Hi everyone – With Forging of a Knight moving along at a nice pace, I felt this would be a great forum to spotlight some of the characters and places that you will soon find within the pages of the book itself. I’ll touch briefly on the heroes, the villains, the supporting cast, the cultures, and the histories you will find within this magical realm as a preview of what’s to come. So let’s light some tallowed candles, and sit comfortably before a sparking fire. As a swollen moon rises, and darksome shadows lengthen outside creaking windows, let’s take out some aged parchments, pull free their waxen seals, and begin our quest…

Character Profile: Qualtan

This is our main protagonist throughout the first Forging of a Knight book. Son to a great hero, and nephew to a powerful wizard, he has been selected to take up the mantle his father had left behind, and wield a magical sword known as the Goldenflame. Gifted with great abilities, he sets off to petition the King of the great nation of Turinthia to become a knight in the Order of the Bearded Lion. He has been trained since an early age in the use of the sword and lance. He has been given enhanced strength above his peers, and resistance to some injury and spellcraft. All in all, the perfect tools to become a noble knight…

However, growing up with stodgy old wizards makes for a more sober outlook in life than most of his friends can relate to, and he starts to notice how different he truly is. As what happens to most of us when we start something new, there tends to be a perception of where we are going, and a reality of the same, with the true path we end up taking somewhere in-between. A little naïve when it comes to what is right and what is wrong, our hero learns defining good and evil isn’t as easy as he first thought. He wants to prove himself as good a knight as his father had been, and puts quite a bit of pressure on himself to meet those expectations. On top of that, our hero’s esteemed lineage isn’t the guarantee to fame he assumed it would be, especially when he meets quite a few people who don’t know anything about his family’s supposed famous name, or could really care less!

Add to this an encounter with a rather unusual “friend” that will test the biases and prejudices of his time, and Qualtan will find himself questioning more things than he thought he ever would about himself, the viewpoints of his uncle (who he had kept in the highest of regard), and the worldview he thought he had understood.

Those problems kind of sound familiar, don’t they? Whether Qualtan’s answers to those questions can help him reach his goal, or prevent him from doing so, we’ll soon see…

The next profile will be on the unusual “friend” Qualtan meets…and wishes he hadn’t!