Whatcha Reading? is a feature that spotlights currently released titles. Today we have Keryl Raist here to give us a peek into her debut novel, Sylvianna.
Sylvianna
by Keryl Raist
Sarah Metz just started college. She was looking for a degree but found a group of wizards. They remember her. She doesn't remember them. Over the next year, she'll help them fight off the creatures trying to kill them, fall back into love with the man who used to be her husband, break the heart of her best friend while doing it, and maybe, if they're very lucky, not remember who she used to be.
What’s the basic premise of Sylvianna?
A group of wizards on the run from their past. They killed their God, and fled their home world to avoid it's destruction. They ended up in modern day Earth. Twenty years later, they're in college, and have found each other again. Now it's time to wrap up the last loose ends of the world before. That's the fantasy plot. Chris, one of the two main characters, and the one who actually killed the God, was married. His wife, Althiira, a farseer, kept telling him it was going to end badly. He couldn't not go through with it. She couldn't help him do it, believing it would end their world. They loved each other dearly, but there was no compromise for this problem. Chris killed his God, and Althiira, his wife, was right, it did destroy their world. When we rejoin Chris he's still trying to learn how to live with the fact that he killed almost everyone who was ever dear to him. Then Sarah Metz (the other main character) jogs by him. Sarah was Althiira, but she doesn't remember that life. And there begins the love story plot. Wrap them together and you've got Sylvianna.
What inspired the idea for this book?
I had the good luck to spend my college years with some immensely creative people. We were role players, and one friend came up with a character that was the seed for Chris. The idea of a wizard on the run from his own dimension because he inadvertently brought about the apocalypse, mourning the loss of his wife and children who died in said apocalypse, seemed like a really interesting character to explore. So I stole that character and began to play with him. 270k words later, and he's barely recognizable as the same character, but I've had a lot of fun with him.
Who is the audience for this story?
Adults with the patience to get into a long book with a lot of stuff going on. People who like having their brain as well as their libido engaged by a book. Someone who finds the idea of a book with discussions of free will versus fate, deeply character driven plot, a carefully created magical system, a slowly evolving love story, angels and demons, and scorching hot erotic sex all in one package enticing. Someone who can stand a love story that doesn't have a happy ending.
How would you define the genre for this book? Are there any underlying themes?
Hmmm... Technically it's Urban Fantasy. I thought I was writing a Paranormal Romance, but once I finished the story I found out that to be a romance it had to have a happy ending. So, UF. Themes? I've got themes out the eyes. ;) Free will or fate? Forgiveness or justice? What makes a good man? What makes a good God? Making the best out of a bad situation. Surviving pain and grief.
What sets Sylvianna apart from other books in the genre?
It's a love story where the characters take the time to build a real relationship before hopping into bed or declaring their undying love for each other. I think the magical system is unique (though I could be wrong about that). Among other things, if my magic users don't have the right level of protections in place, the magic drives them insane. Outside of Lovecraft I haven't seen much of that. I think it delves deeper into intellectual territory than most fantasy, without bogging down in it.
Is Sylvianna part of a series? If yes, can you tell us more about it?
Yike! How to do this without dropping spoilers all over the place? Okay, here goes. Sylvianna is the first book of a trilogy. In Sylvianna, the main characters wrap up dealing with the last vestiges of the world before. When they killed their God, their planet and universe were destroyed. The Angels weren't, and they want revenge. In Justice, the sequel, they'll deal with each other. Sarah remembers who she used to be, and how she and her children died. In One Hundred Years, I'll take them back in time, to when Chris and Sarah were Cell and Althiira, and young and happy, and tell the story of how they fell in love the first time and their marriage.
Who did the cover art for your book?
I did the cover art. There's a scene in the story where Chris is showing Sarah his magical defenses. He has his main offensive spell linked into a seven pointed star pendant, and she's holding it, learning how it works. That scene was pretty easy to translate into a picture, so it became the cover art.
What is your favorite scene or line from Sylvianna?
There's a conversation Chris and Sarah have, where he's talking about a spell he used, called flesh melt. It's a very nasty way to kill someone, melting the flesh off their bones. He's talking about the war, and how after several days of very bad battle, his wife and daughter were kidnapped by the enemy. When his wife got back, she had been raped and their daughter killed. He and Pat (his and Sarah's best friend) tracked down the people who had done it and killed them all, and, as he put it, they died hard. I love that scene because it's one of the first times you get to see that mild-mannered Chris has some real edges to him. I love the fact that he's aware of exactly how awful what he did was; its thirty years later and he still feels bad about it. I love that you can feel his pain at what happened, to his wife, to his daughter, and how he responded to it. And as much as it hurts him that he acted that way, he's well aware of the fact that if he could have found something worse to do to them, he would have done it. It's a very dark scene, very romantic, and it tells you a whole lot about what sort of man Chris is.
As for my favorite line: "You may have noticed we have no sex lives, as a result there's a lot of chocolate in this house." Obviously that's a very different sort of scene. The characters are kicking back after finals, watching Buffy, and relaxing.
If you could be one of the characters in your book, who would it be, and why?
Wow... To some degree I'm all the characters in the book. Sarah is based on me, based on the version of me I played in that role playing game the proto-Chris came from. But like with the proto-Chris 270k words later, she's a very different person. Since I know what happens to the characters, I'd rather skip being any of them. I love them all deeply, but they've done some horrible things, and without going too far into the spoilers, the sequel is called Justice.
Where can readers find your book? Is it available in ebook, print, or both?
Sylvianna is available all over the place:
Is there anything else you would like readers to know?
I had an absolute blast writing Sylvianna, and I hope that they'd have just as much, if not more, fun reading it.
How can readers find you online?
