Dragon Week: Guest Post from Author Mark Cushen
This week (and a half) my blog is focusing on all things dragon-related. I’m excited today to share a guest post from Mark Cushen, author of the Garlen Greatheart series.
If the question Name Something Associated With the Fantasy Genre came up on Family Fortunes (or Family Feuds, for the Americans amongst you), chances are that one of the Top Prize answers, if not the Top Prize answer, would be Dragons.
They appear in some fashion in the vast majority of fantasy stories, across all its forms in all mediums, and have done for as long as stories themselves have existed.
They come in many shapes and sizes. Some have wings and can fly, while others don’t, and simply walk upon the earth, or even swim in the sea. There are those that breathe fire, while others breathe ice, or freezing cold air. The odd few can control the weather. Most of them look like giant lizards, but some are long-bodied like snakes, and have heads that resemble wolves or lions more than any sort of reptile.
Found in the myths and legends of almost every single country in Europe and all the way over to the kingdoms of the Far East; as well as featuring in one of the most important and most translated works of Old English literature , Beowulf , to the tales of much more recent times like The Hobbit and A Song of Ice and Fire , dragons are as synonymous with fantasy as hamburgers are with fries.
And the fantasy stories that I write are no different.
Set in the fairytale-esque kingdom of Faeland, the Garlan Greatheart trilogy does not feature any sort of front-and-centre appearance of a dragon until the third and last book itself, even though they do exist in the world during the first two entries. It’s just that they don’t appear to us as readers because the heroes of the story do not encounter any.
But they are there. In fact, here they are mentioned in the very opening passage of Book 1 in the series, Little White Hands :
Right there, in bold red lettering. Because of course there are dragons.
Nevertheless, no dragons actually appear in this book, or its immediate sequel, and maybe you’ll wonder why that is. It’s a story about a little boy who dreams of becoming a knight, after all, and what good is a story about knights if there aren’t any dragons for them to vanquish? The answer is pretty simple, really: I did not want to shoehorn one into my stories just for the sake of it.
Way back when I first started writing Little White Hands (and then its sequel, Faeland’s Champion , a short time later), I had only ever envisioned the series being a duology. While it would have been nice to have a dragon in those two books somewhere, they just never seemed to fit neatly into the stories I was trying to tell, and they deserve so much more than to be shoved into a story just to fit some sort of imagined quota that says a fantasy story must have a dragon in it.
Yet even with all that said, they still left their mark on the first two books.
About halfway through Little White Hands, our heroes find themselves trapped in the lair of Grotusk, a wicked troll-like creature who sets his pet on them. Here is the monster that emerges to confront them:
Even when they do not make a direct appearance themselves, dragons are so iconic that they serve just as well as inspirations for other things. Their cold, reptilian presence can almost always be felt.
Their influence is so great, in fact, that it can even leave its mark across the annals of time itself. In this passage below, at the very end of Little White Hands, our young hero Garlan meets a legendary knight whose reputation was built on the shoulders of an even more legendary dragon that he defeated many years prior:
All the best legends have dragons in them, after all, and that legendary encounter with Gildagaze the Grandiose is referenced again in Book 3 of the trilogy, when Garlan meets the aforementioned famous knight one more time. During their conversation, Sir Caliburn describes his nemesis as having “wings so vast they blotted out the sun, and his claws could have shred a warship to kindling.”
It does not need to be said that dragons truly are the most fearsome creatures in all of fantasy, but there is so much more to them than their capability for immense destruction.
As pointed-out in the above passage, dragons are very often associated with their love of gold, which is a recurring theme made popular by the dragon in Beowulf, and the tale of Sigurd from the Volsung Cycle of Germanic heroic legend. It is in those stories that we first learn of a dragon’s love of gold and the ferocity with which it will guard it, an idea which later influenced perhaps the most famous dragon of modern storytelling: Smaug, the main antagonist of the beloved fairytale-fantasy book, The Hobbit , by J.R.R Tolkien. In that story, the titular hobbit Bilbo Baggins ventures off into the eastern wilds with a band of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf, in quest of the dragon’s treasure hoard, which it had stolen from the dwarves many years before.
Since my favourite book is The Hobbit , it was only natural, then, that this idea of gold-guarding influenced me, as well. At the climax Book 2 of my trilogy, Faeland’s Champion , our heroes venture into the depths of the mysterious Fae Forest, where they encounter the bumblebeast:
Clearly mostly bear-like in form, the bumblebeast has hints of draconic features in its appearance, due in no small part to the circumstances of its creation: when outsiders threatened to steal away their precious store of golden honey (treasure, you might say), the swarm of bees the honey belonged to were transformed by the forest’s magic into this fearsome monster in order to defend it, just as any greedy dragon would defend its own golden hoard.
But for as much as I enjoyed creating these other creatures that were influenced by dragons, and though I had used dragons as a means to expand the world-building of my story, there was still an itch present in my mind that even they could not scratch.
Nearing the end of writing Book 2, I began to have this reoccurring image in my mind of my main character, Garlan, mounted on horseback, facing down a dragon. You probably know the sort of image that I mean: Google search Knight and Dragon and you’ll see plenty of examples. Because it seemed to me to be the only way this kind of story could end; it must be destined for my hero to face down the dragon. My mind would not allow me to end it in any other way.
Such is the influence of those creatures.
And so I decided that I would build a new story around this single idea. Young Garlan would have his dragon, and I will get to write about the quintessential final boss I always wanted to; the biggest and meanest baddie of them all; the last great hurdle of the hero’s journey:
Dragons are the Top Prize answer for a reason, after all.
And if you have been following my stories so far, then in Book 3, titled Greatheart , the Top Prize will finally be yours to enjoy.
Purchase link: Little White Hands
