The Midnight Sea
Kat Ross
(Fourth Element #1)
Publication date: May 10th 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
They are the light against the darkness.
The steel against the necromancy of the Druj.
And they use demons to hunt demons….
Nazafareen lives for revenge. A girl of the isolated Four-Legs Clan, all she knows about the King’s elite Water Dogs is that they bind wicked creatures called daevas to protect the empire from the Undead. But when scouts arrive to recruit young people with the gift, she leaps at the chance to join their ranks. To hunt the monsters that killed her sister.
Scarred by grief, she’s willing to pay any price, even if it requires linking with a daeva named Darius. Human in body, he’s possessed of a terrifying power, one that Nazafareen controls. But the golden cuffs that join them have an unwanted side effect. Each experiences the other’s emotions, and human and daeva start to grow dangerously close.
As they pursue a deadly foe across the arid waste of the Great Salt Plain to the glittering capital of Persepolae, unearthing the secrets of Darius’s past along the way, Nazafareen is forced to question his slavery—and her own loyalty to the empire. But with an ancient evil stirring in the north, and a young conqueror sweeping in from the west, the fate of an entire civilization may be at stake…
EXCERPT:
My eyes flew open at the crack of dawn. I groaned and rubbed my forehead. My scalp tingled, an icy, unpleasant sensation. I knew right away where Darius was and what he was doing. It was another side effect of the bond, I’d discovered. I could feel his heart beating. I knew that one of his boots was too tight. I could shut my eyes and tell you exactly where he was, even if he was hundreds of leagues away.
Why had no one told me what it would be like? I supposed Tijah did, but this was much worse than I’d expected. Much, much worse.I threw on my new scarlet tunic and marched down to the river. Tendrils of mist swirled through the dead reeds at the edge. It was late autumn and the air had a dank chill that promised snow.
My daēva stood there, stripped to the waist, pouring water over his head with his right hand. He wore a gold faravahar on a chain around his neck, its eagle wings spread wide. His left arm lay at his side, grey and dead. I stared at his shoulder, at the juncture where smooth skin met rough. His Druj curse.
It slowed me for a moment, seeing that pathetic arm, but I wasn’t yet ready to forgive him for waking me. That was my excuse, anyway. Of course, what really angered me was the terrible realization that I was burdened with a sorrow not my own, but that bled me nonetheless. What really angered me was him—everything about him.
He was calmer this morning, but I wasn’t. I stopped about twenty feet away. He didn’t turn around although he knew I was there.
“It’s nice that you’re so pious,” I said. “But don’t you think it’s a little early to be down here performing the morning rites?”
He paused, then dumped the last of the water from the bowl. I felt the cold trickle down my spine and my lips tightened.
“I was taught by the magi to come at first light,” Darius said. “Did you expect to sleep in? I’m afraid that’s not the way it works for Water Dogs.” He smiled, and we both knew it was fake. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you in some way.”
I stared at him, at the dark hair plastered across his forehead, his stubborn mouth. He looked so human. And yet there was something in the way Darius held himself, perfectly at ease in his own skin. Still but coiled, like the wolves I’d seen in the mountains.
“You haven’t offended me in the least,” I said. “I suppose you need the blessing more than I do.”
I spun on my heel and walked away, knowing I had wounded him. A small stab to my own heart. And I felt slightly ashamed. But that wasn’t the end of it. Then I felt his satisfaction at my shame. And my own anger that he knew and was glad.
And then his amusement at my anger!
I stalked off, determined to think nothing, to feel nothing, ever again.
If only it were that easy.
Author Bio:
Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She lives in Westchester with her kid and a few sleepy cats. Kat is also the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day (Skyscape, 2014), about a world where the sea levels have risen sixty meters. She loves magic, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Preferably with mutants.
