Nora Graves

Part I: Pre-event Assignments 1. Story Statement: Avert the takeover of the country by the illegitimate brother of the king. 2. Sketch of Antagonist: There are two levels of antagonistic action in this story that interact to develop plot points in this book and the plotline of the projected series as a whole: Level 1: Internal antagonistic force: Loyalty to The Eye requires Winifred Randall to repeatedly sacrifice relationships, abandon personal goals, and deny the fulfillment of her deepest desires for the sake of exercising her gift in the service of her country. Level 2: External antagonist: Simonides Halford, illegitimate son of a king, knows that he and not his weaker half-brother, who sits on the throne of Kettering, inherited their father’s acclaimed gifts for war and government. In this first installment, Simonides is jockeying for position, maintaining his façade of loyalty as he strategically gathers popular and military support to launch his country on an imperialistic crusade and realize his ambitions of ruling an empire. Simonides’s core wound is his illegitimacy: he is haunted by the sense that he was from conception a persona non grata, the son who should never have been. He is desperately—fiercely—seeking the validation of his existence. 3. Break-out Title Options: The Child of the Eye The Eye’s Child The Eye of the Ketteringa The Eye of the King 4. Comparable works: two current works in same genre with similar themes, plots, etc. Cross R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War with Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and you find yourself somewhere in a world straddling the borders of fantasy and magic realism. Winifred Randall, like Kuang’s Rin, is a scrappy female protagonist with a genetic disposition for the supernatural. While Rin fanatically pursues the development of her giftedness as a source of power and self-actualization through military exploits, the exercise of Wini’s gift destroys her hopes of domestic happiness as a wife and mother and forces her into the council rooms and confidences of the rich and powerful. The mute orphan boy Bel, her childhood love, is reminiscent of the snow girl Faina, a mixture of the human and the ‘other.’ The question of his origins is never resolved, and his identity remains a mystery although his presence continues to be felt after his death. 5. Logline: The future of her country rests on a young girl’s loyalty to a gift that betrayed her parents to their deaths and threatens to take from her all she holds most dear. 6. Secondary conflicts: Inner Conflict: The drowning of Wini’s younger brother triggers a disintegration of her parents’ personal lives and their marriage. Her mother descends into the manipulative world of substance abuse; her father becomes entangled in an adulterous relationship with an ambitious socialite. Wini is forgotten and left to the care of her spinster aunt until she is discovered to have inherited her father’s gift of the Eye. This revelation brings closure to her parents and results in their reconciliation. Wini experiences a brief interlude of happiness, and then her parents are assassinated. Having witnessed the impending attack (but not her parents’ deaths) in a vision beforehand, Wini feels betrayed, confident that she could have saved their lives had more been revealed to her. The next ten years of her life are spent denying the Eye: an attempt—doomed to failure—to sever her identity from her gift. Secondary conflict: Kettering is a tiny mountainous country of enormous wealth, the object of annexation by its neighbors and colonization by overseas nations. Because of the strategic importance of the Eye to its stability, continued sovereignty, and control of its wealth, the country’s founders placed strict prohibitions around the marriages of the Randall family, the carriers of the Eye. Children are contracted to eligible mates at birth. Such contracts can be dissolved when the children come of age, but marriage is still restricted to members of the Ancient Three, the only remaining descendants of the country’s original inhabitants, the Elderstar. Wini is contracted to her childhood nemesis, Johnny Haelstrom, but she loves her father’s ward, the mute orphan boy Bel, with whom she communicates telepathically and can share the visions the Eye gives her. Bel’s own peculiar mental gifts suggest that he is descended from an illegitimate branch of the Randall family, but despite compelling evidence, his illegitimate roots would still negate any possibility of their marriage. 7. Setting: Kettering. The wealth of the tiny country of Kettering is legendary. Situated high in the Grand Torr Mountains, its broad interior plain is surrounded by rugged, forbidding mountain peaks. The Ketteringa River flows southward from the Greater Torrs in Kettering’s northeast corner to empty in the Last Seas, cutting sharply west to the center of the great plain before curving south again. Here it is met by the country’s other major navigable waterway, the Brindle Stryd, which empties into it and divides the country into three distinct regions, shaped roughly like a Y. The northernmost region, called the Brindle Stryd after the river, is the principal source of Kettering’s mining wealth, a mountainous area famous for its deep deposits of gold, tin, and precious gemstones and forests of tall cedars. The northern and eastern Strytheclid, to the right of the Y, are also mountainous and rich in ore and timber, but the Strytheclid embraces a portion of the fertile interior plain on the east banks of the Ketteringa as well. The third region to the west of the Y—the Hlafward—is the breadbasket of Kettering and includes most of Kettering’s interior plain: a fertile, flat to slightly