Writing in the Gray

I have never been all that interested in stories that divide the world neatly into good and evil. I hope that if you have read my work, it is immediately apparent.

That may sound strange coming from a dark fantasy author. My books are filled with tyrants, monsters, witches, fallen powers, corrupted faiths, ancient evils, and people who do horrific things in the name of empire, survival, love, prophecy, or God. Darkness is everywhere in Lucardia by design.

Although I spend a lot of time in the darkness, it has never truly interested me, for I quest for the gray.

There is a reason my characters carry names like Erikson Gray and his father, Koen the Gray. The protagonists may lean toward the light, but light is not always clean. Good intentions do not always lead to good choices. Mercy can become weakness. Duty can become cruelty. Love can become possession. Faith can become a weapon. Survival can demand something monstrous.

That is where I like to write. Not in the easy place where the good man defeats the bad man and order is restored, but in the chaos where everyone has a reason, everyone has a wound, and everyone believes, at least for a moment, that what they are doing is necessary. People win, but are plagued by the horror that got them there, and the losers are a tragedy as their good ideals, intentions, and deeds are erased.

I do not want to write characters who are born evil. I do not write villains who exist only because the story needs someone to sneer from a throne or sharpen a knife in the dark. That kind of evil has its place, especially in myth, horror, and fairy tales, but it is rarely the kind of evil that frightens me. What haunts me is conviction. The person who does terrible things because he believes they are saving the world. The empire that slaughters in the name of peace. The priest who persecutes in the name of truth. The soldier who obeys because the order must hold. The monster who believes humanity stole what was never theirs to inherit. Those are the antagonists I return to again and again. They are merely actors against the protagonist, not because of right or wrong, but because they view the world through a different lens.

Vesper is a tyrant, but he does not see himself as one. He believes he is healing Lucardia. He believes the land is broken, divided, bleeding from old wars and lesser kings, and that only his empire can make it whole. If terrible things must be done to achieve that unity, then he believes the alternative is worse. Every skeleton beneath his throne becomes part of the price he has convinced himself history will forgive.

The Nephilim do not act blindly either. They do not see themselves as mindless destroyers. They see humanity as the enemy. In their eyes, their return is not an invasion, but a correction. Humanity stole their magic and cheated at the moment when their strength and right to rule the land were to be validated. Humanity was the opposers of Yahweh, regardless of whether they now bow to the deity or not. They are Yahweh’s chosen people, and now they return to claim what was wrongly taken.

The Nyth Cigfran see themselves as something else entirely: not villains, but weavers of humanity’s destiny. Their cruelty, their manipulation, their dark designs are not senseless to them. They believe they are shaping what must be shaped. They have made mistakes, yes, but now they will correct the weave.

Even Astros, the leader of the emperor’s terrible Legion, who may at first appear to be the quintessential villain, becomes more complicated the deeper the reader enters my world. We discover he cares about the realm. He wants Lucardia whole. He wants it strong. He will even disobey the Emperor himself if he believes the Emperor endangers that greater purpose. That does not make him innocent. It may make him more dangerous. His hands are stained red, but the reader will discover that the blood helped grease the rise of some important characters.

Of course, understanding a character is not the same as excusing them.

A character can have reasons and still be monstrous. A character can care about the realm and still commit atrocities. A character can love their family and still become cruel to their children. A character can believe in God and still persecute the innocent. A character can be right about one thing and terribly wrong about what that truth allows them to do.

That is the gray. And the gray does not belong only to the antagonists.

My protagonists are flawed, too. Sometimes they make the wrong decision. Sometimes they do horrible things. Sometimes I want the reader to stop and ask, “Am I still with this person? Do I understand this? Do I forgive this? Should I?”

Koen is one of the clearest examples. In the first scene I wrote for this book, he murders a group of strangers who take shelter with him in a tower. It is a heinous act. At the moment he does it, the reader has every reason to question him. He is not killing them because they have attacked him. He is killing them because he must remain invisible. He is being hunted. His quest matters more than their lives. To him, they are suspicious, dangerous, and capable of pointing his pursuers in the right direction.

Later, he discovers they were slavers collecting children as replacements for a tithe to be sent to Norn, part of his father’s terrible tax. That discovery may validate the act in Koen’s and the reader’s minds. It may make the victims seem less innocent. It may allow Koen and the reader to breathe easier and think, perhaps shamefully, that murder was not as bad as it first appeared.

But in the moment he chooses to kill them, Koen does not know all the facts. He makes a decision based on little information and acts.

That is the important part.

He does something horrible before the story gives him the comfort of justification. The reader is forced to sit with the act before history, coincidence, or revelation softens it. That is the space I am interested in: the moment before the moral accounting becomes easy.

Because history is always doing that, isn’t it?

It softens some horrors and sharpens others. It crowns one butcher and curses another. It turns conquest into unification, persecution into purification, rebellion into treason, and slaughter into the necessary birth pain of a golden age. We in the West see Chairman Mao as a despot who murdered millions of his own people. However, many Chinese still see him as a god who allowed the common folk to stand up against their imperialistic oppressors and who built a proud China, not one that bows to the West. Many were ground into the dirt, but the fertilizer allowed a great power to grow.

As in CCP China, in Lucardia, much of the known history is written by the victor. Vesper the Uniter’s story is one of triumph. He smashed the other terrible kingdoms of Lucardia. He ended their chaos and the forever wars. He brought forth a golden age and an empire of white.

But if that is the whole truth, why do all of his sons eventually betray him?

Piece by piece, the cracks show. The Legion. The poisonings. The religious persecution. The slaughter. The things hidden beneath the shining version of history. He takes the attempted, and noble, course correction of his sons, Koen and Sylvanus, and runs it through the mud, making them monsters in the eyes of his people.  

That is one of the ideas I return to often: the victor writes the history. The good guy beats the bad guy, and the story is told so that good appears to have prevailed. But sometimes the victor is not good. Sometimes the victor is simply the one who survived long enough to name themselves righteous.

Sometimes the villain writes the holy book.

Sometimes the tyrant builds the monument.

Sometimes the empire calls itself light because it has burned everything else away.

That is why I want readers to feel conflicted. I want them thrown into chaos. I want them to almost side with the antagonist, then question why they did. I want them to hate an action and understand it anyway. I want them to see a protagonist do something unforgivable and wonder whether the cause, the wound, or the world around them changes anything.

Not because morality does not matter. Because it does. But morality is easiest from a distance. It is easiest when the story is already over, when the bodies have been counted by someone else, when the winner has written the account, when the choices have been reduced to symbols and slogans.

Inside the moment, morality is harder.

Amid fear, hunger, grief, war, faith, ambition, love, and survival, people become very good at justifying themselves — just like Koen did, just like Vesper did. That is where danger sleeps. Not only in evil, but in certainty. In the refusal to question. In the comfort of believing that because someone shares our ideals, their hands must be clean.

I think about that often, not only in fantasy, but in the real world. Too many people want black and white. They want the righteous side and the wicked side, the pure cause and the corrupt enemy, the hero and the villain. But the world rarely gives us something so simple. And when it pretends to, that is exactly when we should start asking harder questions.

Who benefits from this version of the story?

Who was erased so this history could look clean?

What horror was renamed necessity?

What cruelty was excused because it served the side we wanted to win?

That is the heart of the gray for me.

I do not write antagonists who oppose the protagonist just for the sake of it. I write people with reasons. Dangerous reasons. Human reasons. Reasons that might make the reader nod before they recoil. And I write protagonists who are not safe from those same temptations.

Because sometimes the difference between hero and antagonist is not the wound. It is what the wound convinces them they are allowed to do.

Cheers!