When Peter Redfist left the mountain, it was because he did not have the wisdom he needed to lead his people. He needed what he called “The Wisdom of the Kings.” His people were tribal and no teacher could be found to bring him that knowledge. So, he left the mountain and he went to war.
Peter is the one I have been talking about for three and a half years. He is the key character in the epic story I am telling in the first 27 books of my career. His struggles and his triumphs will show for you the workings of my world and my mind. Peter is the one. He is my messiah. But there is a piece missing.
A series called The Coming of the Redfist is on its way. It will show you the first glimpse we see of Peter. It will take you to the moment when he prays to his ancestors and abandons his people for answers. That will be the second book of the series. Then a jump.
The next time we see him he is in the nation of Tienne. He is trying to prepare them for a war and the man who is leading an army that will destroy a way of life. There is a gap between those two stories that is about three months long. For three months, we have no idea what happened to Peter and his men.
I wrote those books about two weeks apart in 2011 in a cramped office pressed against a wall. I wrote in a fever back then. I wanted to tell the stories as completely as I could, but between the second book of The Coming of the Redfist and the first book of The Madness Wars was this very frustrating, very unavoidable blank. Three months. Three months of my main character’s life was shrouded in vagaries and nothingness. But I had clues.
At one point in Onslaught of Madness while we are in the point of view of Aaron the Marked, he off-hand thinks about the four days they were in the nation of Eloo. Four days he said of constant running. The thought he expressed at that time began to chew at me. Slight at first, but then more vigorously, until it was a constant gnawing in the back of my mind. I would stare at the map, stare at Eloo and the wide expanse of land they had traversed, and I would think to myself, “Four days. They did it in four days. Why? What was chasing them? What happened in that darkness?" It was years before I figured out what Eloo was.
In 2017, I was writing the third book in The Madness Wars series and a character goes into Eloo for a meeting. I find out it is a nation of darkness and death. A nation that sells space in its lands for the bodies of great men and women from all around the world. Eloo is the world’s cemetery, with tombs of kings from all over, and in its soil lies the most powerful villains and the most pristine heroes the world has ever seen. It is the home of a vampire king, one of its noblemen is a ghost who his ruled his estate for thousands of years, and this is the land where the dead rest, and often walk.
Four days. Four indescribable days in this hellish landscape, Peter and his men ran. Something was chasing them. And I had no idea what. That was until 2018.
I was invited to participate in an anthology with a talented group of peers. The anthology is called Blackest Knights and it was put together by Charles Phipps and printed by Crossroad Press. I was told to write about a dark hero, so I closed myself in my office one night and I saw it. It horrified me to my core, but finally, after seven years, those four days were shown to me. And I wrote the short story “The Land of Rott and Cur.”
When you read Onslaught of Madness, you will hear Aaron think about these four days. You will feel the same thing I felt when it hits you that this is a blank in the story of Peter Redfist. You will start to wonder what could have happened in those four days that impacted him so deeply. However, you will not have to wait seven years to find out. In preparation for The Madness Wars, you might want to go look into Blackest Knights now.