Excerpt from Sylvianna
Copyright 2010 Keryl Raist
Sarah and Chris talking. "I" is Sarah.
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“If you can blow up something’s brain just by thinking about it, why are the Minions a problem? Can’t you just…” I twirled my fingers and flicked them at an imaginary critter in front of us. “And have it fall over dead?”
Chris laughed. “First of all, I almost never…,” he mimicked my gesture. “Autumn does stuff like that. I don’t. For obvious reasons I’ve never seen myself do it, but I imagine I just look like I’m concentrating hard.
“Secondly, Minions, at least here, aren’t the kind of thing I can just kill with a snap. My great talent—if you want to call it that—is to see how something is put together, see what makes it alive, and then stop that. Take us for example: I look at us and understand how heart, brain, and lungs work together to keep a person moving. Then I figure out which of those three options will kill easiest and do enough damage to drop the person. Most magical things without bodies were made by someone. I have yet to run into anything made by a mind like mine that I couldn’t take apart. However, the Minions were not made by a mind like mine. I’ve had lots practice with them, so I do know how to kill them, but it takes more time and effort than I’d like.”
“What about the Dark Man? What’s the problem with him?”
“Same problem as with the Minions. If anything made the Dark Man, it was God, and that’s very much not a mind like mine. Sure, give me a day or three of fighting nothing but demons and I’ll find a way to kill them. Pick a target, and I’ll eventually find a way to destroy it. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be fast, clean, or easy.”
I sat there and nodded. Battle mage was becoming a more concrete term. “So, you really used to kill things on a regular basis?”
“It wasn’t my first choice, but yes, I did it, and I was good at it.”
“Why?”
“Why did I do it, or why wasn’t it my first choice?”
“Why did you do it?”
“Two assassins showed up on my back porch and tried to kill me and my children. It was kill or die, and I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt them. I never really did any magic before then. Didn’t have a clue I could do it. But no one was going to harm them, not while I was breathing. I don’t know, maybe if they had just gone after me, that’s where the story would have ended. But those two idiots picked a time when my kids were with me. It was the last thing either of them ever did.
“It was a very…” He spent a moment looking for the right word and didn’t find it. “It was a moment of perfect clarity. Everything slowed down. Everything was sharp and intensely real. I was whole and perfect and doing precisely what I had been created to do. Then it was over. I got my kids inside, then collapsed shaking and threw up because that’s when the fear hit.
“There’s...” he paused, once again thinking of a word, “an exquisite contentment that goes with doing precisely what you were created for. Pat can tell you about it, too. You can see it when Mike picks up a sword. I know it sounds terrible. When I’m killing things I’m perfectly at peace and right with the universe because it’s what I was meant to do. The magic is beautiful and sharp and clear and just so perfect; it’s hard to describe. Like working with molten diamonds. It’s just… right.”
I didn’t know what to do with all of that. So many things there, so I started with the easiest one. “You had kids?” Wrong choice. I could feel the glow he had from talking about the magic fade to regretful pain.
“Yes.” He sighed and tried a smile. “Five of them. The youngest two hadn’t yet been born when that happened. It was autumn. We were playing… call it hop scotch. Filling the time between dinner and bedtime. My guards hated that flat. But I was being stubborn and stupid. We were in the Palace, supposedly surrounded by my supporters. We built it the way we wanted it, had lived there for sixty years, and our children had been born there. I didn’t want to move to a more secure location. We moved the next day. Our children went into hiding the day after that. The day after that I declared the people who hired the assassins in formal rebellion, and the war was on.”
“That’s when being a battle mage really started?”
“Yes. Sort of. Took a little while for me to be able to do it on command. The first year I did fight with a sword. It was only by the grace of our God I survived. Pat and his troops showed up in the third year. That’s when things started to shift in our direction. Having him around helped. I could watch how he did it and improve my own techniques. There was a war on, so I got lots of practice with my new skills. Since it’s what I was made for, I had an innate grasp of better, easier, more effective ways of doing what I needed to do. Basically, I’d watch him do it, try it a few times myself, and then change it to make it work better.
“By the fifth year I was really good at it. By the tenth the price on my head was so high it would have bankrupted the other side to pay it, but it would have been worth it because it would have won them the war. By the last year of the war, no one was even willing to fight me. I won by virtue of being the biggest gun in anyone’s arsenal.” He paused, looked at me, got a sense for what I was feeling, and said, “You’re having a hard time believing this, aren’t you?”
I looked at the tall, skinny kid with a bowl of cheerios in his lap, staring at me through small, round glasses and tried to find a tactful way of saying what I was feeling. “Well, you aren’t precisely Chuck Norris, now are you? I’m sorry. I can feel you mean it. It’s so very real to you, but it is kind of hard to believe. While you say it to me, it makes perfect sense. Then I realize I’m sitting on your sofa while you eat Cheerios in your jammies. It’s just… unreal.”
He half-smiled. “Well, first of all, me versus Mr. Norris or any other superhero—with the possible exception of someone like Wolverine who can heal really quick—and I win. Secondly, it’s probably a good thing you don’t just sit there and believe all of this with nothing but our stories for proof. Thirdly, one of these days, you’ll see the proof. I don’t mind waiting a good long time for that to happen. You’re willing to heal us and haven’t called campus psychiatric services to see about having us committed. That’s about as good as we can hope for right now.”
Find it on Goodreads HERE!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Keryl Raist is a part-time writer, part-time blogger, part-time book reviewer, and full-time mom. When not balancing babies with books, she likes to sleep. She lives in Charleston, SC, with two little boys; the "Number One, All-Star, Son-In-Law Of The Year Champion" (according to a discerning panel of her mom and mom's best friends); and a remarkably unflusterable cat.
Thanks for telling us about your book Keryl!
