Demented Hamster

The Official Site of A. E. Mus

The Gift of the Oracles

The time for peace has arrived. With the marriage of elven-prince Siilas and his teenage bride Alhani, the four warring Realms of Talynith have settled into an uneasy truce. But that peace is fragile and does not last long. The Dragon and his Army, long awaiting an opportunity, strike the royal city, the Banintain, and force the young couple to flee for their lives and the life of their unborn child who was prophesied to be the downfall of the ever-incensing Dragon...[unfinished summary]

The Chosen of the Staff

The birth of the half-elven twins Dawn and Dark was prophesied from the Fall of the world into chaos, but there are those who would destroy the twins before they have come into their full power and fulfill the prophecy of the Chosen of the Staff. The Black Emperor, under the influence of the Dragon, seeks out the twins to annihilate them before they can rally the Guardians to threaten his throne, but by his very actions the twins lives are saved and the new-born babes are whisked away to a remote village in Kilintari by a soldier in the army that slaughtered their parents.

The Twins do not remain hidden for long, for the Dragon's seeks them diligently. The Black Army accidentally re-discovers the children on another raid of their new village in search of the Chosen Ones. Again, Rasha, the daughter of the Black Emperor, is forced to take action to preserve the 13-year-old Twins' lives. Killing, the Dawn and Dark's adoptive parents, Rasha allows the Twins to escape and flee to Milandari, where they are taken in by the Lord of Barmore Castle, a staunch protester to the Black Emperor...[unfinished summary]

The Guardians of the Beasts

A gold-eyed stranger appears in the Ice Hand mountains of Milandari and the Elders of Milanoch seize him, believing they have captured the Black Emperor's son, Fin. When their inquiries discover nothing but a vast darkness in the stranger's memory and a devastating illness in his body, the Elders discard him, letting the Twins take him to Barmore castle for treatment. There, after many long, frettful days, the stranger awakens, but with no knowledge of who he is or where he came from. He has even forgotten the language and speaks only gibberish interspersed with semi-intelligable phrases...[unfinished summary]

The Last of the Prophecy

A strange plague spreads throughout the land of Talynith, killing mercilessly, and nature itself is thrown into great discord as the Dragon's new scheme to destroy the Realms comes to fruition. Only Ryian the son of the Aubrey can stop it, but the victory is only temporary and cost everything and everyone he holds dear: his new wife and their two unborn sons, his Beast, his Throne, even his very life...[unfinished summary]

The End of an Age

No summary yet available.

Time Line

For one of my previous birthdays, I had received a pale yellow journal with very 70's-rific orange and brown pasleys and flowers on it from one of my best friends in elementary school (I think it was Kelsey C., but it might have been Kelly H.). I do recall it being one of the more disappointing presents of that year, and it sat around for quite some time, blank.

Then, as I said, sometime around sixth grade, I decided to try to write down a story I had been thinking about and adding onto for years just for fun, and I happened to come across the unused journal (probably while cleaning my room; I don't actually recall). I wrote down four sentences—fragments really—a whole whopping nine words, then put the journal away and didn't come back to it for at least another year.

A year or so later, I did come back to that journal and pondered over those nine words for days. Finally, I added more words to them, about a page's worth, front and back, then set it aside for another span of time to think. As a child, I watched The Last Unicorn more times than I can count and I'd recently bought the book by Peter S. Beagle from the local Friends of the Library sale that my granddad was involved with (that's how my mom even knew when and what it was to take me there; even as a child, I was a bibliophile).

