First and foremost, let me apologize for suddenly disappearing in 2022. I sincerely wish that I could've continued writing, but life often throws curve balls when we least expect them.
I don't know if I have ever mentioned it before, but my mother passed away on March 12th, 2022. I had started writing The Dreamer's Fall a few months before her passing, and she read through each of the chapters I wrote, offering feedback and helping me decide on the path that I wanted the story to follow.
Her input greatly impacted the story, specifically where it started in the overarching plot I had devised. I had rewritten the first 20-30 of The Dreamer's Fall 3 times before I was happy with it, and she read each iteration despite having close to zero knowledge or interest in the fantasy genre.
I originally believed that I had grieved her passing, but I was greatly mistaken. I turned 30 in November 2022, and that was when it hit me, and it hit hard. I'm not sure if it was because it was the first birthday in my life that I didn't hear her voice or if it just took that long for it to sink in.
Regardless, the depression affected my writing, and even today, as I reread The Dreamer's Fall from start to finish, the last few chapters available on Patreon feel like such a drop in quality that I'll likely have to rewrite them from scratch in the next few days.
As I reread those chapters today, I vividly remember how frustrated I felt when I wrote them. I wanted to take my mind off things and sink into this world I was creating. Yet, every paragraph I wrote felt rushed and wrong, leaving me anxious and feeling all the more frustrated at my inability to free myself from the situation.
Initially, I planned to take a week or two to cool off and return, but in December, I finally resolved some legal troubles I had been battling for the past 6-7 years. I won't go into any great detail about it, but as a result, I was put on probation for a year.
My probation agreement stated that I couldn't employ myself for work. It not only kept me from writing full-time but also forced me to close down an online business I had created a decade prior—a business that accounted for the vast majority of my income, leaving me with very little wiggle room financially.
The consecutive blows left me with little time or energy to care about much else. Honestly, I was in a pretty dark place, feeling as though my entire world was crumbling around me. I really don't know how else to put it.
I won't lie—the past two years haven't been all that fun for me. That's why, despite having completed my probation six months ago, I'm only now picking up writing again. And while I'm most certainly in a better place mentally after resolving something that had loomed over my head for almost a decade, financially, things aren't all that great.
That is why I can't dedicate too much time to writing at the moment, at least until my writing can substantially supplement my income via Patreon. At the time of this writing, I'm currently doing the editing I had been putting off since before my hiatus(Ch.1-55) and re-uploading each chapter to the various sites I publish The Dreamer's Fall on. After that, I intend to get at least 20-30 chapters ahead on the Patreon before publishing free chapters.
Once all that's done, I'm aiming for three chapters a week(Fri-Sun). So, once again, I apologize for my disappearance, and I hope you all can continue this journey with me as Arthur's story unfolds. Thank you all for the support you've given me before and during my hiatus. I truly do appreciate each and every one of you.
A semi-short recap for those returning after the two-year hiatus!
Last time on Dragon Ball—I mean The Dreamer's Fall:
Arthur was reborn into the fantasy-like world of Nithe in the Ollerinian Empire as the son of Marquis Edward Revan and Lady Sofia Perick. Sofia was poisoned by Soul-Severing Poison during childbirth at the behest of the Ducal Yor family in an attempt to ensure that Edward's children with his other wife, Elyria Yor, would inherit the wealthy Revan Marquisate.
Likely due to the timing at which the Soul-Severing poison was administered, Arthur retained his memories of his previous life. His early years were spent studying magic in secret under the care of his mother's handmaid, Senna Crost.
After some time, he discovered a spell one of his ancestors created that theoretically could be used to create an artificial soul. Arthur immediately got to work attempting to complete the spell with dreams of becoming Nithe's first necromancer and attaining true immortality, his raison d'être in this life.
Around the same time, he met Kyren Drent, a ninth circle mage from the neighboring empire, The Dominion of Sparnia. Kyren had been poisoned a few years prior to their meeting by the second prince of Sparnia and was now a disembodied spirit that only Arthur could see.
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When Arthur turned thirteen, his father Edward disinherited him from the Marquisate's line of succession and offered him the Earldom of Helagaust in the Kingdom of Bern to the south of Ollerin. However, Bern was in the midst of a war with Ollerin, and to claim his Earldom, he'd be forced to participate in said war.
He was given a pittance and twelve personal guards for his troubles and sent along his way.
The Guards We've Met So Far:
Foster Welt: A handsome, childish twenty-something who often guarded the study Arthur used daily. His family is a wealthy merchant household that Foster doesn't appear to get along with.
Harkon: A young, naive recruit that Foster often takes advantage of.
Jeren: An ever-serious noble-born man with a mysterious background.
Saria: A young woman who dreams of learning to craft spells like her father.
