Many Swords. A vision of things to come…

This was an early design for the sword Halo Sky I did in March of 2013. The idea was that hatches on the side would open up to release the wings in the heat of battle…

Sometime around 2015, I’d mocked up what I wanted the cover of the book to look like with Halo Sky and it’s wings open. I had every intention of using this design until…

In September 2018, as I was getting to the point of finishing some edits of the book, I decided to add some digital color to the sword, and halfway through I saw it… And when I saw it, I said these words out loud

“It’s a goddamn cow!”

I wasn’t able to not see the cow. Even to this day I can’t help but see the cow in my original design. And so, I went about making a new design. There were a few I came up with, but this one was the one I liked the best. And while I still love this design and hope to use it again some day, it still didn’t have the vibe I wanted. I was going to go ahead with this design. I was pretty much ready to do so. But…

Around the same time in February 2018 I was working on what was then, a series of unrelated stories, and I had designed this sword for one of the characters in that story. This sword was love at first sight…

I wrestled with myself for a while over this one. I didn’t think it was fair to have designed this sword for this story, and this character, and take it away and put it in another story, for another character. It was probably the right call to do so, seeing as how I scrapped those stories, and this sword design might have been lost…

So that’s how I got here, to this design and this cover. I had to change a few things in the story to line up, but this sword design better fits the original vision I had in my head than how I first wrote the sword in the book. Now I can’t really imagine another sword being Halo Sky.

As the vision foretold, there will be many swords.

There are many monsters still yet to slay.

And so, there needs to be many Heroes to slay them.

Pavilion Remembers: Black Orchid is a short story that will pick up where Pavilion Remembers: Halo Sky left off, but will take the story back to a time where two worlds collide and will diverge the Pavilion Remembers series down two different paths.

One road will take the story back to Niel and the monster hunting theoarm people as they try to rebuild what Syn and his army of monsters torn down.

And another road with follow the story of Orrin Mannox and a group of zeno, as they fight to find out who is killing their people and harvesting their supernatural powers!