A-to-Z Challenge: “I” is for Iryen

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2016, I am blogging info on my current work-in-progress, a YA fantasy/adventure mini-series tentatively titled “The Other World”.

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Okay, so up until now I’ve been repeating the words “protagonist” and “antagonist” over and over, but today I’m actually going to officially introduce the antagonist, the Shadow King, Iryen.

I’ve already told you a little about Iryen in other posts. By the time he was a young prince of the Kynnon royal line, the magic in his family’s blood had been vastly diluted and been all but forgotten through the passing of the generations. However, young Iryen was a bit of a loner who would spend many long days squirreled away in the darkest corners of the castle library, and one day he found an old, dusty book that was actually a journal. This journal was written by a servant of an old king, and it detailed the strange ways in which the king would use his own blood to accomplish amazing feats, such as instantly taming a wild beast that had been terrorizing the kingdom. Young Iryen was captured by these stories and immediately set to work tracking down more information. It was slow and difficult, but piece by piece he began to put together bits of stories that eventually revealed the truth about his family: that their ancestors had been gifted with the power of blood magic.

Iryen then became obsessed with fostering the latent magic in his blood. He studied every text he could get his hands on with even the briefest mention of the subject, performed a number of experiments until his body was covered in scars, and eventually came to two powerful realizations. One was that he possessed a power that could be used to control the world. The other was that he very desperately wanted to do so.

By the time Iryen had come to the conclusion that would change the lives of the entire kingdom, he had been lucky enough to gain the love of a beautiful, kind woman named Eden, but even she could not pull him away from his evil, misguided plans. In the day that he was prepared to cat the world’s most infamous spell, Eden confronted him once more, desperate to change his mind, determined to get the man she loved back before he made a terrible mistake. But Iryen was too far gone, and in that moment he inflicted the worst kind of betrayal on Eden, so she in turn betrayed him, cutting his infamous spell short.

But only for a time…

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I hope you’re enjoying the A-to-Z Challenge and my little snippets of ‘The Other World’! If you’re interested in what else I’ve written, please be sure to check out ‘Nowhere to Hide‘, available on Amazon in both hard copy and e-book versions!

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