Life Among the Lipizzans

What happens after the Big Bad Emperor is deposed?

The impact of a problematic tyrant doesn’t end with their death. The policies of that autocratic ruler don’t just go away overnight. The despot’s allies don’t fade away into the shadows. The social and economic impact from that oppressive regime reverberates down through the assorted social classes from top to bottom and—measures have to be taken to replace the unjust previous policies.

Not an easy thing to do, even if the new ruler is anointed by the Gods and acclaimed by the people.

Nor is it an easy thing to write, as I know far too well.

When I finished Judgment of Honor, the last book of the previous series, Goddess’s Honor, in 2020, I fully intended to quickly pick up the story in a new series showing the new Empress of Daran, Witmara, wrestling with the implications of reforming the previous Emperor’s despotic practices.

It’s not like I hadn’t written about those problems before. After all, a big chunk of Goddess’s Honor deals with the struggles of Rekaré ea Miteal after she eliminated her tyrant father’s rule over the land of Medvara. In Challenges of Honor she ends up failing this test, brought down by the schemes and traps created not only by the evil Emperor of Daran, Chatain, but also by her father and his divine patron, the Goddess Nitel. It takes Rekaré’s cousin Katerin, who is also Witmara’s mother, to finish the task that Rekaré began. Rekaré goes on to win redemption by helping Witmara defeat Chatain and Nitel, ending up as Nitel’s replacement in the pantheon of the Seven Crowned Gods.

But—I started having problems figuring out just what Witmara’s quest needed to look like once she became Empress. Instead of wrestling with what happened to Witmara, I worked on an intertwined set of series featuring a powerful family in a science fiction/science fantasy multiversal setting, the Martinieres. Every time I poked at Witmara’s story, the basic concepts seemed to dodge away and well, hey, I’d just thought up another facet about the Martiniere Family Saga.

Eventually, I ran out of Martinieres, culminating in what I think is the best subset of the Saga, The Cost of Power trilogy. Ironically, writing the three books of The Cost of Power showed me the path to figuring out Witmara’s story, between the redemption of Philip and Gabriel Martiniere, and the compromises and costs for Gabriel and his wife Ruby as they become more powerful. However, The Cost of Power didn’t give me the answer to my biggest issue, until a few months after I had completed the books.

One of the problems I’ve always had with the world of the Seven Crowned Gods has been settling on the viewpoint characters. I struggled for years to capture the voices of Rekaré and her mother Alicira. Eventually, I settled on Katerin as the first voice, in what is now the second book of Goddess’s Honor, Pledges of Honor. That opened up the pathway to first Alicira (in the collection that’s now the first book, Beyond Honor), then Rekaré in Challenges and the other three books in Goddess’s Honor.

The same thing happened with Vision of Alliance. At first, it was the voice of Chatain’s exiled half-sister, Betsona ea Ralsem, that came most clearly to me. Betsona is a minor character in Choices of Honor, then becomes one of the protagonists in Judgment of Honor.

Betsona has reasons to see her brother deposed. A powerful sorcerer in her own right, she was badly injured during a magitech performance that she and Chatain worked on when they were children. Chatain covered up his role in sabotaging that performance but privately gloated about what he did to Betsona. After their father died and Chatain became Emperor, he systematically destroyed the rest of their close family. It was only through Betsona’s magical skills, political scheming (including recruiting Witmara to strike at Chatain), and the obvious love and devotion from the people of Daran that she survived. She can’t rule on her own—she lacks the strength to manage her full magic, and has limited mobility as a result of that disabling incident.

But—Betsona’s mind is not impaired. And she has learned political manipulation over the years from excellent teachers, including her observations of Chatain’s missteps and abuses.

We see the early days of Witmara’s rule, both good and bad, through Betsona’s eyes as Witmara struggles to gain control over the much-abused land’s magic—a key element for rulers to succeed in this world. Someone was missing, though—and it took my experience with the Martinieres to figure out who that was. One of the influences in Witmara’s early life was Heinmyets, one of the Three Leaders of the Two Nations. Heinmyets served as Witmara’s Heartfather, a surrogate standing in for a missing father, since Witmara’s father Metkyi had died in the battle to control Medvara.

Heinmyets’s voice turned out to be the balance I needed to Betsona’s perspective. There’s also another element—a nameless, cream-colored, magical stallion from the breed called daranval (plural daranvelii) who cannot be ridden due to his own impairments. Despite his physical handicaps, this little stallion possesses strong magic. Heinmyets is also a strong earth sorcerer, and kept the nameless stallion from being culled, which would be the norm for a daranval with his problems. However, Heinmyets has lost both of his bondmates, Alicira and Inharise, and seeks a new purpose for the remainder of his life.

That purpose appears to be over the ocean in Daran, helping both Witmara and Betsona.

There are complications, of course. Once I figured out that Alliance featured both Betsona and Heinmyets, and the process by which the two of them ally to help Witmara, the story started flowing…and here we are.

Things are far from perfect in the land of Daran, even with Chatain gone. Witmara and Betsona need to overcome multiple obstacles to Witmara’s rule. The forces allied against them are very real, including semi-divine entities who would just love to upset the pantheon of the Seven Crowned Gods to become fully divine again. While Rekaré’s ascension to divinity and the demotion of Nitel as Goddess may have appeared to resolve conflicts between the Gods, that isn’t necessarily the case.

Stabilizing Daran is also key to the survival of the Seven Crowned Gods—and, as we’ll see in the next two books of Goddess’s Vision, Vision of Chaos and Vision of Order, that is not so easily done. Not when Daran’s problems go back to its founding, and the malign influences that seek to bring about its final destruction.

Vision of Alliance is available in ebook through all major retailers. It is also available in paperback and hardcover. Find your preferred retailer at the book landing site on my website: https://joycereynolds-ward.com/books/vision-of-alliance/ef7ac7a1-fb6b-4a6b-8c5a-203b9915fda6

I plan to release Vision of Chaos in late June/early July, and Vision of Order in late October/early November. For more information about the timing of these releases, follow my website at https://www.joycereynolds-ward.com or check out my Substack (Speculations from the Wide Open Spaces, https://joycereynoldsward.substack.com/), or follow me on Bluesky at @joycereynoldsward.bsky.social. Note: please have SOMETHING in your Bluesky account if you follow me. Due to social media weirdness, I tend to block empty accounts with no posts.