Guest Post: Rhiannon Paille (Author of Flame of Surrender) On The Making of Villains

Today, I am happy to have guest on the blog Rhiannon Paille, blogger and the author of Flame of Surrender. I hope ya'll will give her a warm welcome.

Rhi was never a normal girl. She tried, but she couldn’t get rid of the visions, the voices in her head, and the hallucinations. When she was on the edge of crazy someone pulled her back and explained it all. She wasn’t insane. She was psychic, really psychic, too psychic. Her life was an urban fantasy wrapped in a paranormal romance and served with a side of horror. To escape her everyday weirdness she began writing fantasy. She frequents twitter and facebook, but if you really want to get to know her you should visit her site: http://www.rhiannonpaille.com/

Her book FLAME OF SURRENDER (The Ferryman and The Flame #1) Comes out November 1st, 2011. Check it out here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11841693-flame-of-surrender

The Making of the Villains

There are a lot of Villains in The Ferryman and The Flame and they’re of the scary variety.

The Valtanyana are a group of 11 super beings much like the Titans that at one time controlled all the lands across the stars. They were ruthless, biased, and horrible rulers. They came to recruit Tor who was supposed to be the last of them but he didn’t accept and war broke out between them.

Tor won. He trapped the Valtanyana in Avrigost and threw away the key so to speak. He took over as High King and spent thousands of years restoring the lands and creating peace. The only people who still follow the Valtanyana are the Daed. Factions of them exist all over the place but they stay underground or hidden. Tor has had to fight many factions of these Daed Warriors, and he always wins.

In the earlier drafts of FLAME OF SURRENDER there was an entire Villain storyline that existed away from Kaliel and Krishani and their happy little life in Avristar. I originally cut back and forth between the main storyline and the Villain storyline before I eventually omitted it altogether to see if that would fix the flow of the book.

Sure enough it did, but I still have a file on my computer labeled, “SurrenderVillainTrack” and it’s pretty much a bunch of deleted scenes that I not only wrote, but rewrote.

The first scene is about Isadora, the Iolite Flame. She’s in Avrigost guarding the tomb of the Valtanyana when seven members of the Daed faction show up by teleporting into the tomb. Isadora goes inside, they fight, she slices one of them while they crack open one of the tombs. The blood mixes with the dust and Crestaos forms. Crestaos then kills Isadora and makes those seven Daed his minions.

Later we learn the names of the seven Daed members, Lorac, Valtor, Turon, Delotha, Azdrach, Narwa and Hortis. In the first scene with the seven of them, Delotha is returning from Hadwen in the Avristyr Quadrant, in the Land of Beasts. He destroyed the land and didn’t get what he came for. Lorac, their leader decides that because of their poverty they have to awaken Crestaos. The rest don’t like the idea, but they do it anyway.

After retrieving Crestaos, the Daed become his minions and they begin hunting the flames. There are a few scenes where the Daed members are facing Crestaos and those scenes were very tense. Crestaos doesn’t talk a lot, but he isn’t afraid to resort to violence. He holds a lot of power over them and in some cases divides them.

My favorite scenes from the Villain storyline had to be the torture scenes. There was one with Lotesse, the Emerald Flame and then another with Cossisea, the Ruby Flame and Shezeel, the Quartz Flame. Lotesse was tortured by Crestaos himself where as Cossisea was tortured by Valtor.

There were of course scenes where the Daed traveled to other realms using things like necra powder, ipsum powder, a lantern, and ripping the fabric of space and time. One of the scenes had Narwa being seduced by Shezeel, the Quartz Flame. Later, he tries to convince her to give up the other flames in exchange for a quick death instead of a lifetime of imprisonment. She gives them the location of Tiki, the Carnelian Flame and then Crestaos finds them and not only kills Narwa, but finished off Cossisea and Shezeel, trapping their flames in orbs so he can use them later.

I don’t know if I’ll ever let anyone see the full scenes from the Villain storyline, but I might let you see one of the torture scenes that was really too gruesome for YA.

My main inspiration behind the villains was to make them scary. Crestaos is the type that doesn’t talk a lot before acting. He’s intense, and usually angry and direct. The Daed are lesser villains that get the job done. In terms of relatability, the Daed were always more relatable than Crestaos, but that was the point. Crestaos was supposed to make you tremble every time he entered a room because you never knew when he was going to kill someone.

I’ll admit I had a lot more fun with Crestaos in FLAME OF JUSTICE when Hortis spoke at the wrong time and ended up blind.

Scary enough for you?

Flame of Surrender (The Ferryman and the Flame, 1) by Rhiannon Paille, November 1, 2011.

The boy who follows death meets the girl who could cause the apocalypse.

Krishani thinks he’s doomed until he meets Kaliel, the one girl on the island of Avristar who isn’t afraid of him. She’s unlike the other girls, she swims with merfolk, talks to trees and blooms flowers with her touch. What he doesn’t know is that she’s a flame, one of nine individually hand crafted weapons, hidden in the body of a seemingly harmless girl.

Nobody has fallen in love with a flame until now. She becomes Krishani’s refuge from the dreams of death and the weather abilities he can’t control. Striking down thousand year old trees with lightning isn’t something he tries to do, it just happens. When the Ferryman dies, Krishani knows that he’s the next and that a lifetime of following death is his destiny.

And Kaliel can’t come with him. The Valtanyana are hunting the flames, the safest place for her is Avristar. Krishani can’t bear to leave her, and one innocent mistake grants the Valtanyana access to their mystical island. They’re coming for Kaliel, and they won’t stop until every last living creature on Avristar is dead. She has to choose, hide, face them, or awaken the flame and potentially destroy herself.