Mythology

Hello again, loyal readers...

Every fantasy setting has its own mythology and features that make it a distinct setting, unlike the real world.

In Vatican Vampire Hunters, there's not too much in the way of mythology. The story is set in what's mostly the real world. Vampires and the supernatural exist, but otherwise, it's the same (the approach used by The X-Files, White Wolf's World of Darkness games, and many, many other works). As far as the vampires themselves are concerned, nobody is really sure of their origins. It doesn't come up (at least in the current draft).

But, weaned on fantasy like Lord of the Rings, that's not enough for me. I want to create worlds!

My probable next project, White Queen's Tribute, lets me do that. It's an original fantasy novel. I haven't given too much thought to the setting's history, geography and mythology yet, but there are two elements that I want to play with.

The first is the (as yet unnamed) world's counterpart to Satan. In the Judeo-Christian tradition most Westerners are most familiar with, the Devil has a few popular images - the horned, hoofed demon and the snake in the Garden chief among them. On this world, instead of a snake, the most common animal form of their Devil is a bat.

As their version of the Fall of Man goes, the second generation of humans (children of their Adam and Eve) were lead astray by the Bat. He seduced them with stories of a Great Beast out beyond the boundaries of their garden (an island in an inland sea, perhaps) and, driven by the desire to gain glory in a righteous cause, almost all of the children left the island to follow the Bat after the Beast. Of course, the Bat was the Beast, and their hunt ended in misery and judgement from on high, a rough parallel of what happened to Adam and Eve in the Bible.

The other element of the World's mythology is that instead of picturing Hell as a place of endless fire, the people view Hell as eternal imprisonment in ice (much like the deepest pit of Hell in Dante's Inferno). The souls of the damned are buried in a huge ice-filled chasm that reaches to the very heart of the world. Each new soul rises the ice just a little bit higher. The End Times will begin when that chasm fills up all the way to the surface and the damned spill out to fight a terrible Last Battle against the loyal sons and daughters of "Adam" and "Eve" (not all their children followed the Beast; the ones that didn't are preternaturally strong, wise and powerful... and nowhere to be seen by mere mortals)

That's just scratching the surface, of course. We'll see where it goes...

Until next time!