Category: An Unfound Door

An Unfound Door, Chapter Eight

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Agnes and Fhiad meet in the library on the morning after the summer court opens. Agnes wakes before dawn out of habit, while Fhiad has been up all night reading. Fhiad left the library to get tea, and he returns just as Agnes is studying the books he left on a desk. They sit down together, and he apologizes for snapping at her and making wild proclamations.

When Agnes asks Fhiad if he would truly destroy Faloren if he found Soreiya’s Tear, he explains that doing so would be impossible, as the cost for performing magic on such a large scale would require an unimaginably high cost. Magic is taboo in Faloren, so Agnes knows nothing about how it works. Fhiad gives a demonstration. Agnes is so amazed that she asks a clueless question, thus chilling the warmth of an intimate moment. 

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This is the beginning of what Jessica Brody (of Save the Cat fame) calls the “fun and games” section of the novel. This section constitutes the bulk of Act Two. While the opening and closing of a novel should ideally follow a set formula that helps to guide the reader, the middle of the story offers much more freedom to the writer.

I’m going to use this freedom to indulge in all of the narrative tropes I enjoy, and this chapter includes one of my favorite narrative devices: An intimate conversation in a library helps the protagonist and her foil understand that they should be friends. At the beginning of this chapter, Agnes is characteristically blunt and ready to fight, but she and Fhiad manage to establish a common ground by virtue of the fact that they’re both giant nerds.

In this scene, Fhiad begins to show his true colors. He’s much more socially polished than Agnes, but he’s essentially a gentle person at heart. In fact, most of Fhiad’s trouble has resulted from him being something of a pushover. Although he gets in a few good jabs at Agnes, Fhiad also submits to her multiple times during their conversation in this chapter.

I was recently reading an academic book chapter about gothic fiction, and the author was saying that the erotic charge of the narrative is primarily generated by the question of whether a wild and mysterious man will sexually assault the heroine who fears him yet is still attracted to him. This sexual fear turns to romance when the heroine realizes that the man’s menacing aura is a result of his violent passion for her.

I unapologetically appreciate that sort of character dynamic, but it doesn’t fit what’s going on with Agnes and Fhiad. Agnes isn’t fearless, but her extreme pragmatism drives her to behave as if she were. Meanwhile, Fhiad is competent and talented in his own way, but he really has no business being “wild” or “menacing.” In a reversal of the classic gothic gender dynamic, Fhiad needs Agnes to push him forward, while what Agnes needs from Fhiad is his patience and kindness.     

Mainly, however, this chapter is about doing magic in a cool library. The next chapter is also going to be about magic and libraries. And the chapter after that? More magic and libraries. I love libraries and magic, what can I say. This is my story, so I write what I want.

An Unfound Door, Chapter Seven

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Fhiad leaves the court and walks through the halls of the castle as he reflects on the circumstances that have brought him to Faloren. Guerig, the king’s secretary and acting regent, enthusiastically granted Fhiad permission not only to study the castle, but also to live there while supposedly doing research on the building’s architecture. Fhiad curses himself for being drawn into a complicated situation, but he has few resources and fewer choices. As he wanders, Fhiad’s thoughts reveal that he did indeed once study architecture, and that Faloren Castle is an architectural monstrosity whose continued existence almost certainly relies on powerful magic.

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An Unfound Door is written in limited third-person perspective, and this is the first chapter that focuses on Fhiad. As the B Story character, Fhiad represents the “upside-down world” of Act Two, which begins when the A Story character’s status quo is disrupted. Fhiad is the catalyst for this disruption, but his arc is also a mirror of Agnes’s character development. Fhiad and Agnes ultimately want the same thing – the power to choose the direction of their own lives – but their initial motivations and goals are drastically different.

Fhiad may have told Agnes that he intends to destroy Faloren, but what he truly wants is to understand what happened to him. He’s suffering from severe trauma that he hasn’t been able to process, and he alternates between distraction and intense anger. He attempts to distract himself from his grief by tasking himself with a quest. Meanwhile, his anger has no outlet save for Agnes, who became his target simply because she’s the only living person he knows. Fhiad is doing his best to survive, but he’s a hot mess.