5 Cool Things You Didn't Know About the Persian Empire
Hi everyone, and so excited to be here on my release day! The Midnight Sea was a very long time in
the making. In fact, its first incarnation was wildly different. Although the story did have the character of
Darius, a daeva with supernatural
powers, it was sort of a fantasy-mystery mash-up set in contemporary times. I
still like that manuscript, but something wasn't quite working. So I went back
to the drawing board and decided I really needed to write the origin story of
the daevas first—which meant travelling back in time more than two thousand
years. This presented its own special set of challenges (see K.M. Weiland's great blog
post for some tips on writing historical fiction), but it felt right so I
scrapped the first draft completely and dove in.
I don't identify "The Empire" by name until the
very last page, but I'm sure a lot of people will have figured it out by then
so this probably isn't a major spoiler. The time period is the end of the
Achaemenid era, just before the invasion of Alexander the Great, so around 330
BC. In fact, my cover is based on a real disk from that time that was unearthed
during excavations in Persepolis. And unlike the distorted picture often
painted by Hollywood, in which the Greeks are the heroes and the Persians are bloodthirsty
monsters, many historians consider the Achaemenids to be one of the most
advanced and enlightened civilizations of the time.
So here are a few interesting things I discovered in the
process of creating my (highly) fictionalized world of daevas and Revenants and
necromancers and other magical stuff.
The Persian Empire was the biggest of the ancient world.
Yes, far bigger than Rome! At its height, nearly half of the world's population – about 50 million people – lived
inside the empire's borders. That's a greater percentage than any other in
history.
The Persians had the world's
first bill of rights. It was created by Cyrus the Great after he conquered
Babylon, when he famously allowed the Jewish people to return to Israel and to
rebuild their temple at Jerusalem. It called for tolerance for all races,
religions and languages; for slaves to be allowed to return to their homelands;
and the restoration of destroyed temples and religious buildings.
Women also had a relatively high degree of social and legal freedoms.
They owned property, were involved in managing their assets, and had jobs,
sometimes as high-ranking administrators. Historical documents show that male
and female workers received equal pay—something
we still don't have in most countries today!
The Persians had the world's first postal system. It spanned
the Royal Road system built by King Darius the Great, which stretched about 1,700
miles all the way from Sardis in Turkey to Suza in Elam. The Greek historian Herodotus
described the postal system in this way: "It is said that as many days as
there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along
the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day's journey; and these are
stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat
nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all
speed." Sound familiar?
The Persians also came up with the world's first monotheistic religion: Zoroastrianism. It is still
practiced by a few million people and preaches that one should be good and
honest in this life. In The Midnight Sea, Zoroaster is known as
The Prophet and he goes on to play a big part in the next two books of the
series (and probably beyond, when I bring the story up closer to contemporary
times). As a vegetarian, I also like the Zoroastrians because they were kind to
animals of pretty much every species, which really stood in sharp contrast to
many of the other barbaric practices of the time.
Anyway, thanks for reading! The Midnight Sea is now
available (woo-hoo!), and the sequel should be coming out by the end of the
summer. Happy reading and writing!
Despicable You:
Writing Great Villains
I have a confession to make—one that some of you might share.
My favorite characters are usually the awful ones. The ones who do terrible things
without a shred of remorse. The ones that I'm dying to see get their
comeuppance, but not before they push our beloved protagonist to the very edge
and nearly destroy everything in the story we care about. Yes, I'm talking
about the villains.
Think the viscerally creepy Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neil
Gaiman's Neverwhere. The icily
elegant Mrs. Coulter from Philip Pullman's His
Dark Materials trilogy. Elizabeth Wein's SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden in Code Name Verity, who we only meet
second-hand but is terrifying nonetheless.
Villains can make or break a book. When they're boring or
one-dimensional or clichéd, there's no tension and the plot deflates with that
sad wheezing noise balloons make when you stick with them with a hatpin. But
when they're done right, meaning that they are an actual character and not simply a clunky device to test the hero, they help
keep the stakes of the story high and the reader turning pages late into the
night.
