Here's To Life

Here's To Life is the fifth short story in the series of works inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Taking place weeks to months before Falling For You, the affable warlock Soryn Cyanos continues his quest to find his childhood friend, Katalia Rhoeas, through the land of Talamh Dieu, finding himself in the expansive woodlands of Ealdland. In the midst of his travels, however, his cursed blood begins to beckon for an offering, and while searching for such, he comes across a mysterious clearing in the woods. After a tangle with an otherworldly foe, Soryn becomes acquainted with an enigmatic woman only named Korari, and as they recover after the end of the skirmish, Soryn attempts to learn more about the hermit in front of him, and as he discovers, try to help her find out more about herself.

Here's To Life can be read right here.

The above image is a painting entitled The Magic Circle, an 1886 oil painting created by English artist John William Waterhouse.

Some author's notes can be found after the jump.

To continue the titling trend of previous works in this series, Here's To Life was named after a song, this time by ska punk band Streetlight Manifesto. Of note is that an older draft of this story was entitled That'll Be The Day, after the Buddy Holly song of the same name and as to re-start the trend of including times of day in the story titles; the change came about due to the original story featuring a completely different conversation between Soryn and Korari, with Here's To Life being used as the new title to reference how Streetlight Manifesto also has a song entitled That'll Be The Day.

Perhaps more importantly, in this original draft of Here's To Life, Korari was explicitly stated to be Ione Anhera herself, with deeper details on why she elected to flee into the woods. I wasn't satisfied with this sudden plot development, however, and I ended up radically changing Soryn and Korari's conversation as to make it ambiguous as to whether Korari truly is a reformed Ione Anhera, or if she's a lost soul that was inadvertently entrusted with Ione's legacy.

Korari's name comes from a Maori word that describes the flowering shoots for Phorium tenax, a flax plant native to New Zealand that has a number of practical uses related to textiles, ropemaking, and similar implements, alongside its use as an ornamental plant.

Ione Anhera was initially named Kristina Anhera; due to the recent abundance of names that started with a hard C sound (Katalia, Catherine, Korari...), however, it was shifted to becoming her middle name instead. "Anhera" itself is an accidental corruption of the word "Anahera", which means "angel" in Maori; the meaning of the name was intended to be ironic, but we'll be seeing more of that in a later work...

The name for Soryn's Fiend was initially intended to be Charon, as to reference the Greek mythological figure, but I decided this was a bit too obvious and uncreative a reference. As Charon is also the name of Pluto's moon, I chose to dip into astronomy to find a new name for it, settling on "Pallas" after 2 Pallas, an asteroid found between Mars and Jupiter. When I later discovered that the name "Pallas" was actually a feminine name, notably used as an alternative name for the Greek goddess more known as Athena, I elected to refer to Pallas purely with the pronoun "it" to reinforce how mysterious Pallas is to our ordinary world.