More than anything, this chapter establishes how and why Fhiad is now living in Faloren Castle. It also provides a second perspective on the characters and setting.

What the reader is able to see through Fhiad’s eyes are two things that Agnes takes for granted. First, Agnes is subtly shunned by the members of her court; and second, Faloren Castle is impossibly large and labyrinthine. These two observations help justify the “fun and games” portion of Act Two, which will involve Agnes and Fhiad hunting for a hidden relic. In other words, Fhiad’s observations hint that Agnes is free to search the castle precisely because she doesn’t have many social obligations, and that her search is going to be interesting because it isn’t going to be easy.

Something else Fhiad has noticed is that there’s something suspicious about Agnes’s cousin Galien. This is fair, as Galien is hiding a number of unpleasant secrets. Still, Galien is no more a villain than Fhiad is. An Unfound Door is a “gothic fantasy mystery,” which means that everyone has secrets. This is why, at this point in the story, the main task of the characters is to learn how to communicate with each other.

An Unfound Door, Chapter Six

~ Kathryn

The summer court opens with a celebration attended by the wealthy families and nobility of Faloren. After the ailing king retires for the evening, Agnes is introduced to Fhiad, who claims to be a university student from Cretia studying architecture. Fhiad has altered his appearance and accent, and he pretends not to recognize Agnes. Later, when Agnes escapes to a shadowy corner for a moment of quiet, Fhiad approaches her. He initially seems kind but quickly becomes cruel and insulting. He tells Agnes that his homeland of Erdbhein has been destroyed, and he declares his intention to take revenge by visiting the same ruin on Faloren.

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This chapter is the transition between Act One and Act Two. Fhiad, the B Story character, has returned, and he establishes himself as an antagonist. He states his goal to uncover Faloren’s magical artifact with the intention of destroying the kingdom. In Chapter Eight, Agnes will state her own intention to solve the problem he represents by opposing him. Fhiad’s anger is not the real problem, however, and this is the wrong solution.

It’s always bothered me when a villain is angry about something legitimately upsetting, but then the writer has them kick a puppy to show that this anger is bad. What I mean by “kicking a puppy” is that the villain will do something excessively violent or disturbing that is either entirely out of character or framed in such a way as to make their actions seem irrational and done solely for the sake of being evil.

A villain typically represents a challenge to an established order, especially an order built on arbitrary divisions that inform a strict hierarchy. In the case of fantasy especially, there is often a class of “monsters” who are sentient yet still positioned as being okay to kill. When a villain wants to establish an alternate power structure in which “monsters” are not killed, it’s only natural to wonder if they might not be justified in doing so. The villain must therefore be shown kicking a proverbial puppy so that we do not begin to feel sympathy for them. Based on my observations of various fandom discourse wars, a surprising number of people take this puppy kicking very seriously as an indication that a villain is irredeemably evil.

It’s important to me that Fhiad is portrayed as a legitimate antagonist, at least at first. In this chapter, he proves himself to be two-faced, manipulative, and more than a little creepy. He invades Agnes’s personal space, physically threatens her, and mocks and insults her. He verbally attacks her at a vulnerable moment, and he says horrible things that are all the more hurtful because they’re true. Even worse, he’s cruel to Agnes precisely because he knows she can do nothing to stop him. In addition, the curse laid on him is still active, and it’s implied that he may no longer be entirely human.

Still, the root cause of Agnes’s problem – the decline of her kingdom – is not Fhiad, nor is it anything he’s said or done in the past or the present. Rather, this problem is a direct result of a horrible atrocity committed in the past by Agnes’s ancestor. I therefore had to make sure that what Fhiad does at the beginning of Act Two is upsetting but doesn’t fall to the level of puppy kicking. In other words, I attempted to create tension by means of the antagonist’s bad behavior while still being fair to the complexity of his character and his experience of justified anger.

