The Real and the Unreal

Reality breaks down hard in my book, On Black Wings. I wanted things to get surrealistic quickly, but still retain a grounded feel to them. Right from the first lines, she is detached, talking from the past, and things aren't what they seem. In a way, it's like she knows what's coming, and there is nothing she can do about it.

And a black horse shows up at her doorstep, and we are off.

The horse may be a metaphor for something else, a later post, a discussion we will have soon.

The world is flipped on its head, an unknown place, and oppressive and unrelenting in its embrace of death. It's the same world, only at its end, and her riding through the storm of ash is another message, another metaphor.

She meets knights soon after she gets her wings, and undead ghouls try to hold her down so she can be brought to the forces of evil. She meets ancient men she thinks are men, but she knows they are something more, something different. She is captured by knights, and thrown in a dungeon cell. There is some ancient world floating out there in the nether, something real yet unreal, yet it feels it is connected to our world in some unseen way.

It's not explained either, it is there, yet we are here, and there are places where these two worlds touch and cross. It is possible the stone War set free breaks down the walls between these worlds, and creates the situation she finds herself in.

Yes the medieval and the modern blend in this celestial battle, places she appears in, goes to, and flees from - neither the modern or the ancient matter, it's people, it's places, it's things and causes that matter the most. Like saving the world.

Her motivations to save the world are born out of saving the ones she loves, but there is a moment where she realizes the responsibility put upon her, and she takes up the cause. She still retains her darkness, her other sinister motives, but the fights for a path out of the hell which she was thrust into.

It requires crossing the boundaries between worlds, something she understands little yet it is an unknown skill she must master.

There is one point where the worlds meet, and the modern world makes its power and darkness known to the ancient world. The ancient world strikes back at the end of the book, making its terrible creatures known as an answer to that incursion. It could be seen as a war, and she takes up fighting it with the true mantle of a heroine sacrificing herself for the good of all.

That crossing of the worlds, the mix of the real and unreal, it is a big part of the story, and I wanted it to seem like it mattered little to her plight. She was where she was, and her mind was so broken down at points it didn't matter where she was, it mattered what was happening in that moment.

The entire experience is a metaphor, being thrust into strange places with strange people, disconnected from a life you knew back then but none of it applies anymore, a lost and listless feeling that you are stepping into someone else's life and picking up the best you can.

You're not home anymore. Home never existed. She is a leaf lost to the wind, settling down in a place for a moment, dealing the best she can, and the wind takes her away.

The next place she lands is her reality. She is so jaded she could never be in one place, she could never have the concept of home, and she could never feel settled.

It's a feeling of being lost while being in a place that is home in name only.