The making of Lost Elven Realms, Part 1

The Lost Elven Realms series started with Frida and Silas, who were never supposed to be main characters at all.

They first appeared as secondary characters in Age of Rekindling. Or rather, they first appeared in a draft of The Champion of The Ice that I couldn’t make work. The main characters needed Silas’s help to find an ancient artifact, but Silas’s love — the pirate Frida — had been captured and was rotting in a dungeon. The man was a wreck. So the first quest became a rescue mission.

The problem was that the whole manuscript was stuck. Things I couldn’t figure out, things I wasn’t happy with. Eventually I shelved it and moved on to what would become the Shadows Over Garm series.

Frida and Silas didn’t appear at all in A Silvery Moon. But when I was plotting the sequel, Mask of the Eternal Moon, I needed a way to lead the main characters to a lost artifact. The answer was already sitting in my notes: a treasure hunter and his pirate companion, fully formed, waiting for a story.

So they came back as supporting cast — meant to guide Lucius and Oskar to one half of the Sundered Mask of the Blood God.

Of course, as soon as they walked onto the page, they started doing their own thing.

The way I write is roughly 20–30% planned, the rest improvised. I start with a skeleton and a rough map, then let the characters take me wherever they go. In this case, Frida and Silas ended up stealing the mask from Lucius and Oskar, putting themselves on a collision course with the villains. They became a fulcrum the whole story spun around — even though they never quite got the spotlight.

The Thread That Became a Series

The real seed was planted almost as an afterthought. When Frida and Silas are introduced in Mask of the Eternal Moon, there’s a near-throwaway line about Silas having been rescued from inside a magical tome. Neither of them wants to talk about it, especially Frida. The thread is just left hanging.

I put it there for flavor — to signal that these two had brushed up against the supernatural side of Elessia, which mattered because magic was still very rare in the world at that point. It also established that they’d fought in the war in the North, which hadn’t yet been written.

But that dangling thread kept pulling at me.

After finishing Shadows Over Garm, I returned to The Champion of The Ice with fresh eyes — and suddenly the magical tome gave me exactly what the earlier draft had been missing. It gave Silas a clear arc: during the war, he gets trapped inside the book. It gave Frida a goal: getting him back. And it gave me a clean way to move both characters out of the Age of Rekindling storyline and into something new.

By the end of The Champion of The Ice, the setup was complete. Frida escapes the war in the North, but Silas is lost inside the tome. The book comes into her possession, though she doesn’t know he’s trapped within it. In the epilogue, she too is pulled inside.

Which left me with a question I’d been circling for years: what exactly is inside this book?

Building Quel’Aiqua

My first answer was that the tome contained a constructed world — the place where the elves fled when magic died in Elessia. As magical creatures, they couldn’t survive without it.

But as I worked through the structure of Sword of the Elves, the idea evolved. It wasn’t a world inside a book. The book was a gate — a passage into a real, physical valley in Elessia, impossibly remote, sealed off by geography and ancient enchantments.

I made that change because it connected better with everything else. A real place allows for consequences, for interactions with the wider world. And if you’ve been reading along, you know that what excites me most is how events in one story ripple into the others. So the elven kingdom of Quel’Aiqua was upgraded from a pocket dimension to a place on the map — hidden, but real.

That gave me everything I needed. How do Frida and Silas escape? Can they return? What do the elves think of seeing humans for the first time in millennia? What would thousands of years of isolation do to a culture?

Interesting questions need answers. Those answers, I hope, make an interesting book.

Raiders of the Lost Realm

Everything about Frida and Silas has always had a strong Raiders of the Lost Ark feel. Indiana Jones was a formative love, and I wanted to bring that energy into a fantasy setting. I already had a template for it — just as Indy is pulp adventure, I had a pulp fantasy touchstone: Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

Conan is full of “reach a lost place, find a magical treasure, complications ensue” stories, and that loop fit perfectly. When I was writing Sword of the Elves, I went back and reread the complete Howard collection, and it directly shaped the kind of character Frida would become.

There’s Conan, and there’s his female counterpart, Red Sonja. (The red hair is a coincidence.) But I wanted Frida closer to Conan than to Sonja — more outlaw than warrior queen. Despite being in her late thirties, Frida has been a noble, a slave, a mercenary, and a pirate. That progression directly echoes Conan’s own life path. The biggest difference is that where Conan is defined by prodigious strength honed among barbarian tribes, Frida runs on speed, wit, and hard-won skill.

Silas leans more Indiana Jones, roughed up a bit, with a dash of Han Solo.

The result is that Sword of the Elves is probably the most heroic, pulpy fantasy I’ve written. The sequel shifts tone somewhat — Elessia is a dynamic world, and the epic scale of Age of Rekindling inevitably seeps in when the stories share geography and timeline. But that’s a conversation for another post.

If you haven’t started the Lost Elven Realms series yet, Sword of the Elves is the place to begin. And if you’ve already read it — Book 3 is coming in March.