All-Patron Reward: Evolution of the Eönwyl

Evolution of Demons of the Past #1: The Eönwyl

Those who've read Demons of the Past: Revelation have met the mysterious independent trader known only by the name of her ship: The Eönwyl. A very tall (~6'3"+) slender woman with brilliant blue eyes and a standing-up mane of hair colored like a starburst (a center of white over her forehead that radiates out into yellow, orange, and finally red), she is considered a minor legend even when we first meet her, with rumors flying about that range from her being some kind of spy to being a surviving Atlantaean, complete with ship. 

None of the rumors actually come close to the truth, which is unsurprising. 

But some of them almost were true… and there were times she wasn't anything like what she is today.

Most of the time, my vision of a character in my books remains pretty constant; oh, they start off kind of fuzzy but they fairly quickly come into focus, and establish a presence and image in my head that doesn't change tremendously. But for the characters in Demons of the Past, this wasn't so true, as I'll talk about in a few of these columns. 

With Jearsen being killed off (in every version of Demons ever written, even in part, poor Jearsen never survives the attack on Tangia Station), it was natural that I would want to have another character who would eventually connect with Varan as Jearsen previously had. One thing I knew I wanted was someone who wasn't part of the military – Jearsen and Varan had both served that purpose. Neither Vick nor Guvthor would fit (for fairly obvious reasons, especially back in the late 70s-early 80s when I started working on this saga), and the character who eventually became Taelin was always meant to be a friend and ally but never a romantic interest.

In an early Traveller game, I had actually created the character who inspired Varan, and that character had a female opposite, who attuned to him psionically in a manner that the two of them together were vastly more powerful than they were separately. I considered just going straight with that, but I didn't, for a couple reasons. First, Varan's psionic abilities were central to the part he, personally, played in the plot. Adding in another human psi, at least one that played in any of the same arenas he did, would weaken his significance. Second, if I kept Varan central – and Demons of the Past is, and was, always about Captain Sasham Varan first – then such a character would be in danger of being reduced to an adjunct of Varan.

I was toying with a lot of different civilian roles – a planetary security officer, a commercial pilot who runs into Varan, a powerful businessman Varan has connections to due to his rescue of a passenger liner years ago, and so on – but none of them quite clicked for me as the character who would become Varan's human companion.

I tried other options, too: maybe she (or he) was an ancient Atlantaean, somehow suspended in time for thousands of years until someone reawakened them? That would certainly make sense in terms of why they'd become fascinating to Varan. Or they could be an artificial intelligence – that would be something as dangerous and forbidden as a psionic, and thus a natural ally for another renegade like Varan. But these seemed either stretches or perhaps almost cliché. 

Then I got the game Sundog.

I've reviewed Sundog previously on my main site; suffice it to say that it was at the time a unique game indeed, in which you played a star trader with a challenging mission to complete in order to win your full freedom and ownership of the ship, The Sundog. I enjoyed the game and its central premise so much that I created a character patterned after the main character in Space Opera. And that was when it hit me:

A free trader. Now that fit what I wanted – someone who might provide Varan transport when he was on the run, someone who was as far from the regimented life of the military as possible, someone who could be anywhere and who might well, like Han Solo, be riding the edge of the law. Such a character might be willing to listen to Varan's impossible tale – if I could establish a connection between them early.

The Sundog (as I called the character at the time, being quite honest about where I was taking the inspiration) was originally male. Then female. Then male. Then female. I lost track of how many times I changed my mind on that. 

Despite the regular change in gender, the character's basic description didn't change much – they were always very tall, very slender, stronger than they looked, deadly with a gun, standoffish, hard to reach, and with some kind of secret in their past. Initially, I had the character usually wear a full (if form-fitting) spacesuit, including an opaque helmet, so that no one even knew what they looked like outside of the general build; this of course led to other rumors, like them being an alien or even a living artificial intelligence. 

But the name "Sundog" had inspired one clear feature in my mind: a blazing rainbow of hair, a starburst, and when I saw David Bowie's hairstyle in Labyrinth I knew that that was exactly what I wanted – except slightly bigger, and with the described sunburst of color.

Around that time, I decided I needed a somewhat more original name for the character, and he became the Starhawk. At all times the character's name and that of their ship were identical. At that point I really started understanding the Starhawk's origin – I created the planet Fanabulax (though the name of the planet actually was created by someone else in a completely different context) and began to get an idea of what Fanabulax was both to the past of the Galaxy, and to the Empire. Some of the ideas that made Fanabulax and the Sundog/Starhawk/Eönwyl's background came from Sundog, some from the Space Opera RPG's Star Atlas series, some from the works of Laumer and Harrison and Van Vogt and Norton.

Once I started to grasp the details of the character's background, I knew how he met up with Varan (and Jearsen), and as other details of the overall plot jelled I knew how they came to reconnect. But there was still something missing.

Some years later, I began reading Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf series of novels (The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The Witches of Wenshar, The Dark Hand of Magic) and lo and behold, there was a female character named Starhawk. She was a tall, slender, mysterious warrior woman who was the ultimate romantic interest of Sun Wolf. Now, obviously there were still a lot of differences, more than enough so that I could easily have continued to use the name, but seeing the character triggered a realization in me: 

Her name should not be one we have today.

I had to make a lot of compromises in the later drafts of Demons in the sense that I'd worked out all sorts of details of the Empire that were "authentically alien", but that would slow down reader enjoyment and comprehension; I mean, really, does it improve a book for the reader's purposes for me to replace all the units of measurement of time, distance, and so on with ones made up for this world? No. 

But in the case of names, now, there I could have some alien background touches without affecting readability. The character had to have a name that would, in Varan's world, carry the same impact as "Starhawk", but it couldn't be an English word.

Once I had that thought, I realized I had the perfect choice – a powerful magical being which had been one of the major symbols of the ancient religion of Atlantaea, and thus recalled in the Book of the Fall, and one that I could even use later in a personally symbolic moment when Varan had finally reached Earth: The Eönwyl.

It was then that I also became certain that the Eönwyl was a woman, not a man, and her entire role throughout the trilogy suddenly clarified – I knew why that name would become even more appropriate, and why she had to be the one who accompanied Varan to Earth, and whose children would, one day, settle there. I knew what her special power was, and how it was necessary for the endgame of the adventure… and how very long it would survive, passed down for almost five thousand centuries until a young lady named Sylvia Stake would be born with a very similar talent.

I really like The Eönwyl (and her ship), and I'm glad I finally came to know her.