Creating Dark Realms - A Rampaging Author of Dark Fantasy

By Tristan Dineen 

I am an independent author of dark fantasy with a complete two novel series to my name and a second series in production. While my original muse was a boring job with too many office hours, I am happy to say that my writing has grown beyond those humble beginnings and has taken on a new and rampaging life.

I was drawn to the genre of darker, grittier fantasy because it more closely mirrored the medieval European history I’d been interested in while growing up. The more you learn about history, the less you believe in fairy tales about simple morality and clear divisions between good and evil. I wanted my fantasy world to be just as complex and believable as Medieval Europe or the Ancient Mediterranean. Good guys and bad guys still exist, but they live in a world governed by overarching political and economic forces that shape behavior and are far more complicated characters than a writer like Tolkien would allow. It follows that dark fantasy allows an author to explore real world themes to a greater extent than traditional fantasy.

The Falhorne series (begun with Falhorne: The World is Burning and concluded with Falhorne: Dark Dawn) follows the quest of Tagus, who is among the last of the Falhorne: an ancient order of warriors dedicated to the Elder Gods and to the protection of the persecuted Old Believers. The Old Believers, along with their Falhorne protectors, are pariahs in the eyes of Church and State. When catastrophe engulfs his community, Tagus must risk all in order to save the people he loves from destruction. His journey will take him far from home and into the darkness of his own past, as he confronts an evil deeper than his wildest fears.

Vinos, Tagus’s homeland, is much like Renaissance Italy, and, like Italy, was born out of a fallen empire similar to Rome. It has a largely feudal economy but that is beginning to change due to the demand for “satincane” in the textile mills of Tarn, a rising empire to the north. The profits from this trade have allowed the reigning Prince of Vinos to centralize political power and the crackdown on the Old Believers is not only due to their refusal to follow the established state religion but also because the prince wants slaves for the plantations producing satincane for export. There are very real parallels to actual history here and I believe it makes the fantasy world I’ve created, and the struggles of its people, more believable.

In the real world, people who challenge oppressive systems of power do not have access to secret arsenals of space-age weapons technology or magic so powerful that it negates any advantages their enemies have. Real world heroes are almost always outgunned and lack anything close to the resources their powerful enemies possess. Real world heroes die. Real world heroes experience loss. While fantasy worlds will always offer advantages that the real world does not give, I wanted to emphasize the challenges that someone resisting entrenched power structures must face. It makes the hero’s eventual triumph, or their mere survival, all the more heroic.

What little stability Tagus enjoys in his life collapses very early in the story, and, for the first time, he must determine his own path with the help of unexpected friends and allies. While he struggles to uphold his honor as one of the Falhorne warriors and defend the Old Believers, he is confronted by situations that force him to confront the very core of who he is. The political and economic forces of Vinos were not made to benefit someone like Tagus and he must struggle to make his way in the world; striving toward his goals against crushing odds. It could not be any other way for someone in his circumstances.

Vinos resembles 16^th Century Europe. Early Modern Europe was full of religious persecution as states like Spain, France and England centralized royal authority and defined themselves in political and religious terms. Vinos and the wider region are undergoing a similar process with similarly bloody results: whole groups are politically marginalized, religiously persecuted and economically exploited because they do not fit into the new order of things. Old Believers are killed, enslaved, forced into slums or driven into exile. Tagus (and the various characters aiding him on his quest) is resisting this brutality while at the same time trying to save the world from destruction at the hands of a much deeper evil.

This element of my world building was inspired by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who set his anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children in the 17^th Century, although he was really trying to warn people about the coming outbreak of World War II. He did this because he knew that his audience would be biased if he set his story in the 20^th Century and that he would be more likely to get his message across if he placed his characters in a different time period. Fantasy worlds are similar in that they allow us to communicate real world themes in a setting removed from the real world, making them easier for people of different backgrounds and politics to accept.

Overall, I believe I’ve found my niche in merging elements of fantasy, horror and historical fiction. I have started work on a new series (two novels planned) that will be set in a very different part of the same fantasy world as the Falhorne books. Instead of Renaissance Italy, this region is more like Medieval South Asia, but the main character is similarly confronted by a nightmare power that is not of this world – and which may devour it if not stopped.

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