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Emissary

by E.B. Brooks

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GENRE: Science Fiction

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BLURB:

Two Worlds. One Future.

Ewan O’Meara is no stranger to death: in recent months, he’s found his way to limbo at least once per week, much to his parents’ concern. It’s a necessary price for getting experience to become the greatest adventurer his homeland of Veridor has ever known, but the overbearing Veridian Church has him pinned down, soaking him for the penance gold to unlock his stats each time he respawns. And because the Church’s ancient war put an end to both the godlike Gems and the epic quests they once bestowed, Ewan has no better alternative.

That is, until he encounters a young woman fleeing arrest from the Church’s soldiers. At first glance, Treanna Rothchild needs it: she’s clueless about Veridian life. But she has other skills that defy Ewan’s understanding, and she knows things. Unsettling, seditious things the Church wants kept secret at any cost.

And she’s in Veridor to raise an army, to fight an enemy only she can see.

Risking both life and soul, Ewan follows Treanna where no Veridian has ever been and there is no respawning. But for him to have a chance at making a real difference in the strange, harsh world she reveals to him, he must first come to terms with it. Especially as he and Treanna discover how much it has in common with Veridor—and how much they depend on each other to survive.

New-adult science fiction, wrapped in gaming and fantasy around a hopepunk core, Emissary is an immersive, thought-provoking adventure with a little teen romance and a lot of heart.

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Excerpt

Tree broke contact, then looked at the others. “I’m taking command. Samuel, move Nathan to cover by the lift. Put his feet up, and keep pressure on that wound. We’ll throw down a kit once we can.”

Sam hesitated but nodded, then knelt to scoop Nathan up.

“Love,” Tree said, locking hard, frightened eyes on Ewan. “You’re with me. Loot the corpses. We’ll disguise ourselves, then retake the camel and retreat.”

“What about Gabe and Vincent?”

“They’ll escape with us, if they’re quick enough.”

Ewan swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

She darted off to one of the bodies, and he stepped over to the robed figure he’d impaled, thinking a bloody gash in his outfit might be less of a giveaway than a giant frapping hole. But when he pulled the robes free, he knew with a sickened jolt that blood was the least of the differences in appearance.

The man’s copper-skinned face was scarred all over in what was obviously a deliberate, artistic pattern, as though he’d mistaken a knife for a pen. His nose and ears were pierced through with bits of metal, with hair and beard braided and bound in wire that could have come from the ruin’s walls. His muscles were lean and hard, far better fed than should have been possible for someone from the Wastes. Even in death he had a feral air about him, a lingering lethal intent that had Ewan half expecting him to leap out of the sands again.

His hand still clutched a gun, hardly bigger than a tablet. Ewan reached for it, hesitated, and left it to retrieve his thrown sword.

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Lessons Learned from Emissary’s Leads

While escapist fiction certainly has its place, I’ve always loved stories that I can dig into, suffer with the characters, and grow from their experiences. Those are the stories that call me, and those are the stories I strive to write. So a natural question is what I learned from the characters in Emissary (and more broadly, the Emissary Quintet). The full answer, of course, is loaded with spoilers, but below is a brief tally of lessons learned from the three major characters in the first book. I’ll start with the most depressing and end with the most hopeful.

The villain of Emissary is the Diamond Lord, a person using the ancient avatar of Veridor’s most powerful Gem. In the days before the Great War, the Gems ruled as gods, abusing the Veridian people mostly for the sake of their own entertainment. But when Veridor’s legendary hero obtained the means to fight back, he led his people in a revolt that unified the world, founded the Veridian Church, and drove the Gems permanently to their distant realm. In that sense, the current wielder of the Diamond Lord’s power represents the sum total of the resentment of his own people, a people who’ve been forced to live in a hellscape for millennia to tend to the blissfully ignorant people of Veridor. The Diamond Lord is nihilistic, desiring most of all to bring the worlds to an end, because he believes with all his heart that the worlds’ fate can be nothing other than to perish. He wants to end suffering, by ending being. To him, a world based on lies doesn’t deserve to exist, and he despises false hopes and empty promises more than anything. The Centre’s mission, the people it nurtures…they can’t fix the world because they don’t understand it—and by understanding it, they’re certain to hate it, just as he does. He ruthlessly wields the power of the collective shadow: in a climactic encounter, Ewan O’Meara literally hears in the Diamond Lord’s words the voices of many Centrals, all telling him to give in, to stop making things worse by trying to make them better. From this villain, I’ve learned the spiritual trap of knowing without trusting, without striving to improve circumstances, but I’ve also learned to be prepared for the hellish consequences of the best intentions.

