The Web of Story

[Spoilers for the Iomedae threads on Glowfic]

Over the past two years I have spent a good deal of time reading stories on Glowfic, an online fiction site. The best are comparable, in my view, to good commercially published fiction. The trick to reading on the site, as my son, who started reading it earlier than I did, told me, is to find a few authors you like and look for threads they contributed to.¹ The other trick, if you have sufficient will power, is to ignore any story currently being written, doled out a page or so a day, and instead use the site’s search option to find finished stories and read them.

One interesting feature of the stories is that different threads, by the same or different authors, present different ways the same story might go.² My favorite example is the web of stories around the character of Iomedae. In what I think of as the main line of the plot, set in the world of Golarion,³ she is a very powerful and very good (details in a previous post) paladin commanding the Shining Crusade, an army formed to fight Tar-Baphon, a powerful necromancer attempting to turn the entire world into undead under his control. After decades of conflict Iomedae succeeds in imprisoning him, turns her army into a nation on part of the territory she freed from his control, gives it the task of keeping him imprisoned, and ascends, becomes a god. Much of her life was motivated by the belief that there was a kind of god that the world needed and did not have and it was up to her to do something about it.

That is the main plot but there are multiple threads woven about it. In possibly the best,⁴ Iomedae at fifteen, a young and inexperienced paladin hoping to join the Crusade, is by some magical accident dumped in America. She ends up, along with Alfirin, another fifteen-year-old from her world, spending four years in the care of a competent, considerate, and very puzzled foster mother.

The two girls, impressed by how wealthy America is despite the lack of magic or gods, conclude that they should introduce American technology to Golarion, spend four years learning as much of it as they can. Their solution to the problem of getting back to their own world with what they have learned is to kill themselves. In Golarion sufficiently powerful magic can raise the dead, Iomedae as a paladin is the servant of a god and hopes that he will spot her in the river of souls and have one of his priests resurrect her, after which she can arrange for Alfirin’s resurrection.

The plan works — with one small error. They are revived in Golarion some nine hundred years after they left it. Her god, Aroden, is dead. Cheliax, her country and His, has been seized by Asmodeus, the strongest of the evil gods. Their resurrection was commanded not by Aroden but by Iomedae. They have returned to the universe of the main plot line, a universe where Iomedae did not go to America, did end up as a god.

There are now two Iomedae’s, one nineteen and mortal, one a god. There are also, as we eventually discover, two Alfirins. The Alfirin in the main plot line became a mage, joined the crusade, met and fell in love with Iomedae, a paladin in the Crusade but not yet its leader. The two were briefly lovers. Iomedae became in time commander of the Crusade and a legendary hero, Alfirin the Crusade’s archmage. That they still love each other is never acknowledged. Iomedae has concluded that attachment to any one person will make more difficult both her role in the crusade and shaping herself into the god she plans to become.

Iomedae is someone who, having decided what she ought to do, never considers the possibility of not doing it. Iomedae, legendary hero, concludes that the right thing to do is to abandon any romantic relationship with the woman she loves, does so and continues to do so over decades spent working with her to defeat Tar-Baphon. Iomedae, nineteen-year-old stranded in America, concludes that the right thing to do is to kill herself in the hope of being revived by her god and so bringing American technology to Golarion, and does. The threads give a vivid picture of the same personality in versions of the same person not only at very different ages — conventional novels can do that too — but after living very different lives.

The young Alfirin and Iomedae are also lovers. This Iomedae is not commander of a crusade, is not planning to become a god, is working with her Alfirin to introduce technology, including military technology, use it and their considerable talents to free Cheliax from Asmodeus.

Golarion has a spell, Alter Self, that can temporarily turn a woman into a man,  making it at least theoretically possible for two women to produce children. When Alfirin becomes able to cast that spell she does so, very publicly and several times. Only then do they announce their intention to marry, having made it possible to fit their relationship into the norms and world view of the people around them.

The love story blocked the first time around has finally succeeded.