An Unfound Door, Chapter Five

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

After returning to Faloren Castle, Agnes rises early the next morning in order to attend to the correspondence that has accumulated in her absence. As she dresses herself, she reflects on how her mother’s charm and social graces seemed to slow the kingdom’s decline. Unfortunately, her father has done nothing to alleviate the grim atmosphere of the castle since the late queen’s death. Agnes proceeds to her study, a dilapidated yet still handsome room where she secludes herself to work until interrupted by her cousin Galien. Galien encourages her to open the summer court, and Agnes agrees. She believes that a large and lively celebration will be an appropriate symbolic marker of her vow to rejuvenate the kingdom.   

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This chapter is about Agnes’s comfortable existence in the status-quo world. It is indeed a very comfortable and cozy chapter, if I do say so myself. I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoyed reading it again as I made edits.

Aside from establishing the scene of the next chapter, which will be the opening of the summer court, not much happens here. As I wrote in my notes for the previous chapter, it’s important for the reader to understand why Agnes is willing to remain in the status quo.

It seems as though Agnes is doing good work and making good plans, but none of this actually means anything. An astute reader should be asking the questions that Agnes is aggressively ignoring: How did she get out in the woods on the border of Erdbhein? Where did the demon come from? Who kidnapped her? Was it someone in the castle? Are they still there?

Agnes needs to start asking herself these questions soon, because Fhiad is going to come back and cause trouble. For the time being, though, it’s nice to have a small interlude of peace.  

I recently read a Tumblr post (here) regarding how the Gothic genre is all about taking four pages to describe a staircase, and there’s a bit of that in this chapter. I want the reader to see and understand how run-down and decrepit Agnes’s castle is, and I want them to have an opportunity to enjoy this state of decay.

All of the chapters in this story have titles, by the way. I’m not sure if I’ll end up using them, but I especially like the title for this chapter: “A Slow and Silent Decay.”

An Unfound Door, Chapter Four

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Agnes returns to Faloren Castle under the escort of her aide Myla, who had been searching for her. She immediately goes to see her father the king, who is bedridden from a lingering illness. She is met at the door to his chambers by her cousin Galien. Galien has conspired with Myla to hide Agnes’s abduction, and he informs her that it was he who sent the knight Caelif to her rescue. Without inquiring further, Agnes visits her father. He does not wake, and Agnes reflects on the decrepit state of the castle. She excuses herself and uses a discrete servant’s passage to visit the kitchen. The head of the castle’s staff, Taibh, gives her bread and wine and asks no questions.   

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This chapter presents the bleakness of the status-quo world to the reader. There are no people on the roads. The castle town is depopulated. The castle itself is a mess. The king is dying.

Fhiad parted ways with Agnes at some point before the start of the chapter, and she seems to take it for granted that he won’t find anyone in his home kingdom of Erdbhein. This presents a mystery. Why does she think this? What happened there? In Chapter Six, Agnes will explain what she understands about Erdbhein, but the truth is worse. Erdbhein has gone full Dark Souls, and it’s filled with ruin and blight and zombies.

In terms of the Save The Cat story structure, this chapter establishes the “debate” of the main character. Agnes thinks about how she wants to leave Faloren, but she feels that she can’t. In the next chapter, the reader will see that she takes comfort in routines, especially when these routines make her feel smart, powerful, and in control. She ends her debate with herself in this chapter by saying that she needs to concentrate on “work,” which she is obviously using as an excuse for not allowing herself to imagine an alternative to the shittiness of her current situation.

This debate makes a lot of sense to me personally, because I used to be the same as Agnes. I was driven by a need to be “productive,” and I was always working. Those routines made me happy at the time, but they weren’t sustainable. This is all the more true because the busyness distracted me from more important issues, namely, that there was something deeply wrong with my environment.

I had to go through this cycle a few times – and I got very, very good at it – before I realized what it was. I thought I could somehow fix things by simply working harder, and damn did I work hard. Realizing that the cycle itself was the problem was extremely liberating.

