MASTERPOST / ON SOLDIERS AND SUNS (PINE / SPRUCE / ACACIA / ASH / BIRCH)
"Velours, Velours; it was until it wasn't;"
Four years,
"Leclair on the Sun, on my hands;"
Three escaped,
"Even the devil bled red, worth more than diamonds and less than Desire;"
Two arrived,
"Say, do you believe in God?"
One hour,
"Say, where's your faith?"
No mercy.
→ GENRE: Fiction with fantasy, historical, and supernatural elements.
→ STATUS: Second draft (complete rewrite; est. 1 million words at completion).
→ POV: Varies (1st-person past and present; 2nd-person past and present; 3rd-person limited past and present; 3rd-person omniscient past and present).
→ STRUCTURE: OS&S/AOItBBF consists of five parts, currently called: Pine, Spruce, Acacia, Ash, and Birch. Each part is not a separate book, but different sections of the same book. They are divided by theme (Conception / Revenge / Corruption / Mourning / Rebirth), and are meant to be read in order.
→ SETTING: The planet of Svetkva, orbited by twin satellites and orbiting a quasar, with heavens bearing a sea of stars referred to as the “River Danube.” The story begins in the Seraphina Queendom, a country in the southern region of the Bronze Sea, and includes the entire Bronze Sea region, the Shayan continent, and parts of the Northern Sea region. The story takes place between mid-September and late-November of 1997; there are bulky cell-phones, Toyota Corollas, muskets, cavalries, cannons, trawlers and trains. The chill of an impending winter descends from a late-summer comfort, and the world turns on an axis headed toward the apocalypse.
→ CONTENT WARNINGS: Posted before chapters when necessary. Commonly: violence, death, drugs, addiction, weapons, blood, gore, sexual assault (mentioned; not explicit), racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, alcoholism/alcohol, animal death, body horror.
→ THEMES: Politics, religion, faith, ignorance, acceptance, corruption, revenge, conception, death, rebirth, redemption, forgetting, remembering, family (specifically brotherhood and fatherhood), morality, forgiveness and the lack thereof.
→ MAIN CAST: Lennox Schmidt, Cavona Russell Schmidt, Diamant/René, Kii, Felice Morandi, Ariel Simon Taylor, Holland/Marc, Chancillon Lavoie, Puck Devereux, Théophile Tchaikovsky, Leroy Avanteaux, Forge Tetsu, Shiki Matsuoka
→ SYNOPSIS: Beneath the sea of stars reigning supreme amidst heavens somehow familiar, Lennox is born in a mirror-pool said to be the gods’ path to earth in the midst of a forest in the rural central region of the Seraphina Queendom; he is discovered by a homesick ex-soldier hailing from the north, Cavona Russell Schmidt, and the two become fast friends. It doesn’t take long for them to discover that Lennox happens to look uncannily identical to a renowned and resented politician, Chancillon Lavoie, and rumour has it that THIS is Chancillon’s son; soon, the world is after Lennox in order to use him as leverage against the politician, and the pair of protagonists must escape capture. In their journey northward, they become privy to Chancillon’s corruption and determine that they must confront him in Abyss, Ambyssia, at the World Summit slated to take place in mid-November.
What will happen when he is presented with the evidence of his atrocity, lay bare for all the world to see?
(Links and taglist below the cut.)
