The Bonds of Blood

2024’s NovNovel Project

The Bonds of Blood is the working title of the first book in a series tentatively called Last of Avalon. Market research obviously needs to be done because they’re both pretty generic titles.

It’s a story with several Arthurian-derived characters, Shannara-inspired worldbuilding, magic and modern guns.

This one’s been hanging around on my harddrives since 2017, according to the oldest timestamp, but seems like I took a serious crack at the worldbuilding in 2020. I’m not even sure what I was watching and/or reading at the time other than a metric shit-ton of blacksmithing YouTube. Clearly there was some Arthurian legend stuff in there somewhere.

Tropes & Stuff

  • swords & guns
  • All Myths Are True
  • Byronic Hero
  • Supernatural Gold Eyes
  • Merlin and Nimue
  • Magic Knight
  • (little bit of) Wizarding School

Project Stats

Testing out pacemaker.press this year. Let’s see how it fares.

So, you’d like to know more?

Blurb

In the Midgard Era, humanity knows magic and monsters are real. After centuries of stalemate where talon and tank were evenly matched and the fabric of the world forever changed, the Wrath of the Seele, Vivienne, fell in battle, and her legions of monsters scattered to ravage the ill-defended outskirts of civilization.

After wandering for years as a magic-wielding sellsword, Eliot Titan finds himself confronted by the most indefatigable of foes: Mika Titan, only child of his twin brother Edwin. Determined to follow in the footsteps of her late mother and become a Conductor, Eliot reluctantly escorts her to the Academy of Mither atop the flooded ruins of New York City.

There, Eliot finds himself ensnared once again in the veiled truths woven by Mither’s leader, Magnus Emrys, whose oldest secret he knew almost too well. And this time, he’s unable to ignore the man’s entreaties, for the headmaster’s worries are the same as those he’s felt for years now:

A new Wrath is gathering their legions, and the world once again is on the brink of war.

Playlist

The embed widget was being fussy when I did this up, so here’s a link to the Spotify playlist.

Some translations….

Places

  • Camerlan: the combined remnants of the USA, Canada, and northern Mexico, cut off from South America after the leviathans appeared and most of Central America flooded. Most human population centers are west of the Rockies and east of the Mississippi River and Great Lakes regions, with everything between a no-man’s land populated by flesh-eating monsters
  • Britannia: the remnants of the UK, Ireland, and the Scandicanvian countries of Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the Faroe Islands.
  • Avalon: the fabled isle where King Arthur Pendragon was laid to rest, also known as the lost Kingdom of Seele. It was severed from the mortal realm in a past age by the rise of the Mist, though passageways to the land have been appearing more frequently over the years, always guarded by the ephemeral Lady of the Lake.
  • Gorre: a land of frost giants headed by their Immortal King, once an ally to the Wrath of the Seele in her war against humanity
  • Formor: a realm under the control of the Twice Kings Conand and Lug, but which disappeared beneath the sea when the Wrath of the Seele’s machinations saw Conand murdered and the Tory Tower, pathway to Formor, destroyed.

Main Characters

  • Eliot Titan: fraternal twin of Edwin and a man bearing the “golden eyes of fae,” Eliot was treated with kid gloves his entire life due to the legends surrounding his eye color. A fistfight with his brother as a child led him to run away from home and discover Ben, whom he managed to talk into living in Malory after several years of persistent needling. After Ben’s death, Eliot lost faith in mankind and became a wandering drunk—but still remains an exceptionally skilled Conductor, and has made an effort in recent years to be a respectable brother and uncle. His primary weapon is the claymore Faol, forged by Ben, though he hasn’t drawn it since her death.
  • Edwin “Ed” Titan: fraternal twin of Eliot and elder of the two, Ed was often called “slow” and “unfortunate” because he was constantly being compared to his more intuitive twin. Their first and only fistfight as children led to Eliot’s running away and finding Ben, and it was Ben who helped Ed get over his shyness and marry Rebecca, who he met while training as a Conductor at Mither. Ed remained in Malory even after Ben’s death, only leaving with Mika after Rebecca was killed in the wendigo attack.
  • Rebecca Nez: Ed’s wife and mother of Mika, a gifted healer and archer from Antelope’s Wall in western Camerlan who traveled across the central plains to attend Mither Academy with several other members of her tribe, all of whom returned to the west after completing their training. She died when wendigos attacked their settlement of Malory, finally leading Ed to move with Mika to Bismark.
  • Magnus Emrys: head of the Academy of Mither, a man with more secrets than he lets on, but who has been the head of the Academy for far longer than most people realize. Among those who know his true identity are Eliot and Ed, and both have their reasons to dislike and distrust the man because of it.
  • Mika Doris Titan: daughter of Ed and Rebecca, born a year to the day before wendigos attacked their settlement. Raised in the heavily-defended urban metropolis of Bismark, Ed initially refused to train her in any Conductor skills, but she stole his revolvers and got into a lot of trouble teaching herself. He reluctantly gave in after Eliot reappeared some years after Malory’s destruction and made a genuine attempt at sobering up and becoming a good uncle.
  • Ben: a white haired, golden-eyed girl that Eliot met after running away from home as a child, and who came to live in Malory after shapeshifting to look more human. Ben was a particularly skilled craftsman, creating Eliot’s claymore Faol as well as Edwin’s dual revolvers Vidar and Vali, among many other contraptions. She was killed by the people of Malory after a monster attack on the settlement, as they mistook her in her true form for a minion of Vivienne, when she was shot multiple times and fell into a river.
  • Vivienne: more commonly called the Wrath of the Seele, or simply the Wrath, Vivienne was the legitimate daughter of Oberon and Titania and heir to the Seele Court of Avalon. Though she never intended to, her actions to seize power over Gorre, Formor, Earth and Avalon resulted in the formation of the Mist, and it took many centuries for her to regain her former power to once again attempt the same. She was believed to have been destroyed at the beginning of the Midgard Era.

The background is that, two centuries ago, the world found out magic was real when the Wrath of the Seele, Vivienne, rose out of seemingly nowhere and started a war against mid-21st century humanity with an army of mythical monsters. Though humanity won out in the end, a lot of bombs were dropped (among other things), and the remnants remain relatively isolated in their own nation-states protected by armies of mages born after Vivienne unleashed her armies upon the world.