I’m not saying that we should all quit our jobs to live our best lives or whatever. Nobody has the money for that. Rather, I think it’s good to at least consider a shift in mindset, and it’s important to chill out and allow room for new ideas and new perspectives.

I also think it’s worth considering that some environments are just rotten. You can try to keep the lights on, but this requires a lot of effort and yields diminishing returns. Sometimes it’s better to allow things to decay.

An Unfound Door, Chapter Two

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Agnes wakes to find that the boar demon has transformed into a young man who identifies himself as Fhiad of Erdbhein, a notorious criminal who was accused of high treason after attacking Faloren a hundred years in the past. He is cultured and well-spoken, but he doesn’t hide his frustration with Agnes, who refuses to free him from the silver chain that bound him as a demon. He tells Agnes that he never had any intention of attacking Faloren. He claims to have had no interest in her kingdom at all; rather, he was only serving as an emissary because he was ordered to do so. Agnes doesn’t know what to think of him, but she’s exhausted and decides to stop for the night.

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This chapter is about two tired people snapping at each other. Nothing happens aside from the reveal that the demon was originally a person, but I did my best to establish the geography of the world and its history without dumping exposition on the reader.

This is what I want the reader to take away from this conversation: Agnes is from a kingdom called Faloren, Fhiad is from a neighboring kingdom called Erdbhein, and there is someplace called Cretia far to the south. Fhiad, who has no concept of how much time has passed, thinks he recently returned from university in Cretia. This establishes him as being in his early twenties while establishing Cretia as a center of culture in contrast to the forest, which is all we’ve seen of Faloren. According to Agnes, Erdbhein attacked Faloren roughly a hundred years ago, and Fhiad supposedly instigated this attack. Fhiad denies this, but he won’t be forthcoming with more details until the next chapter.

In other words, this chapter establishes the broader conflict of the story through the small conflict between Agnes and Fhiad. This conversation sets up a dynamic of Agnes as the straight man who is pragmatic and emotionally grounded, while Fhiad is the funny man who is well-spoken but catty. Each character gets a “save the cat” moment during which, despite their bickering, their first instinct is to be kind to one another when it counts.

“Bickering” may sound like an inappropriate response to the situation, and it is. In the next chapter, the characters will have an opportunity to reflect on their circumstances, and the more serious aspects of the central conflict will be revealed and discussed with a more appropriate tone.

As an aside, there are a lot of shitty things about being in your twenties, but one of the nicer things is being physically fit by default and being able to walk for miles without thinking too much about it. For me in my thirties, I exercise every day but can still only walk for about 45 minutes before I need to sit down. Youth is wasted on the young etc etc etc.

An Unfound Door, Chapter One

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

The chapter opens with Agnes walking in the woods while leading a gigantic boar demon on a magical silver chain. To keep herself awake, she talks to it, confessing that she wants to study its magic in an effort to revitalize the fortunes of her dying kingdom. The demon eventually begins to reply to her in garbled human speech. It responds strongly when Agnes asks about a golden medallion that she found on the battlefield after she spared its life. The demon, who is clearly in pain, asks Agnes to place the medallion against a scar on its forehead. She feels compelled by something larger than herself to do as it asks, only to be overwhelmed by magic.

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During the past two weeks, I submitted all of the writing I owed to various venues. I’m sure there are still going to be edits here and there, but I think I’ve wrapped everything up. I want to hold off on writing short fiction for the time being so that I can focus on An Unfound Door, a novel I started last October but abandoned at the beginning of this year due to a major life disruption.

As I prepared to return to the story, I changed almost all of the character names and reconsidered their appearances. To summarize, I was strongly influenced by the visual design of The Green Knight when I first started the project, but I think it might be best to move away from that influence for various reasons. Recontextualizing the characters helped me think through the details of the setting, which I think is much stronger now.

An Unfound Door is a Gothic mystery set in a decaying castle. Agnes, the princess of Faloren, hopes to save her crumbling kingdom by unlocking the secrets of long-lost relic, but she must conceal it from Fhiad, a mysterious emissary with sinister motives. As their paths cross in twisting corridors and hidden passages, Agnes and Fhiad realize that they must descend into the shadows of the past together if they hope to bring light to the future.