She prestidigitates herself clean and dresses more formally on the walk back to the tower. "So, what brings you here? Me or my wife?" She smiles. She really is so wonderfully delightfully fond of Iomedae, and there's something special about being married to her that wasn't there when they were just dating.

Other threads tied to the main plot include two where Iomedae herself or Marit, one of the core officers under her, find themselves shifted nine hundred years forward, interacting with the country they founded and worshipers of the god she became. Iomedae’s reaction, once she has spent some time satisfying herself that the country and the god have become what she intended them to be:

She loves them. They're Lawful Good and they're careful and they're trying and they have so much on their shoulders and she never wanted to have biological children because it would have been an insane and unethical thing to do but she feels, suddenly, like she did get them after all, like she built a home for them and bore them out of her body when she abandoned it on the steps of the Cathedral and she tried to gesture, for them, at something they may now grasp better than she does, and she loves them, and this is a stupid and unstrategic and unworthy-of-them degree of emotion and needs to wait until she's home. …where she'll have to cry on Karlenius about it or something, Marit's out and she and Alfirin need to be More Careful. 

Marit’s reaction in the other thread, one where he has found himself in the future with no way of returning to his own time, is more complicated:

Marit: …probably I should see how Lastwall handles this. Every time he thinks the word Lastwall it's with detectable annoyance.

Does it not live up to your hopes for it?

Marit: It probably couldn't possibly. We thought we were going to change the world, build something unlike every warlord-state and Lawful the way the Empire could never be, a place anyone would want to live, on soil that they'd won fairly, with a government that was incorruptible, and it'd become the richest and safest and wisest and best place in the world. …we also didn't call it Lastwall, because we weren't at the time conceiving of it as a bandage glued over Tar-Baphon.

I can imagine, if you thought you'd really win - I think Lastwall is a lot of those things. Just - not the richest place in the world, because they're busy keeping Tar-Baphon locked up and holding the worldwound and are at war with Belkzen.

Marit: Yes. It's a lot to be busy with. It's not fair, really, to have left them with all that to do and then blame them because they are busy and tired with the doing. I think really it's just hard to miss your children's…childhood…and then not recognize the men and women they grew up into.

Could it Have Been Done…

I cannot think of any published fantasy book I have read that presents what I have described here as the web of story.⁵ Is there a reason for the difference?

Role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons are multiple author improvised stories, each player taking charge of a single character and one, the DM, the world the story is set in. What I am observing is a literary form that grew out of that approach to story telling online. A thread is the work of multiple authors each taking charge of specific characters. A new thread in the same web is sometimes the work of the same authors imagining a different way their story might go, possibly with a new author and characters added.

Sometimes someone reading a thread imagines how a character of his invention would react to its events, writes his own independent story set in that world, adding to the web. In one such thread an intelligent and curious resident of Asmodean Cheliax tries to make sense of the events leading to the successful Iomedean invasion of his country, to figure out how the Iomedeans came up with multiple new technologies, including firearms and radio, and to guess where the extraordinarily charismatic young lady using the radio to spread subversive ideas into Cheliax could have come from.

Having correctly concluded that “Freedom”’s underlying philosophy is Arodenite — Iomedae is not broadcasting under her own name — he is faced with the puzzle of how a nineteen-year-old girl could have been brought up in a religion whose god died a century ago. He comes up with a variety of guesses, none very plausible, while figuring out for himself and those he cares about how to respond to a rapidly changing world.

Could it be done by a single author writing a fantasy novel for publication? Perhaps. So far as I know nobody has done it.

1. The best, in my judgement, is lintemande. Others I sometimes find worth reading include Swimmer963, Aevylmar, JiSK, and lantalótë.

2. In part inspired by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

3. Golarion is the default setting of the Pathfinder role playing game, modified by lintamande and others and used as the setting for some Glowfic stories.

4. It starts with in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die, is continued in It is true I wished to escape; and so I wish still and then a clash of arms to be eternally remembered, followed by a cluster of parallel threads still in progress.

5. The closest is the tangle of poems and stories out of which Tolkien’s Silmarillian was extracted, unpublished at the author’s death.

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