Phantammeron Book One Secrets

I would like to share with my readers a few secrets from my book, Phantammeron Book One. There is a lot of hidden things I have placed in the book for readers to ponder, many which lead into things revealed in later books. And its these secrets that make the books so much fun for me to write.

Phantammeron Book One

Towards the end of Book One of the Phantammeron the Shade returns to her dying father, the Eternal Night. You might remember the Eternal Night is a metaphor for darkness in the books.

When I created the “Primordial Ones” I had intended to write my own “Creation Myth”….a Biblical and yet Mythological idea which I had hoped tied my books with Tolkien’s own creation story in the Silmarillion (1977). As Ive discussed in my youtube lectures on Mythopoeia, the purpose of breaking away from traditional modern fantasy is to use deeper spiritual paradigms and archetypes to empower meaning behind your writing.

And so I came up with the overarching idea of night and darkness in the world as a God called the Endless Night. At the end of the first book the daughter of the Night called the Shade returns to her dying father. He then reveals to her that her brother the Shadow had not taken the true Wings of Night. For he had hidden them in his thrown.

The Shade then obeys her father’s wishes and finds the Wings of Night and flies up
into the sky to become one with the arch of heaven. She then becomes the “night-time sky” over the forest of Phantaia. And so the metaphor was that the Night birthed the Shade and she became the sky that shadows the earth from the Heavens.

That was the hidden creation myth I wanted to conceive in that sub-plot in the book. You will see the Immortal Clay, also a Primordial, lost all his children but two: One became the rocks of the earth and lord over the flesh of the living (Rock Eternal), and another became the source of the spring of the rocks (Secret Spring), the well of the world. Again these are creation stories designed to explain the making of my world through dramatic characterization.

And so if you trace through the book carefully there are 5 mini Creation Myths that both explain the meaning and purpose of the elements of the world but also their hidden connections between themselves and the characters whose lives they also represent.

In the case of the Eternal Night, he loved the light and spirit of the Secret Spring but was rejected so his tears formed the black roses in the gardens of Phantaia called the Murgala. And here I combine rejected love with black dead roses that poison and entrance their victims in the book. But the metaphor is of darkness and shadow, poisoned love, and dark desires.

Last item…..when the Shade at the end of the book meets her dying father, there were some hidden things he tells his child. I loved writing this scene as so much was redeemed emotionally in me writing this scene. It showed the Night was not motivated by evil, or greed, or hate but had in fact travelled a fallen path which ended with his own child destined to fulfill a promise he had made to the Creator, his own father in the first chapter….to use the Wings of Night to make the night-time sky over sleepy Phantaia. And so he smiled when his daughter told him the forest was not destroyed but remade in Twilight, something he had known.

But when the Shade goes to find the Wings of Night trapped in the dark crystal of her father’s thrown, the Wings are not these large dark wings but tiny silver ones…..and that represents the deep irony of life and what we think we know about what the world is or should be. Its the irony that we work our whole lives for riches when what was important was a smile, a child, a loved one we once hugged, a poem, or just a view from a mountain. Life’s real beauty and Truth is transcendant and so surprising at the end…as it was designed to be.

And so the Shade pulling out those tiny silver wings that held such huge power shows the humility of the moment. Its the humility of my grandfather – my Mom’s father – who I once loved and knew who moved me so much by his own humility and gentle kindness……a love I see is so rare and hard to find, and which made him such a monumental human being in my mind.

– the Author

Created Jan 28, 2018, 12:15 AM



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