ForgeFyre

[Jubal]

ForgeFyre

Foreword

For a while back in the mid 2010s, I wrote a story called ForgeFyre. Like many of my ideas, it had grander aims than ended up happening, or at least, it didn't end up with the sort of following that would have justified those aims. The idea was to do a fully-online format of tale that could allow for creative mixed media storytelling, focused on a heavily neurodivergent-coded character with a bit of a Sherlock Holmes aspect to her, and a portune, one of the strange magical little-folk of the Guns, Swords and Steam setting. They got two chapters in before my attention and that of Hannah, the excellent artist who'd provided sketches for me, began to fray rather: I tried things like getting ForgeFyre its own website but also to rather little avail.

The origins of GS&S were very much in pulp military storytelling - the very first versions of the setting which I made in my early teens (the oldest doc I have on the setting is a spreadsheet I made in 2006, when I was twelve) were for wargaming, and embarrassingly involved a sort of flipped American Civil War setting where the slave states were aesthetically and geographically the North. The setting moved pretty strongly to an earlier pseudo-time-frame through my teenage years as I developed it in its own terms and noticed that 'hey what if we did this thing but where the other guys were the racists' is a really bad concept. By 2010-11ish it had taken on a lot more gothic and pseudo-European rather than colonial-focused elements, the 'south' got scrapped altogether in favour of what became the rump state of Chaltary, and the Union faction became a sewing together of various old countries taken over by vampires rather than a 'union of states'.

Should I just have scrapped the setting rather than adapting and evolving it? I still wonder sometimes, and I abandoned it for a number of years partly because I wasn't sure I wanted to be writing a setting which aesthetically drew on periods with such huge impacts on the creation of oppressions that still sit with us today. My eventual conclusion, though, was that a lot of people are trying to write Steampunk and Clockpunk types of fiction, and I think GS&S has developed to a point where it has things to say that are worthwhile in that space, and that handling the tropes of early modern themed fantasy in ways that question and push back is worth doing, even (sometimes especially) where that means questioning and pushing back on one's own earlier work.

What emerged from all that was a setting that jumps quite wildly between various tropes and ideas, less coherent in its references but more coherent in what it's there to do. Where this is a setting about war, it's a setting about war from the view of conscripts: where it's a setting about violence and oppression, it's one that wants to see those things for their human, not geopolitical, cost. It can also be a setting about folktales and folk music and living what those meant to people, from love to greed to hope. This is all something that is too often missing from the sort of steampunk that mostly involves posing in pith hats for the aesthetic. The different places and factions in the setting have a lot of variance: Durginfeldt draws heavile on the English Civil War, Surany is a sort of early modern Rohan, Aloen allows for some pseudo-French courtly scenes and the Union has its own particular blend of vampiric Da Vinci gothic atmosphere. It's a jumble, but one that creates space for stories - and thus, stories were born.

In that light, ForgeFyre in 2014 (so written when I was twenty) was a further move away from the original geopolitical concerns of the setting towards something more rooted in folk tales and ghost stories, where I could tell the stories of ordinary people, misfits, communities, and adventures in this world. Some more courtly politics and suchlike was planned around the little French-themed mountain kingdom of Aloen, but the two chapters we finished were really based around the main character's home village.

The story now has been unavailable for about six or seven years, so this thread will contain a staggered re-release of the story, just interlinked within the forum and probably just limited to the two completed chapter-stories we finished, 'The Strangest Creature' and 'Ink-Cap and Nightshade'. It probably won't get read much but I feel like what we made should exist somewhere, and this is somewhere. I hope you enjoy it and find it interesting.

Contents

Prologue - The Strangest Creature

Chapter One
Words, text, setting, and editing by James Baillie: Art by Hannah Milburn.
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six

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Prologue - The Strangest Creature

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There is a girl here. She clutches something to her chest and stares at the fireplace, where a cascade of soot falls. Soot and ash are grime and dirt to the world, but to her they fall as black stardust, the billowing particles floating around a contrast to the white snow outside.

She is six years old, and the world is still a playground.

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The girl hears a voice from the fireplace. It comes as little shock; the world is still full of wonders, and her eyes light up at the sound. She is bold, and fearless, in a way that only a little girl can be.

"Child."
"Yes?"
"Child, o, child..."

Blinking little bright blue eyes, she stares into the darkening room. She is alone. The soot settles on the wooden boards.

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The house is old, and creaks. Tucked into a half-forgotten valley somewhere in the hills of Aloen, with ivy growing up the walls, it is a moated manor that barely deserves the name. The seignior is away on business; he has been away often since his wife passed from the world, and the little ivy-covered house forgot the sound of song.

That was six years ago.

It is just a week and a day since the girl's sixth birthday. It slipped by without comment, the time passed with the old manor reeve who is teaching her to write. She can already read, and the scraps of books she can get through are beginning to become her truest playmates.

She dreams vivid dreams, and marvels at the world.

But she does not think she dreamed the voice.

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"Child."

"Who are you?"

Staring around, the little girl pouts. Voices are supposed to have people behind them. Or fairies. She found a book that had fairies in, not long ago. Her mother had not been idle in preparing for her child, and though five years of dust had gathered since, the gifts of an unknown parent were still voraciously set upon when discovered.

"I am a friend."

"Hm."

She has had friends, of course; but the children of the village never stay long when she makes her way out to the old stone wall, scared of a shouting at for talkin' to the better folks up at the house who aren't for their sort. And so she retreats; makes a shell. In the world inside her shell, there are people and fairies and dragons and all of them – all of them – read about other things so they can make those real, too.

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"Why can't I see you?"

A haze appears in her eyes, and she squints, unsure of what she can see. Then her eyes widen...

As if some new thought seeped into the back of her eyes, almost painted onto and into the world, the little patch of haze thickens.

An image begins to form.

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As if breathed out of thin air, a child appears. Or it might be a child; he, it, moves stiffly, an odd puppet in the thin air, and almost flickers out of being when her eyes flick away.

Both old and young it seems; the eyes at least are old, and dull where hers are bright.

Her eyes, for their part, widen, and she curls back towards her bed, for the first time unnerved.

The old eyes droop, saddened; the young-and-old shoulders slump.

The image fades.

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