Toggle's Second Era is actually my oldest piece of fantasy- Radrezyne and the King's Elite have existed in my head in some incarnation or other since I was about six. Of course, their names and characters were all completely different then, but I have a problem with abandoning stories and characters- no matter how stupid and derivative they are, I just can't do it.
The First Era is pretty old, too; Rianna DeLavrey's first incarnation showed up when I was ten or eleven, and I think the Rift and the Dragonstaff Princes are a little older. I am, sadly, too attached to these bits of derivative fantasy to put them to rest and move on. (I think part of me is afraid I'll never come up with anything original again, so I cling to what little I have, storing them up against that inevitable day when I run out of ideas.)
The Third Era, though- the Third Era was my most directly derivative storyline, and also the one that started to show the most influence from all the anime and video game fanfic I was reading at the time. It's still a story I'd actually like to write at some point, because I'm terribly fond of the main characters- but I have very little idea of what's going on in it, beyond the main characters having wacky hijinx.
After the Second Era, the Godhead was split with the opening of Rianna's Tower; Radrezyne kept half of it and and became the God-Empress of the eastern half of the continent. Her story directly affects Stella Matin in the Fourth Era, but for the rest of the Third Era, Radrezaria isn't all that important. A lot of awful shit happens, but it calms down pretty quickly. (The only really important thing is that she marries the exiled prince of Izalia, one Jarrek DeLavrey. By the time the Fourth Era swings around, no one remembers his name- just his title, the Dragonlord. (Razhia and Drazhene have the most screwed up genealogies everaaaahahaha.))
The other half of the Godhead went to an elf named Tybarra Ridelaine, who spent about a day as a goddess before she got sick of it. She split her piece of the godhead into six elementals- earth, fire, water, air, life, and death. Then Ty and her girlfriend wandered off into the cosmos, happily ever after. (Alright, yes, fine, okay, all of my characters are gay. Whatever. >_< Tybarra's girlfriend was the Lady DeLavrey of her generation, though she didn't realize it for a while. They're also really cute together.)
The six elementals became the patrons of various areas of the western half of the continent; Celesia, the White Lady, became the patron deity of Shaivhen; the Kraken (the physical elementals all have real names, beyond their titles, but they haven't told me them) took Akvaria and the Akvarian Ocean; the Wyrm took Tarmish and the Wild Woods; the Wyvern took the Reichen Mountains and Murundcar; the Salamander took the deserts in the south (which were part of Radrezaria), most of the southeastern coast, and Dzyrach; Adarial, the Dark Lady, took the Ikatian peninsula and all the northern nomadic tribes. Everything was cool and stuff until Adarial decided that, in addition to presiding over the domain of death, she was also the personification of betrayal.
Edrana Niceeraea Coralin was a shaman of the Ikatai; the position is hereditary, and she came from a long line of powerful and distinguished shamans. Adarial chose her to be Her Avatar on the material plane. Edrana had no choice in the matter, and found herself undergoing a series of upsetting and uncomfortable transformations into various forms of undead. After being a zombie, a vampire, a wight, a ghost, a nightwalker, and a shade, she finally descended to lich-queen and rampaged across the Ikatian peninsula, turning whole tribes into armies of hungry undead as she went.
(...should she and Theron ever meet, I'm rather convinced they'd fall madly in love.)
The plan was for Edrana to conquer the rest of the continent in Adarial's name, gathering souls and power for Adarial. Meanwhile, Adarial would use the boost in power to tear open the Rift and release seven of the Greater Demons of the first era- creatures so horrific and destructive, the creator put them to sleep at the very bottom of the Rift and charged the rest of the monsters with keeping them there.
The other five elementals weren't about to let this happen, so they raised Avatars of their own. Celesia chose the youngest prince of the Rothish royal family, Prince Siegfried al Rothcar. Ziggy was a scholar and a geek and was kind of gay for his best friend, and was, in general, not at all suited to be a warrior for Good and Light and things like that. But then Edrana's army of undead sacked the city (Shaivhen gets sacked a lot. Like, constantly. It's a thing.) and slaughtered the rest of the royal family. Celesia downloaded fantastic combat skills into his head, turning him into the greatest warrior of the age, but all Ziggy wants to do with himself is read books and raise hawks.
The Kraken picked a sea elf whose name is utterly unpronounceable; everyone calls him Blue. Blue was assigned a position as a border guard, because he had an upsetting tendency to go berserk at inopportune moments and bite people's faces off. The Kraken thought it was hilarious. Most of the time, though, Blue was a nice guy with a slightly quirky and morbid sense of humor.
The Wyvern's Avatar was a windrider named Redea Stormcry; windriders are basically avian humanoids- wings and talons and beaky noses. Redea was something like a princess and something like a shaman/warleader; she had a sunny disposition and a mean right hook, and an eidetic memory.
The Salamander picked a Gathare shaman named Deryll; the Gathare are usually called desert ravens, though they look a lot more like Disney's gargoyles than anything else. Daryl was an albino and an exceptionally powerful shaman among his people, but he doesn't speak much to non-Gathare. He's a bit of a snob.
The Wyrm's Avatar was Joradi Deethanas, a bobcat type malestri. The elves in the Third Era were less actively fascist than in the Second Era, but they were still in the process of slaughtering all the other sentient forest dwelling species. It was a territorial thing- the cities were encroaching on the forests, so the malestri and lesser fae agreed to give up the borderlands and retreat deeper into the woods. The elves, however, were having none of this; they allowed the refugees beyond their borders, and then executed them. After that, the elves started expanding their borders and invade what parts of the woods the malestri and lesser fae still inhabited.
Most malestri are bound to the forest; they're lesser elementals of a sort, and favored children of the Wyrm. Jora, however, wanted nothing to do with living in trees- so she hightailed it out of there and went to live in Tarmish, where she joined the Thieves Guild and caused mayhem wherever she went. She was the first Citywalker among the malestri, and her existence paved the way for the grand experiment that led to Foxbird, Harbard, and Sharecht being abandoned in Shaivhen in the Fourth Era.
The five Avatars eventually take down Edrana; they can't kill her, though, so Celesia breaks Adarial's control over her and de-undead-ifies her. She joins up with the other Avatars, and they seal Adarial away. Then the six of them get put to sleep until they are needed again.
Cut to a few hundred years in the future: the world is full of peace and happiness, the Radrezarians have gone isolationist, the Gathare and the windriders have been slaughtered and hunted nearly out of existence, along with the malestri and the lesser fae, Dzyrach has become a breeding ground for political insurrectionists, Tarmish is ruled by gangs and undercity guilds, Akvaria is destroyed by a hurricane, and Shaivhen has been taken over by a bizarre religious cult that preaches bigotry and the sacrifice of intelligent creatures to appease its made-up gods. The Elementals finally realize something isn't right, and they wake up their Avatars to fix things.
Shennanigans ensue (by which I mean plot and epic battles and religious politics, and all those other things I suck at writing), and Rianna's Tower gets opened. The Elementals are sucked in, chewed up, and spat out as the Thousand Little Gods. All six of the Avatars die in the process (even though I really want Edrana to live forever; she shows up in several other stories of mine because I adore her so much), and the Fourth Era begins out of the wreckage of the Third.
Sometimes, in the dark corners of my mind, I like to call the Avatars the Planeteers. They get really upset with me when I do that. But anyway. The basic plotline and a lot of the minor characters and locations in the Third Era are lifted from Dennis L McKiernan's The Eye of the Hunter, which is a most excellent book.
I don't have any other characters for the Third Era, beyond a few elves and maybe a cultist or two; someday I'll sit down and start plotting, but that day is not likely to be any time soon.
