorcery, conan-like world where grit and blood abound, with the twist that the world has a finite lifespan.  We came up with several ideas, and settled tentatively on a periodic global flood that devastated the planet.  I think we all got really excited when we discovered that the floods were caused by the complicated tidal patterns of a whole mess of moons, thirty or forty of them.  Again, I can't claim it was only my idea, but I'll put my flag in it regardless.

So we had this world, and a few kernels of plot, but nothing more.  We ended the initial world building session with the assignment to create a character with a brief back story.  I went home excited, knowing exactly who I was.  The next day I wrote the following:

The Would-Be Vessel 

I am Speaker Feast of the Second Mylthaenii Waning. I am one of the few who still believes in the preservation of the old gods naming convention. My birth was witness to the second waning cycle of the minor sub-mother Mylthaenii, an event very few are fortunate enough to experience. Mylthaenii’s many faces foretell a great tapestry of history that will blanket our world for better or worse. I am told that at the moment of my birth the sub-mother wept in the sky and a thousand lands were drowned in her tears. I am Mylthaenii’s sorrow. I am the Astronomer’s Feast. I am the speaker of my people. And I am alone.
My birth stirred up great turmoil amongst the Astronomer’s of (insert name of monastic island enclave here). Children born with the mixed eyes of Great Father Je’Cheris and the idiot-sleep are beyond rare, and a sign of powerful change and destiny. Many saw these traits and marked me as the vessel re-born, an omen my people wait their whole lives to see. But sub-mother Mylthaenii marks her children as destroyers, and dealers of deeds much darker.
The political infighting, compounded by my increasingly infrequent bouts of idiot-sleep saw my expulsion from the good graces of the Great Father and Sisters. They say the signs were wrong. They say I am not, after all, the vessel re-born. They say it is another. But I know who I am. I can feel the overwhelming weight of perfect geometry weighing down on my soul. I can see a thousand lifetimes spread out behind me like a great caravan across the sea of stars. I am the Astronomer’s Feast. I am Mylthaenii’s Sorrow. I am Hesetiah’s one true child. My people burned for their disbelief. Now I have only my duties, and my destiny, and the child.
The highlands writhe with whisper’s of the coming flood. A flood the likes of which this world has not seen since the days of the men who fell. Soon a thousand children across a thousand lands will be hailed as the one. The chosen one. The one who dries the world. The vassal come to pull the ill and meager mumbling ones from the rising tide. But these false idols are born of fear and superstition. They will bring only false hope and complacency.
In a time when C’Kana marks imminent turmoil, I say Amen. 

I go back and read this now and cringe a little.  Seems pretty melodramatic to me. 

Our gaming group never met again.  The project died and we all forgot about it.  My interest in role playing died as well.  But from that project the seed of this novel was created.  For that, I owe thanks for my fellow role players.  

Almost three years later, when I decided to commit to writing a novel, I immediately thought of Feast, the would-be vessel.