This story summary needs some work, but I’ll keep editing it as I write.

In terms of “Save the Cat” story structure, this initial chapter provides the opening image: A young woman sitting at a campfire next to a boar demon in the darkness of a huge forest.

The closing image, which will mirror the opening image, will be Agnes and the now-human demon sitting in the shade of a lone tree as they watch the sun rise. In both cases, Agnes will be leaving the scene of a battle with the demon to return to civilization. What Agnes considers to be “civilization” will have changed, as will her understanding of herself and her relation to the magic she’s trying to harness. And obviously she and the demon will have kissed.

This chapter sets the Gothic tone of the story – a brave but somewhat naive young woman not-quite lost in a dark and sinister place – as well as the central set of mysteries. What is the demon, and where did it come from? What is the medallion, and what relation does it have to the magic that created the demon? Where did the hero come from, and where did he go? Why is Agnes’s kingdom in decline, and why is she alone in the forest with a demon?

To establish Agnes’s character as the protagonist, she has literally “saved the cat” here, except the “cat” in this case is a giant horrible boar demon. I assume the “hero saves the princess from the evil demon” narrative pattern will be familiar to most readers, who will hopefully be intrigued by the element of Agnes’s character that leads her to capture the demon instead of killing it. She perceives her need of the demon’s magic to be worth the risk, but she’s also intellectually curious and looking for trouble. Essentially, she is the sort of person who willingly gets herself caught up in forbidden magic.

Agnes is going to start wearing a series of masks once the story gets going, so I think it’s useful for the reader to see her true face at the beginning. As corny as this sounds, the way that Agnes needs to change over the course of the story is to learn to follow her heart, by which I mean she needs to recognize her own face underneath the masks she wears. Also, I want to use the story to explore the beauty of decay, and I’d like to use Agnes to make an argument that some kingdoms should be allowed to crumble.

An Unfound Door

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

The sacrificial princess Agnes spares the life of a demon from the blade of the hero who rescued her from certain demise, but was this the wisest decision? Upon returning to her decaying kingdom, she finds the beast waiting for her, now in the form of a man. He is determined to restore the ruins of his homeland to their former glory, but his ambition presages calamity. As Agnes follows her enemy through the shadows, she must shine light onto the mysteries of the past if she wishes to restore hope for the future.

This is my working description for An Unfound Door, the dark fantasy mystery novel that I’m currently writing. I borrowed the title from this passage in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, a coming-of-age story primarily set in an old and decrepit town: “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the dark lane into heaven. A stone, a key, an unfound door. O lost and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.”

The character illustrations are by Marianne Lalou, who is on Tumblr, on Twitter, and on Instagram. Lalou was able to take my amateur designs (that I posted here) and polish them into something magical. They’re one of my favorite fantasy illustrators and character designers, and it was an amazing experience to work with them!

Agnes and Zidan from An Unfound Door

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

An Unfound Door is a Gothic mystery set in a decaying castle. Agnes, the princess of Faloren, hopes to save her crumbling kingdom by recovering a long-lost relic, but she must find it before it’s discovered by Zidan, a foreign prince with mysterious motives. As their paths repeatedly cross in the twisting corridors and hidden passages, Agnes and Zidan realize that they must descend into the shadows of the past together if they hope to bring light to the future.

While I’ve been planning this story, I’ve also been working on character designs. This is what I’ve come up with…

Agnes is in her early twenties. Her palette is fairly monochromatic, making her look somewhat ghostly. She’s not used to interacting with people, and she’s aloof and serious to a fault. Her floral motif is the moonflower. I was aiming for something like a “dark academia” aesthetic.

Zidan is also in his early twenties. His palette is warm with accents in brighter colors. He’s charming and polite, but he’s too proud to conceal the sharp edges under his smooth exterior. His floral motif is the Chinese lantern flower. I was inspired by the work of the artist Emily Cheeseman in creating his design.