First Look: Iron Mountain

I'm pleased and excited to announce that my next web novel, A Hero Past the 25th: IRON MOUNTAIN, is now slated to launch on Monday, the 23rd of March. Barely a month from now! Oh gods.

If you've lost count, this is already the 5th part in the series, set two months after the events of Fire of Prometheus and Side Story A.

The story will be released exclusively on Royal Road, a chapter per day, except on weekends. As previously stated, there won't be a new fiction page, this episode will be uploaded on the same All Songs page as the previous part. So if you're already a user and following that, you should get notified automatically when the fiction is updated.

You can probably tell by the title and the promotional image, but we're done with hot jungles and prairies for the time being. This ride will be stone-cold, hard as rock, and merciless as the arctic winter. Our heroine and her dedicated minstrel companion travel to the northern territory of Dharva in search of fortune and glory, and, as usual, things rapidly escalate from there. To the point that even the author was starting to sweat bullets.

I set out to write a casual, fun adventure in the vein of good old B-cinema classics like The Mummy and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. And while mostly successful, it also turned into something not so PG-13 along the way. You might need someone to give you a warm, long hug afterwards. Then again, I trust you already know what kind of a series you're dealing with...

Against what the setting and the description might suggest, the story's not really "filler", by any means. In fact, when it comes to the over-arcing main scenario, I'd say this book is likely the most relevant so far, and many questions presented in the previous parts now get a direct answer. So if you're interested in world-building and the lore behind the setting, this should be particularly intriguing for you. I was personally very thrilled to finally put these ideas into text, after fantasizing about it for so long. But, no spoilers!  

Iron Mountain is technically one of the most challenging stories I've ever written, with the largest active cast to date and some elaborate new places. There's a heavy emphasis on exploration and action. To keep a clear grasp of where everyone is and what's happening at any given moment, I relied on modern technology and built simple 3D-models of various key locations.

It was time-consuming work, but also really fun and very, very helpful. I would've been pretty confused and lost if I didn't have such references and only had to rely on memory and imagination.

Below are some samples, rendered in Blender.

Following the story's release, I'll also post here profiles for some of the new cast members. At least one very obvious. And Aiwesh, at last.

I'll keep working on the story until March 23, so that I can share this fantasy with you in the best possible quality and accuracy of vision.  Hope you'll look forward to it!  Thanks for following and see you soon!