Snowflake Method: Round Three – Part Two

This one’s for Ziegander!

My twitter handle. My online handle all across the web for many years.

Ziegander was a character in a “fantasy epic” I started writing when I was like 16. It wasn’t good. It revolved around swords imbued with *absolute* elemental powers over, you guessed it, Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. And also Light and Shadow. There was a complex mythology and all that, and a world-engulfing struggle for dominance over the swords, but I just progressed everything insanely too fast, and it never went anywhere.

Ziegander, in that storyline, was the first of the Fiendslayers, Fiends being birthed into the world by the hatred borne by the world’s first murder. He later became one of four Oathkeepers sworn into the service of the Lady of Shadow to protect her son, also the son of the Lord of Light, from the Lord of Light’s vengeance. In some way or another, he had failed in his mission and was cursed to become a Fiend himself, chained and forced into servitude for his misdeeds.

Anyway, that story didn’t go anywhere. Maybe someday it will. But for now, Ziegander is among the lost and forgotten. Perfect for the broken universe of The Waybetween. Within the Waybetween, Ziegander remains chained for a sin that perhaps he was never aware he should not commit, the sin of trying to do too much, and failing. Ziegander is doomed to watch over a street corner adrift within the Waybetween that he calls the Switchboard. From there he sends wayward souls off to Shard Worlds where they might find purpose and perhaps gives guidance to those with the will to become new Silver Heralds of the Spider.

Anyway, what was Snowflake Method, step 3 about again?

• His name: Ziegander, the [Redacted]
• One sentence summary of his storyline: Ah, this gets interesting now. “Chained to the Switchboard, Ziegander receives and unloads all newly tethered souls from the Void and into the Waybetween.”
• His motivation, or what he wants abstractly: Zieg wants to know how the universe became broken in the first place and how to stop that from happening again in the future…
• His goal, or what he wants concretely: Zieg wants to escape from the Switchboard.
• His conflict, or what prevents him from reaching his goal: The Spider, a power as ancient as she is powerful, has bound him to the Switchboard and he is not remotely the match for her.
• His epiphany: Maybe Len can succeed where he failed. Maybe she shouldn’t…
• What follows is a heavily redacted one-paragraph summary of Ziegander’s storyline.
• “The Void will swallow it all up someday, that is its role. The Spider will work to stop this, but [REDACTED]. What she cannot save is sealed away, deep within an [REDACTED], never to see the light of day again. Ziegander was, some say, the first of The Spider’s Heralds, but with the powers granted to him he [REDACTED]. Now, as punishment for [REDACTED], Ziegander, also called [REDACTED], is shackled to a tiny Shard set adrift in the Void, forced into the role of welcoming all newcomers to the Waybetween and finding for each of them a purpose. But when one of these newcomers comes back to him for advice, advice that perhaps ONLY he is qualified to give, advice regarding a certain [REDACTED], what will Ziegander say to her? Knowing what he knows, knowing what he wants, would he doom this woman to a fate so similar to his own to sate his [REDACTED]?”