Behind the Scenes
The NeryonStories
(Part I)
By Michael A. Stackpole
Behind the Scenes is a feature-offering of the Chain Story Project in which authors get to discuss the ideas behind stories, why they made certain choices during the writing, and any other details that don’t always make it onto the page, but certainly influence what appears there.
Spoiler Alert: These discussions will reveal facts about the stories that could give away key portions of the tale. These essays are best read after you’ve read the stories they address. Toward this end, the authors will include links to their stories so you can obtain and read them first.
Coming into 2025, and preparatory to setting up the Chain Story Project, I was reading a lot of sword and sorcery fiction, both new material written over the last ten years, and the vintage stories from back in Weird Tales’ heyday. I’d read tons of Robert E. Howard’s work before—and had even written a couple of stories set in his Hyborean Age—so revisiting those stories was a joy. Lovecraft, on the other hand, is a tough slog for me, so I did what I could with his material—basically read a little and wish I could get through more.
Clark Ashton Smith, as the third of the key trinity of S&S, I’d never read before. Back in the 1970s, when his work got collected, the covers didn’t appeal to me, and I found the stories a little dense, so I never got very far with his tales. But seeing stories in old issues of Weird Tales, I took the opportunity to dig in. I was immediately blown away by the lyrical nature of his prose. Smith was a poet and the way he used words in his stories really makes that clear. I suspect, when I was younger, the lyricism and precision were aspects of his work I didn’t appreciate, hence my not reading much. But now I was entranced and delightedly gobbled up whatever I could find.
Wanting new work for the Chain Story Project, and inspired by Smith, I sat down to write something brand new. Things actually started with an idea for a story. I was at my desk, thinking about sword and sorcery stories, about the mix of action and magick, and the bones of the plot for The Mad King just came to me. I jotted notes down on a small memo pad. Instantly I had a story. Next step: I needed a character to get through it.
Normally when I start a story, I’ve worked on developing the world, I know who the main character is, what their goals in life are, and how this particular story will fit into their overall saga. Sure, the story might be a one-off, but I’ve generally found that several ideas will occur to me during development. I jot them down and look to see if I can work anything in as foreshadowing on whatever I’m doing at the moment.
With Neryon, however, I knew none of that, and still don’t know much of it. I also knew nothing about the world—other than it had a tomb and something bad would happen in there. I was just plunging into an unknown world with a relatively unknown character, and was ready to see where things were going to take me.
Mind you, thirty years ago when Roger Zelazny told me that was pretty much his approach to his work, I found the concept inconceivable. Now a lot older and, I hope, a little wiser, I was ready to see if it could work for me.
About the only decision I made about Neryon is that I didn’t want him to be the oft-maligned barbarian, and especially not a barbarian warrior with an allergy to magick. There are plenty of stories about such characters, with most of them being really well done. I wanted to play around with something different, both for the challenge and because I didn’t want to make it easy for folks to dismiss the stories as being yet one more story that was obviously Conan with the serial numbers filed off.
Besides, I like playing with magick and really wanted to see how a magick user would slide into a role oft crafted to suit muscular folks with sharp, pointy weapons brought easily to hand. I saw Neryon as being what I mentally defined as a warlock—so capable and comfortable with magick—but I also wanted him familiar with physical fighting and a variety of other skills. He could dress up for polite company, likely had found vaguely valuable items new homes (with or without permission), and generally could fit into any story or setting that came along.
The first thing I discovered about Neryon came in answer to a very logical question: How did he get here, to this place, to have this adventure? Since I didn’t know who he was, or what he wanted out of life, it seemed inescapable that he must have been a victim of fate. So I gave him a leather pouch in which he’d collected bones and stones, twigs, coins and other things suitable for divination, that he’d toss into a pile and read the results as a fortuneteller might read Tarot cards. He would do what his fortunes told him to do—and as a device to motivate a character, this is a god-send for a writer.
Also, because I didn’t know the world, I didn’t want to start imposing things on it that might not work later. So I decided that every valley had its own king—didn’t matter how rich or poor the place was, how big or small—and the valley kings, at least in this part of the world, all swore fealty to the High King in the Capital. And no, ten months into writing stories in this world, I have no idea what the capital’s name is, how much power the High King has, and while I’ve placed the capital on a makeshift map, it’s only in pencil and likely to move.
Two other weird little things popped up. The first concerns naming conventions for the world. I like names in stories to be orderly and to make sense. I decided that I’d make up fantasy names, but, importantly, the greater the number of syllables, the higher the person’s station in life. Neryon could be either two syllables or three—I pronounce it as three—and nobles in this world have a minimum of four syllables. Likewise the naming of places, which can lose syllables if they get smaller or add them if they get bigger, much in the same way people elected to an office or elevated by their guild, might add a syllable to their names.
The other thing that came up was simply, at first, a bit of color text meant to describe how insane a king had been in the past. I noted that said king gone to war with the gods. Once I’d written that down, I started wondering what that would look like, and what would it mean for the world if, some time back, a Man had declared war on the gods and had succeeded in killing a bunch of them. Thus was born the Gods’ Slaughter, an historical event in which a lot of gods died or were otherwise dealt with—a consequence of which we see in a later story, The Sea-God’s Daughter.
All of these things play a part in shaping Death Grip, which was the third Neryon story and my first story for the Chain Story Project. In that story there are a couple other things you might not have noticed. The first is that the fragment of the crown which appears in my story first appeared in Robert E. Vardeman’s story Blade of the Storm Witch. I chose to use his fragment, with his gracious permission, just to set an example for other authors in case they like what a colleague did and wanted to play with something they’d created, too.
Another thing in Death Grip was the appearance of a Magistrate-Martial, who has come all the was from the Capital and who works for the High King. I named him Logan and wrote him as it he was a Talion from my novel Talion: Revenant. It was a little inside joke which I’m not sure anyone noticed.
Death Grip also produced a throw-away line which proved inspirational. When Neryon is asked what is greatest fear is, he replies in part, “[A] half-dead sea god with a pod of overly amorous daughters…” A new story, The Sea God’s Daughter, coalesced around that concept and I wrote the story under that title within two weeks.
The last point I’d make about the Neryon stories—for now at least—is that I also wanted to use them to explore how sword and sorcery stories or elements could appear in stories that might be classified elsewhere. Death Grip is really a police procedural with magick. The Mad King is a straight-away sword and sorcery story. The City of Thieves, the second story in the set, is a crime drama, and The Sea God’s Daughter trends more toward romantasy than anything else, while still having the S&S elements in play.
In Part II I’ll get into a few more details about the stories, and a big realization I had about the nature of Neryon’s stories. I’ll also touch upon how The Epistles of Dancillius Hrekt, Monster Fighter, ties into all of this.
The job of being a writer is weird, but also a lot of fun. Getting to spend time with friends I never knew existed before is one of the best parts. Watching their worlds evolve, expand and demand more stories is more satisfying than pretty much anything else in life.