Bannon: A gruff man who speaks his mind.
After receiving his orders to lead an army in the invasion of Bern, Foster goes missing. Arthur searches for him and encounters spies from the Kingdom of Agelia, Bern's ally in the war, pretending to run a tavern. He plays along with their charade and uncovers an Agelian sacrificial ritual used to summon abyssals from their god, Minaan's realm.
While stopping the ritual, he encounters Fenric, the leader of a mercenary group employed by Edward Revan for the war, whom he had previously met. He enlists his help to rescue Foster and Fenric's two lieutenants, Mara and Alan.
After defeating the abyssals, Arthur convinces Fenric and his mercenary company to work for him in exchange for land in Helagaust once the war ends.
Following those events, Arthur learns that Harkon, one of his guards following him to war, had been imprisoned by Merin, the woman who poisoned his mother during childbirth, under the orders of Elyria Yor, his stepmother.
Arthur uses Harkon's imprisonment and the Agelian ritual as an excuse to kill Merin in revenge for the death of his mother. For the act, he was banished by his father and forced to live in the military camp outside the city of Munn until the army left for war.
There, he suffers an assassination attempt by one of his personal guards that was thwarted due to Kyren's warning. Having made some progress on the mana soul spell he had been working on, he decided to test it and successfully created an undead puppet. Lacking the privacy to do more experiments, he extracts the physical mana core from the undead to study further and discards the corpse.
After the assassination attempt, Arthur decides to buy armor from the blacksmith who created his main weapons, his hidden blades. The possibly-dwarven blacksmith Thoran obliges him and offers him a massive discount when he learns that Arthur is being sent to war.
When he later returned to the blacksmith to pick up his armor, he encountered another assassination attempt, which he skillfully thwarted. After turning the assassins into puppets and extracting their mana cores, he encounters a mysterious old man who appears to stop time for everyone other than Arthur.
The mysterious old man referred to Arthur as a 'boy with a broken soul' and then vanished as if satiating his curiosity and losing interest. Arthur was then convinced he had met some terrifying god-like being, but he struggled to recognize the old man as a god due to his modern way of thinking.
Once the army departed for war, Arthur spent most of his time researching his mana soul spell, but he later encountered an oddity in the Bernish city of Rothwel. The city was meant to be under siege but was curiously abandoned by the Agelian-Bernish army.
Arthur grew suspicious of his missing enemy and ordered Kyren to scout for their army's location. Kyren soon finds the Agelian-Bernish army camped below a cliff, waiting in ambush. Thanks to this information, Arthur's army successfully catches the Agelian-Bernish army off-guard and defeats them.
Once the battle was over, Arthur took his men to loot the enemy's camp, where he encountered Arianna Puck, a countess of Bern, pretending to be a servant. He then offered her a deal in which she would help create a spell to rot off flesh from bone for his necromancy, and in exchange, she would be treated well as his prisoner.
She then told him of visions that the god of Bern and Agelia, Minaan, had sent out to his most devout followers. The vision revealed that the devout Bernish worshippers were to flee to Agelia and showed them scenes of Ollerin's downfall if they complied.
After working out a deal with Arianna, he encounters Marquis Rennar Bennet, an Ollerinian ninth circle mage, wandering back from the battlefield as if lost. Arthur calls out to him but quickly realizes that, like Kyren, Rennar had become a disembodied spirit, but for some reason, he had lost his memories of the past few weeks.
With Kyren's help, Arthur convinces Rennar to teach him the Bennet family's magic so that Arthur can learn more about magic. In exchange, Arthur offers Rennar the same opportunity that he offered Kyren years ago: Arthur will give him a body with his necromancy spells once they are completed.
The Ollerinian army continued south after defeating the Agelian-Bernish army and laid siege to the city of Harran, which is where we left off two years ago.
Some Names to Remember:
Levin Felridge: A sixth circle mage hired by Senna to teach Arthur magic after discovering him reading up on the subject. Due to Arthur being ordered to war, Levin couldn't complete his contract and agreed to follow him to his new home in Helagaust once the war had concluded.
Garren Perick: Sofia Perick's little brother and Arthur's uncle. Dislikes Arthur due to the complicated emotions he feels surrounding Sofia's death.
Baron Iken: A baron of the Ollerinian Empire and leader of the Ollerinian army that Arthur is a part of.
Ellena: A slave Arthur bought before leaving for war so Senna wouldn't have to care for him alone. He agreed to free her once the war had ended. She is likely a noblewoman from the Federation of Mutumn in the far-east displaced by the recent crusade led by the Cellan Theocracy and surrounding nations.
Damien Verac: An Agelian nobleman and leader of the Agelian-Bernish army coalition that Arthur counter-ambushes. His fate is unknown after running into Rennar Bennet once he fled the battle with his men.