Fortunately, the Diamond Lord isn’t the only Central, and not the first that Ewan O’Meara encounters. Thanks to privileged information, Treanna Rothchild sees an emergent threat to the Centre and acts independently of the sluggish Central bureaucracy to counter it. She enters Veridor, ignorant of the resultant culture shock to both Veridor and the Centre, but it would never have stopped her. Hardship is in Tree’s bones and blood, and any time the weight becomes too much, she takes a deep breath, gathers herself, and becomes stronger. She impresses Ewan with her ability to quickly acclimate to Veridor’s rules (but not its culture), then aggressively build herself in new (and frightening) ways to fulfil her mission. Treanna is realistic, desiring most of all to protect every life the Centre holds, because humanity’s survival depends on it. But she holds things in grim perspective, and she doesn’t hesitate to send people into death’s arms when she decides the sacrifice is necessary. For her, the end goal is survival. The only goal is survival, because even that is almost impossibly hard. And the almost-impossible is where Treanna thrives. From her, I’ve learned the vital importance of pragmatic judgment, to deal with the world as it is and not be distracted by how it should be. Ideals become a luxury when survival’s on the line, and reaching for one before the other can be deadly. It’s a cold comfort, but it’s a necessary first step.

Ewan O’Meara, whose perspective we follow most, starts out blissfully unencumbered by any of this. For him, the biggest hassle in life (and death, and respawning) is not being taken seriously. He strives for adventure, idolizing the legendary hero of Veridor’s past, but in his time, adventure is “nerfed” to exploring the same old caves and wilds, or running fetch quests for the Church. But Ewan doesn’t let this get him down: he’s resilient, and stubborn, and he dies frequently in pursuit of his dream. Ewan is optimistic, desiring most of all to make an impact on the world—and when he learns how huge and broken the world really is, he puts his life and soul on the line to heal it. From him, I learned that surviving isn’t living, and to always keep in my mind’s eye the end goal, because it’s frighteningly easy to lose oneself along the way. Our ideals and hopes are something we can’t abandon, no matter how unrealistic or impractical, because they are what drive the effort to change the world for the better. And by changing it, even a little, we change what is realistic and practical, giving our successors a hand up for their own turn. From Ewan, I learned to hold in my heart the wonder and awe of the interconnected whole, and to take a lack of understanding as an opportunity to grow. Or as Ewan would sing, to greet the unfamiliar as a friend.

Which character’s worldview will win out? Emissary is the opening chapter in a battle for the heart of humanity. And with each character determined to see their vision realized, everything can change in a heartbeat—for better or worse. But all three characters would agree that in true Veridian fashion, death and failure aren’t the end. Only quitting is. 

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

E.B. Brooks lives in the southeastern USA, where he splits his time between writing, research, and homesteading. He enjoys building fictional worlds, real houses, and landscape models, but he’s most at home with his wife and children, and their many, many pets.

Website: http://ebbrooksfiction.com/

Twitter: @EBBrooksFiction

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG2vFKJoCSoJaP6qCECwPIA

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19919752.E_B_Brooks

The StoryGraph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/authors/d82b9abb-6a6a-48a7-8563-a84689316df7

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/e-b-brooks-df6155fb-c7c4-4568-b612-ac5ae2eeb86b

Buy Links (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/stores/E.B.-Brooks/author/B087D6C88X

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