Anyhow, Beagle's book, particularly towards the ending, got me to thinking about unicorns an awful lot. What really stuck in my mind was the story, I believe Schmendrick mentions it, about how his master turned a unicorn into a male human in order to save it from a hunting party or something, then the unicorn fell in love with a maiden and they got married and lived happily-ever-after, but had no children. I kept thinking, what if unicorns could turn into people, or what if people could turn into unicorns? I wondered what their purpose would be, why they would take either form, and what would happen if they forgot or didn't know who or what they really were. Eventually, that idea morphed into the concept of fey "Guardians", or unearthly protectors of the magic realms, and I wrote out a description of them as I also began to write a little more—somewhat aimlessly—in my once-hated yellow journal:

Their eyes were abnormally colored, undeniably hypnotic, and black chasm deep. You can not see your reflection off their eyes but in them. In those unusual orbs was your true reflection. Their eyes were the mirrors to your heart and soul. The most beautiful woman in the world would look into their eyes and see herself as an old disfigured hag, the true reflection of her decaying heart. Likewise a plain even ugly girl might see a stunningly handsome woman if her heart was of like beauty.

They had an unearthly air about them but only those who know what they are looking for would notice it and realize what it really was. It was the air of the fey creatures, the legendary Beasts, unicorns, satyrs, griffins, dragons, and the like. When they stand it is eerily so, always absolutely and perfectly still as the Beasts they protect.

Their stare could be as intense as the Great Golden Eagle’s or as slacking yet perceptive as a cat’s. Their eyes seem to be portals into infinite time and space; all knowing, all seeing through past, present, future, and beyond. Looking into those extraordinary orbs you feel that if you could have a glimpse, just a glimpse, of what they saw through those eyes you would have all the mysteries of the world laid bare before you and solved. Their eyes seem as ancient as a dragon’s and as vital as an elf’s. Their eyes are old beyond comprehension, some say they witnessed the creation of the world, yet age does not touch those eyes. There is a wisdom there that cannot be matched by any human, elf, halfling, dwarf, or any of the ruthless goblin races. They seem never to blink, always watching, always aware, they are the sentient Guardians of the Beasts.

For a long time, I just kept writing. It didn't matter what I wrote, just as long as the words kept flowing, or trickling, or even dripping, drop by drop. The only things I had to go by were flashes of scenes that would pop in my head, and then I'd write to my best ability, trying to get to the point in the story of that scene because it was the only thing I could "see", in the way that writers "see" things. But soon enough, I'd written myself into a corner and I could get back out without re-writting the entire story based on my then-current schema, or changing the schema to fit what I had already written.

Well, to make a long story slightly shorter, I ended up deciding to change the schema because, quite frankly, it was the easier of the two options and I'd already had some issues with it in the past, especially with trying to figure out make a half-human Guardian—it just wasn't working. So, I scrapped the idea of fey creatures/animals in human form, and, instead, whipped out the elves from my literary, highly-Tolkien-esque repertoire of faerie beings and made them my "Guardians". Thus, was born The Guardians of the Beasts, which is actually the third book in The Chronicles of Talynith quintet, though, as you can see it started off as the first.

It didn't take long before I realized that there was a lot more history behind Guardians than I first thought, and it soon became apparent to me that I would need to develop this new world, Talynith, and its past much more extensively than I had originally intended. The further I got into writing Guardians, the more the need to expound on the background became and it started to clog up the functioning dialogue since I had to stop and have someone explain the significance of characters' action and reactions every few scenes, which was incredibly irksome and highly conducive the writer's block. So, I set about organizing Guardians into a series.

The logical prequels and sequels to Guardians soon made themselves known, and before I knew it, I had jotted out the names of the first four books of The Chronicles of Talynith on the back of a little paper pad that I would later use as I began to create the Talynithian language. I had only ever intended Chronicles to be *at most* a trilogy, but, well, the progression begged to differ. The addition of The Gift of the Oracles as the first book, instead of The Chosen of the Staff, rounded off the—then—un-named quartet. It wasn't until about 2004 that the series acquired the name The Chronicles of Talynith, which was, basically, an arbitrary name at the time because I was just going through all my other stories and organizing them into their respectives series and genres so I could more easily distinguish the books and characters therein.

The End of an Age didn't show up until much later (2006-ish), after I had conceived the basic plotline of The Last of the Prophecy and discovered that it could potentially spilled over into another book. EOAA may or maynot make it into the final cut if the series ever gets published. It could be that it recondenses into Prophecy, which may or maynot require a name-change depending on whether or not it gets merged.