And since Magical Friends is now live, here’s a little extra for you. Because I love Torik and Copperscales and their friends and relatives (so in the image of this post you can see my version and the grown-up version by the awesome Ravven).
These characters were first shown as children in Silvery Earth Kids – the strip that won’t be available on DriveThruComics after all because they don’t allow uploading square covers and PDFs.
You can check some of the strips on Instagram, and I have a prose version for the visually impaired that went through a proofreader, so… well, the strip didn’t, therefore the language might be more clunky. I thought that since they are children, they could be forgiven if they don’t speak properly.
So, we have the children first, and then they are adults – medieval terms for both, so Child Torik already works as a woodcutter at ten and he’s a widower at twenty-two. But, like Copperscales told him, he’ll live to 50 if he’s lucky. Humans have very short lifespans on Silvery Earth!
So in Magical Friends they’re all adults (except Copperscales, of course, she’s still a dragonette the size of an elephant), dealing with change.
Once upon a time he dreamed of becoming a dragon rider. Once upon a time he had magical friends. Now Torik is a woodcutter who has moved to his king’s castle out of friendship for the prince heir.
Now King, Lambert is almost killed in a revolt and Torik’s magical friends resurface to save him. Both exiled from their hometown, Torik and Lambert wander in search of a new home with two of Torik’s childhood magical friends – a young Genn healer and a dragonette.
Twins with different destinies, Babirye and Tamika were born in Sannia, up north, where people have pale skin and golden manes. When they were children, their merchant father moved the family to Agharek, where their dark skins were less conspicuous.
But when the twins developed different attitudes, their father sent them to the Queendom of Maadre. Now Babirya is a shaman and Tamika a strong warrior woman who go back to Agharek to their brothers and magical friends.
A journey through the world, meeting people and seeing places. With a dragonette. A Silvery Earth novel.
Adwins’s twin sisters barely showed up in the strip, but they became important when I started exploring the future of Torik and Lambert. I hope to write more stories about black heroines, possibly the ones who didn’t leave Nera and stayed in their home country all their lives. A couple of Silvery Earth Heroines are similar to the twins, one a warrior woman, the other with more magical and mystic powers.
I wrote also three short stories as companions to Magical Friends. Two are included in Silvery Earth Kids and Related Short Stories (the prose version of the strip). In Hannibal and the Dragon, ten years after the end of Silvery Earth Kids, Hannibal confronts Copperscales.
Following Torik should have been included in an anthology first, but here you have it to introduce you to Magical Friends, or the start of the novel from Baldric’s point of view (expanded in Torik’s version, since I had to fit Baldric’s story in 5000words).
The last one I’m going to submit to traditional markets, since it would be too much of a spoiler for the novel. And then it will probably appear next year in A Taste of Silvery Earth or a future collection about the northern kingdoms.
Heck, maybe I’ll write about the next generation! Or show Copperscales’s future without short-lived Torik! 😉 So stay tuned for more about Torik, his family and friends way off into the new year!