On the Origins of Water Horse
If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said that the idea that became Water Horse sprouted at some point during a two-year RPG campaign set in Middle Earth, though now that I look back, I see that some of the pieces are much older than that.
Playing The One Ring, I got interested in the sources Tolkien used to build his world, and particularly in the Old North. The Old North, Yr Hen Ogledd, covers the post-Roman kingdoms in what is now northern England and the Scottish Lowlands, and is a locus of ongoing conflict between the Britons and the invading Angles and Saxons. I started with a biography of St. Oswald, King of Northumbria (who seems to have been canonized, unusually, for being a generous and just king while still alive rather than for being martyred in battle with pagan forces), and discovered that Oswald’s father was Aethelfrith, King of Bernicia and Deira, known to the Welsh as “Flesaur” or “Twister.” “Aethelfrith the Twister” is a name to conjure with, even if I’ve seen comments that the original “ffleisawg” is probably more accurately translated as “flexible.”
“The Twister” suggested a trope that has been nagging at me for decades, ever since I was a teenager desperate to find any hint of queer content in my reading: the evil queer sorcerer-king that appeared in a lot of the sword and sorcery I read. Years ago, I cosplayed Rhydon of Eastmarch to Lisa’s Wencit of Torenth, from Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni books, not because they were good or admirable men — they weren’t — but because they were unabashed pagans and magic-users in a world that shunned both. They were also codedly queer, and there was some real power to be accessed in putting on this particular villain’s mask. But I had also been wondering for years what it would look like to invert that trope, to make the queer sorcerer-king the hero, and this seemed to be a chance to tell that story. Why couldn’t a flamboyant, elegant, unabashedly queer man be a successful king? More important, what made this man — now named Esclin the Twister, though that title got dropped as I moved forward — a successful king, and what was the greatest threat I could think of to his kingship?
The trope that produces the evil queer sorcerer-king as villain usually has a Chosen One as the hero, a brawny barbarian chosen by the gods to overthrow the villain and restore the kingdom. That was a touchstone for creating the Riders and their Lord Paramount, though if they were to be worthy antagonists, they couldn't be mere barbarians. The idea was further complicated by my interest in warfare on an early medieval scale. Armies were small, campaigns seasonal — what if Esclin has been dealing with an invasion every spring for decades? This is the kind of warfare that empties out the parts of the countryside that can’t be defended, and that makes the situation increasingly unsustainable. Both Esclin and the Riders know this — everyone in Allanoth knows this — and everyone also knows that something is going to have to give. And that lead to the heart of the book: change is inevitable, and the omens say that Esclin will be the one to lose.
But he is the twister, clever, determined, powerful, and if anyone can twist his way out of those prophecies, it will be Esclin. Surely. Or else Allanoth will fall and his world will be lost forever.