In The Midnight Sea,
King Artaxeros II is the obvious villain, but he's also a bit abstract—you
don't meet him until more than halfway through, and then only briefly. So I needed
another antagonist. One who you really get to know. One who has some admirable traits
but, as the pressures of the plot slowly pile up, becomes something much
darker. Without giving away too many spoilers, I'll just say that I spent as
much or more time thinking about him as about my main characters, Nazafareen
and Darius. If you're going to have a colossal betrayal, the reader had better
care about everyone involved or it just won't have much emotional impact.
So here are a few tips on writing unforgettable villains.
First off, all this is very subjective. What gives me cold sweats
might make you laugh yourself silly. So you might start by think about which
villains in film, TV, books, wherever, have resonated the most and why. Is it
the prosthetic hook? The creepy Malkovich-esque voice? The mask of sanity they
wear with their family when they're not committing grisly deeds? Once you know
what disturbs you in the deepest, most primal part of your monkey brain,
channel that quality in your own bad guy.
Okay, this one I cannot emphasize enough: give the villain
motivation that readers can relate to, even if it's totally twisted. So they're
power-hungry. Why? Is it because they have a secret crush on someone they want
to impress? Or maybe they're compensating for a horrible childhood, or their
dog needs an expensive operation, or their ideas of right and wrong are simply
skewed beyond repair? I like to think that even the worst villain has something
they care about. Balthazar, a necromancer who gets a starring turn in the
second book of my series, is madly in love with his wicked queen. Yes, he does terrible
things. But everything he does, he does for her.
Rachel Aaron has an awesome blog
post on character development where she breaks it down into the deceptively
simple formula below. The key is to understand that what a character wants and why
they want it are two separate things and as a writer, you need to be very clear
on both.
What do you want?
(Goal)
Why do you want it?
(Motivation)
What's stopping you?
(Conflict)
If you have trouble, you can also try flipping the story and
imagining it from the villain's point of view. You might be surprised at what
you discover. Setting aside hockey-masked killers and comic book arch-bad guys,
a good villain could potentially be the
protagonist if he or she weren't quite so extreme.
In my first book, the sci-fi thriller Some Fine Day, one of the most despicable characters is a military doctor
who's deliberately infected innocent people with a super-nasty Level Four
virus. But as she calmly explains to the main character, the project is simply
a response to their enemies engineering a similar plague. From her point of
view, it's a matter of self-defense.
Effective villains often embody an exaggerated version of
the same things your hero is conflicted about. That's very much the case in The Midnight Sea, where both Nazafareen
and her antagonist face a similar choice but react in opposite ways. This is
where we dig down deep and see what our characters are made of. Often, it is
the villain's inability to change and grow and face the truth (external or
internal) that proves to be their undoing.
So now that you’ve got a fantastic, fully fleshed out
villain that rivals Moriarty or Lecter, what's the best way to get them across
to the reader? Well, if the story is third person, you can give your villain
their own POV. Jack Torrance in The
Shining is one of my all-time favorites because we get to watch him slide
slowly into madness over the course of several hundred pages. But the scariest
part comes just before he's lost it completely. We know he's probably going to
do some very bad things, but there's still an unpredictable quality to him. In
our hearts, we still vainly hope that his love for his wife and kid will
somehow triumph over the evil ghosts running the Overlook Hotel, which makes it
SO much worse when Jack finally, irretrievably snaps.
As King says, “This inhuman place makes human monsters.” And
those are always the scariest kind.
Anyway, thanks for reading! For tons more on villains, I
highly recommend Bullies,
Bastards And Bitches: How To Write The Bad Guys Of Fiction by Jessica
Morrell.
Interview with Kat
Ross, author of The Midnight Sea
So where did the idea
for the Fourth Element series come from? And why ancient Persia?
Well, I really wanted to write a fantasy, and I wanted to
have supernatural creatures that no one had seen before. Delving into mythology
is a great way to spark ideas, and that's where I learned about daevas. They're
the demons of Zoroastrianism, a religion founded some 3,500 years ago and
that's still practiced today (Freddie Mercury is one of its most famous
followers). I thought it would be interesting a tell a story that flipped this moral
judgment on its head and asked, what if they were actually good? What if the
whole demon thing was a justification for their enslavement by human priests?
