Off World

Thanks for the encouraging and helpful replies to my last post. The Ahmzad are my dwarf type race and I have yet to figure out who side they are on and what special abilities they have. Right now they are a wild card race. If you've read the post "I gotz teh ideaz" or whatever messed up title I had for that post you'll know that Eldrick is a War Wizard and he was taken from his family at a young age to the Blackspire which is where War Wizards learn to be, well, themselves. It's on an island and is surrounded by a small fishing town.

My original idea was to have Eldrick return home to find that his family had been abducted by vampires for larder stocking purposes and that his younger sister had actually been turned. That idea has been shelved.

A while ago I wrote a couple of short stories titled "War Planes" about these plane jumping armies battling on hundreds of different worlds. I've combined a couple ideas (thanks Orson Scott Card) and now I have...

The Shogar are, in truth, trying to burst through Lorin's Gap into the Midlands (the breadbasket of Eldrick's homeland)(thanks Phil) they are not however raiding. They are being displaced by a rogue battalion of the Telek Army led by General Ian Gin (a name I used in a previous manuscript). No one believes the Shogar's land is being overrun because they are thought of as savages by the people of the South and mortal enemies of the people of the North, the Ebresh. In fact, the Ebresh have been fighting the Shogar for so long that they are actually dying out as a people due to decades of war.

The war wizards are called in to help save the Midlands from certain destruction at the hands of the giant Shogar. That is where Eldrick comes in. As a war wizard he is sent to the front only hours after being secretly married to a village girl named Niah who he has loved since arriving on the island as a child.

Thanks to the Eladii (think Tolkien's Elves but more exclusive and warlike)who arrive to assist their long time allies the Ebresh the Shogar are stopped and one of their head men, Golga, is captured and packaged to return to the Balckspire for questioning. Golga warns his captors about the Telek but to no avail.

Upon their return to the Blackspire the War Wizards find their fortress leveled and the town under the domination of a Telek Captain and the 3rd Mechanized Infantry. Most of the War Wizards are dead, some escaped to hidden lairs off the island. The majority of the townsfolk have been taken to various prison camps for transport off-world and the few that remain try to go about their business ignoring the roar of Telek Starstrikers overhead and the earth shaking rumble of Telek Destroyers as they search the ruins of the Blackspire for signs of survivors and powerful artifacts.

Eldrick and an Eladii he has befriended, Omeym, escapes discovery by a Telek patrol and suddenly Golga doesn't sound so crazy after all. Eldrick is sick with worry and is set on finding Niah before she is taken off-world. Omeym's people rarely leave their homeland in the far west and have magically barred the gates to their realm from the rest of the world. Only a small group of volunteers left Sol, City of the Sun to aid the Ebresh at Lorin's Gap and once the Shogar were stopped all of the Eladii returned home save Omeym as it was deemed necessary for him to stay to guard such a powerful being as Golga until he was secure in the Blackspire. Omeym chooses to help Eldrick and they loose Golga in order to increase their chances of escaping the Telek blockades and patrols.

Golga simply wants to kill all the Telek he can and return to his homeland to reclaim what is left of the High North and begin rebuilding what the Telek destroyed. He needs the support of the War Wizards in order to defeat the Telek, however, and he believes that Eldrick can help him gain what he needs.

More to come...