rolling land well-watered by a network of small rivers and famous for its deep black soil and agriculture. Ketteringas. The capital of Kettering is the ancient city of Ketteringas, situated on the border of the Strytheclid and Hlafward midway between the sea and the mouth of the Brindle Stryd. Here Mount Xhorra towers above the western bank of the Ketteringa, a solitary peak separated from an arm of the Grand Torrs that reaches the river on its east side. The original keep silhouetted on the top of Mount Xhorra is now an archaeological ruin, replaced by the breath-taking Winged Palace with its flying buttresses and gleaming white stone towers, the home of the Ketteringan king Leonidas IV. The stone walls encircling the Old City high on Xhorra’s slopes are a reminder of more barbarous times, but the city has long since burst that seam and spilled down the mountain and into the surrounding plain. The time-worn buildings of the Old City house the poorest of the poor and a criminal element; the city’s working classes live on smallholdings in its southern districts amid the refineries that process the ore shipped from the Brindle Stryd and in the western boroughs, bustling with small businesses and expanding commercial interests. The wealthier residences of Ketteringas’s merchant class sit on the northern slopes of Mount Xhorra, and on both banks of the Ketteringa extending to the north and the south of the city lay the small parks of the landed gentry surrounding large, stately residences. Such aristocratic families typically have large land and commercial holdings in the provinces of the Strytheclid, Hlafward, and Brindle Stryd that are the source of their ancestral wealth. Windermere House. The residence of the Randall family when in Ketteringas, is relatively recent in architecture (500 years), constructed of warm, weathered red brick and situated on a high bluff to the north of the city, overlooking the Ketteringa. Marshall-in-the-Fields: A neighboring park and the Ketteringas home of the Haelstroms—along with the Irenii and the Flavellye, a principal line of descent from the Ancient Three—is of even more recent construction, built out of stone and considered by Wini’s father, Lord Henry Randall, to be one of the “most vulgar, most ostentatious houses I have ever set foot in.” The current Lord Haelstrom’s grandfather pulled down the original structure and erected the present building with his initials—RH—carved out of stone and displayed prominently on the four corners of the roof. Little Eye. The ancestral estate of the Randall family, Little Eye, sits in the foothills of the Lesser Cors, the heart of the Strytheclid to the south and east of Ketteringas. Little Eye is named after a small pond on the estate; an underwater projection of black obsidian in the center of the pond’s floor gives it the uncanny resemblance to an actual eye. Legend claims the pond, although very small in perimeter, is bottomless. It is also the reputed grave of the great Xeiba, a tree worshipped in antiquity by the original inhabitants of Kettering, the Elderstar, a people group who were all but exterminated by the invading Ketteringans and whose descendants survive only in the bloodlines of the Ancient Three and the Randall family. According to ancient records, lightning felled the Xeiba the night before the first wave of the Ketteringan invasion began. A cavern appeared in the ground and swallowed the tree, and the pond Little Eye formed above it. Garby. The northernmost region of the Strytheclid, an area that features many of the Greater Corrs highest peaks and the source of the Ketteringa. It is an austere, remote landscape of snow-capped mountains, timbered hillsides, and rocky highlands, famous for its gemstones and one of the least populated regions of Kettering, the site of the charred remains of Rainfall, the ancestral home of Wini’s mother, Lady Rowena Flavellus. Gathersby. A large town at the intersection of the principal crossroads of Kettering south of Ketteringas where the flow of goods and people (including troops) from the country’s three regions meet in their movement to and from the important port of Littlebridge. Littlebridge. A sprawling, congested mass of warehouses, taverns, brothels, and streets of small market stalls dominated by the merchant class who also typically serve as the stewards of the gentry. To the southwest of Littlebridge, out of view of the mainland, lies an archipelago of small, inhabited islands called the Flown Isles. Riverview. A small but strategically important military town on the extreme western border of the Hlafward. It overlooks the Gap of Amun where the Poe River, one of the Hlafward’s important rivers, descends from its source high in the Southern Graels to the Ketteringan plain. It guards the most accessible entry into Kettering from the west, a strategic objective of would-be invaders and an ancient migratory route for displaced peoples. The Grayling—South, West, and North. The area most vulnerable to penetration from the outside and most desirable for settlement, extending from the foothills of the Graels to the heart of the Hlafward centered in the town of Rich Hill. Leighbourne. Located at the mouth of the Brindle Stryd where it flows into the Ketteringa, is the nerve center of the all-important mining industry. Its skyline is dominated by the billowing smokestacks of refineries, and because of its high elevation, this smoke hangs in the air, blanketing the city. Refineries feature in all the smaller towns that mark the many mining centers of the Brindle Stryd. Little Hay, one of these, lies in the mountains that form the regional border between the Brindle Stryd and the Hlafward where the Gap of Camber is the chief cross country access between them.