So I gave them some cool magical powers and threw in a healthy dash of
sword-fighting and forbidden love, and The
Midnight Sea was born.
What's your writing
process like?
I'm not especially fast, and I can be really hard on myself
for having a relatively paltry wordcount at the end of several hours' hard
labor. Rachel Aaron Bach is my hero in this respect, and she has a great book
out called 2,000
to 10,000 that I highly recommend. That said, I do write every day, and I
write in the mornings before anything else because it's the most important
thing to me and I'll be cranky if I get sucked into other things and end up
blowing off my manuscript. But even if I only turn out a thousand words, it
adds up pretty quickly! Honestly, I think you can do it any way you like, the
main thing is to not worry too much about what others think and to keep
believing in yourself, because if you don't, no one else will.
I'm also a heavy-duty plotter and outliner, which means that
my final draft is generally pretty clean. Most of the editing tends to be
adding quieter scenes where the characters reveal themselves in more subtle
ways, since the full-tilt action bits come quickly to me.
Any tips on how to vanquish
writer’s block?
There's usually a reason why I've lost my enthusiasm for a
project. Sometimes it's a very real problem in the story that a nagging little
voice in my head is already aware of and that I need to listen to. If I'm
bored, the reader will definitely be
bored. So I work on identifying the problem. I take long walks, I scribble out
flow charts, I consult wise people like Beth Revis, whose Paper
Hearts is just awesome for plotting and structure. What worked for me recently
on another project was to write a new, one-page summary. I realized there just
wasn't enough suspense building toward the final third. The fix required some
work, but it was completely worth it in the end.
And sometimes you try all that and it doesn't work because there
isn't a real problem: the storyline
is brilliant, the characters are loveable/hateable, the prose is exquisite.
Your head just isn't in the game for whatever reason. If so, sit down and write as often as you can anyway.
Otherwise, the not-in-the-mood excuse will get too comfortable and you won't
ever finish anything.
Finally, whether you are working on a self-imposed deadline
or one set by an editor, take a breath and remind yourself that this is a first
draft. You can—and will—go back later and polish, adding scenes, deleting
others, and generally reworking the whole thing. It doesn't have to be perfect.
It doesn't have to be the best thing you've ever written, and in fact you
wouldn't want it to be, because that means it's all downhill from here, right?
What are you reading right
now?
Moriarty by Anthony
Horowitz, Bone Gap by Laura Ruby, The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan, The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R.
Carey, and A Darker Shade of Magic by
V.E. Schwab. I keep a pile next to my bed and graze depending on my mood. It's
probably a terrible habit, but I can't seem to break it.
Do you write in more
than one genre?
Yes! I think because I've always read pretty widely in more
than one genre (mainly fantasy and mysteries of all stripes, with a side of
sci-fi and thrillers), it's natural for me to try my hand at writing different
kinds of stories.
My first book was a YA dystopian thriller, this series is
solid fantasy, and I have another Sherlockian mystery series in the works
that's set in the Victorian era. The first book, The Daemoniac, is available for free right now in serialized form
on the Radish app for iPhone (and Android later this month), and I'm planning
to publish it this year once I get a breather from working on the Fourth
Element series.
So where is the
series headed?
I have two more books planned to conclude this story arc
(there's still an evil queen to contend with, among other things), so the first
set will be a trilogy. Then the idea is to jump forward a couple thousand
years, although probably not all the way to the modern era. After spending so
much time immersed in Victoriana for The
Daemoniac, I would love to return to that period. Daevas and their bonded
live a very, very long time, so I don't have to say goodbye to my most beloved
(and despised) characters from The
Midnight Sea. I looked it up and there is a mash-up called gaslight fantasy
(adore that!), which sounds just my speed. (:
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