Real History of Ortha

Well, I say a history, but it is more in the nature of a memoir, if not somehow a fiction, for Friday Fiction. It started forty-three or maybe forty-four years ago. John and I, always big fans of Tolkien – and hence Fantasy – dreamed up a project of our own. Another Epic Fantasy, as was all the rage at the time, what with Donaldson and Brooks and so on grinding out their Tolkien clones. We hoped – somehow – to write a tale of our own, and that it would be an ace more original than the others.

We gathered various elements we had been creating through middle and high school. For examples: I had a drawing of an Ogre, and I know John came up with Dunwolf as a name for a wizard. I’m not sure how we came up with the concept of the Morgs, possibly something we did together; we certainly developed them together. I want to say they were based on a Brothers Hildebrandt picture of an Orc, and the concept was of a ‘good Orc’ as one of our Fantasy races.

We had to have a variety of ‘races’ for the tale of course (we were enough of a clone for that), but they didn’t have to be as humanoid as Elves, Men, Dwarves, and Hobbits. The Morgs and the Ghamen were unusual enough to provide more variety, with the Woses (the name snitched from Tolkien, of course, but much different in character and appearance) were a more ‘human’ variant.

We developed the story and the world together, but it was John who did all the writing. I want to say that he began it when I was off in my first year of college, and that he presented chapters to the high school club, Writer’s Roundtable. I drew pictures and maps and tried to make a mythology for the background a la The Silmarillion with rather mediocre results. We would have bull sessions when we got together on the weekends. Our childhood ‘swingings’ and ‘playings’ had pretty much given way to ‘revolutions’: endless walks around the front yard, often in the dark hours of the evening. Endless walks with endless talks under the stars and past the rustling trees.  Sometimes we even acted out proposed scenes; I recall in particular personating Korm (whom I always considered being closest to myself in character) on one wild and windy evening.

There were, of course, a false start or two.  I remember (mainly because I drew a picture of it) that at first the hero was a small Hobbit-like character called Apokka whose adventure was heralded by an ominous ‘raven of Barek’. Apokka then split into two human brothers (me and John?), Apokka and Koppa, and eventually Koppa became the main hero.

The name Apokka highlights one of our little problems; we suffered a certain paucity of mythopoetic naming skills. We couldn’t always come up with good ones and often had to settle on a temporary placeholder. ‘Apokka’ was shortened from ‘apocalypse’ (we even had a running joke that eventually we would have the line ‘Apokka’s lips were now dry and cracked’ somewhere in the tale). The world became ‘Ortha’ (Earth) and the realm ‘Forlan’ (Four Lands). We were constantly muttering “Rewrites, rewrites” to each other, and even in our notes, “Something happens here.”

I am only sure of one verifiable fact about Goldfire (the working title we came up with for the tale), and that was that the first draft ended on January 1^st, 1983. John had written twenty-two chapters, and by our calculations it wasn’t even halfway through. Life was getting busier, and perhaps he was getting weary of the interminable slog with no end in sight. We boxed it up in an unusual eggplant-purple binder with one of my ragged maps on front. And there it lay for thousands of years.

Put away, but not forgotten. We would often discuss its ‘lore’, mourn its unfinished state, consider reviving it, and grind our teeth when other franchises somewhat reproduced elements (especially names) from the tale. “Admiral Thrawn” in Star Wars (we had King Thron); Gildenfire for the tile of a slim book in the Thomas Covenant series (we had Goldfire). And then one day …

It was November 2017. I was finishing the first draft of A Grave on Deacon’s Peak but wanted to continue writing for John every two weeks, especially now that I was in the rhythm of it. I wrote Mighty Mikku as sort of an origin story for Roth, who was always one of the most vibrant of the Goldfire characters. I was so pleased with the result (and with John’s reaction to it) that it began pulling other ‘Morg’ stories out of the nowhere into the here. I even went back and typed up all those inky old chapters of Goldfire, just to remember what it was like. Having it all for backstory and thickening and refining what we ‘knew’ about it all and deepening it in new stories with new lore that seemed to emerge effortlessly, as if it been stewing on the back burner for years.

And now John and I are working on a new Ortha project, a series of scripts for a possible animated show. Our roles are a little reversed; he came up with the idea and I’m doing most of the writing now. I couldn’t do it without his encouragement and ideas. I am enjoying it immensely. I have finished a couple of episodes already; but even if it comes to nothing, in the end it is all worth it just for the fun of it, and to continue and perhaps recapture something of that undertaking of long, long ago.