The Real History of Naevoria

A Look Into the Creative Efforts of Merlin

Naevoria is the name of my first and most detailed world. It started as an island in the midst of a broader world that I knew nothing about, it also started as the setting for a story that I called rather plainly the Adventures of Dannrel. I set out to write a story about a young apprentice wizard (roughly my own age, I can’t recall exactly how old, as I kept changing his age as I got older) and his adventures in his world. The first thing I decided on for the world was the politics of magic (trying my best not to draw on ideas from Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, while desperately wanting to copy them), I set up the Council of Magic and a master/apprentice training system and designed some rules to keep the use of magic in check. The second thing I added to the world was an evil wizard who had defied the council and made himself immortal, this began the First War of Magic (as it was called at the time, now it is merely another squabble between the council and a rogue wizard) and ended in the evil wizard’s capture and imprisonment in a nifty little spell that would hold him forever. (Forever wasn’t very long, as I noted in the story.)

As I wrote Dannrel I created various characters and added what would later become my dragons (as of yet they were merely varicolored dragons with little to set them apart from other dragons.) I always thought that the dragons should be good, but there was the small problem that the people in my world were dreadfully afraid of them and Dannrel managed to get into a fight with one. What were these bad dragons doing in my story? I asked myself. It seemed there were two groups of dragons, one that hated humans and one that tried to help humans. So K’randenmar Rebeldragon was born. The ideas did not yet fall together, they still needed something more.

That something more happened along as I was working on another story. In most of the stories I have read the armies of evil minions have been made up of pathetically weak, untrained soldiers (be they goblins, or some such with a different name) they always attacked straight on, in mobs with little thought for tactics other than superior numbers. This lead to the hero of the story having no trouble fighting scores of opponents and made him look like a magnificent swordsman. In my eyes it just made the bad guy look stupid and the people who died fighting the enemy look weak. I decided that I would create and army of evil creatures that would be really good at fighting. They became the Karadera, adept at all kinds of weaponry, masters of all aspects of warfare, well-trained, disciplined and controlled by mind-controlling wraiths. They were merely supposed to pose a threat, but they quickly overwhelmed the opposition and took control of the land they lived in. So of course I had to think hard to get the people of this land out of their trouble. Most people were enslaved under the Karadera (and their human allies). What they needed was a hero and a liberator. Cendris rose to the challenge and began a resistance that was crushed. He was forced to flee the land and go. . . where?

Until this point I had thought that this other story was taking place in another world. It was here that I realized that they were the same world. Cendris fled to Naevoria. And the people of Naevoria had come from Taera. This connection of worlds brought about the start of the story of K’randenmar Rebeldragon and the history of the Darktimes.

I supposed that the people of Taera might have had trouble with the dragons before. At first I thought for the longest time that some previous rebel dragons had been cast out of Naevoria and banished from the isle of magic and flown across the sea where they found Taera and burned their way across the land in what I called the coming of the Wyrms. So the people of Taera were rightfully fearful when they came to Naevoria, where they found more dragons and set about continuing their destruction. Obviously the dragons wouldn’t be too pleased by that. They fought back, there were casualties on both sides until a girl named Jennstie Morianne managed to bring peace between the two races (don’t ask me how, I didn’t get that far in the details). The leader of the Dragons, Eyreyandale, made peace with the humans. But his brother did not. So the seeds of Rebel Dragon were laid (it was one word back then, Rebeldragon, don’t ask me why, merely an odd quirk of thinking.) They would not be fully thought out until I revisited them when I considered writing Rebel Dragon.

I have always been fascinated with winter and I realized how cruel it would be in this world, so I created the embodiment of winter in the form of the Ice-Wraiths or Isilvrel. They were cold people, living in the north of Naevoria and hating the cold lands to the south. Every winter they would ride forth in an attempt to destroy the southlands. But every year they were driven back by springs coming. With the Isilvrel I also created the boarder country of Lindera (which was the forerunner of Dannrel’s Equilla and Iiyrie) and the men who stood guard against the winter. But they had not always stood. The wraiths had not always come. When they first came the south had fallen and been covered in winter for a few long years. They needed something to save them. It was then that I realized that the Dragons had not been banished from Naevoria. I realized that they had come from Taera in the first place. And that they had not always been dragons.

Fearadrel has always been one of my favorite dragons. He had only been remarkable in that he was the leader of the dragons that had been cast out of Naevoria and had been killed during the dragon purge of Taera. I made him more interesting. He became a powerful mage with a creative mind. Fearadrel gathered a following, starting with Sandra (one of my favorite characters) among them were all the great dragons I had ever named. They joined their power together and under Fearadrel’s direction made themselves something more than human. They made themselves untouchable by time and they gave themselves great power and new form. They became dragons. They had become powerful and nearly invincible. Some of them decided it would be fun to display their power. But they went a little too far. They brought the wrath of the other wizard-groups down on them and proved that even the most powerful could be brought down by numbers. They fought back. Cities were burned and many died. At last the leader of the wizards challenged Fearadrel to a duel, just as he had in my previous idea of history, before the dragons became human. They fought and killed each-other. Or so it seemed. Only Sandra ever knew that Fearadrel had survived in his human form (though his dragon form had been mortally wounded) and fled back to where he came from. The rest of the dragons (except Sandra) left Taera forever. They found Naevoria under the Ice-wraith’s spell and cast them back into the north.

There were many other innovations along the way. But that is the general history of the creation of Naevoria it is not in chronological order, since I started at the end with Dannrel and reached into the past as I created it. It is not a complete history in any way: I make only passing of the Darktime that spawned the Karadera and brought about the Cracking of the Sky and I completely neglected the dragontongue, the white tree of the north, the elves, the Faeisari shapeshifters on Whaldran, the men of Krysane, Teardrop and the Flamereach Archipelago. If I were to include the evolution of every idea it would make for a very long post indeed and would take almost as long to tell as it did to create. As it is this is quite long enough already. It covers the first ideas to the most recent and it gives a glimpse into my mind.