Author’s Note: The Murkwode Reaving

On Thursday November 24, 2022, I published The Murkwode Reaving on Wattpad.

So the title is fantastical and archaic.

The Murkwode comes from the Scottish word murk combined with the old English word for wood, wode.

Tolkien already did the Mirkwood, so I couldn’t do that, and the video game, The Elder Scrolls, did Murkwood. Still, I wanted my own “murky woods.”

Reaving is a very old word that most would recognize from the Scottish word “reive”; present participle of “reave”, which is also Old English: to rob, raid, steal, plunder.

I try to pair these concepts explored in the narrative, like trespass, to try to build the larger idea: this is a story where my heroes work their way through an old wood to plunder a grave.

My goals for this project were to:

1. Write a 12,000-word gritty action and adventure story involving a soldier with PTSD.

2. Feature Bartram Humblefoot.

3. Relate Bartram’s Paladin ordination.

4. The antagonist would be Confessor Bog.

5. The moral would be that you can’t take anything for granted; anything important needs to be earned.

The final draft of the work landed around 16,500 words. So that worked out.

Readers of my work would recognize Confessor Bog as the antagonist in The Ballad of Skyer Dannon, but the Ballad took place 400 years before the events in this story, and Confessor Bog was burned alive. How’d there be anything left? And that’s where the wraith and wight elements of the story came from. I needed a way to explain Bog's presence, which fit nicely. Readers would also recognize the way Bog died and his vestments; I liked the cross-over.

When I started, I knew I would kill off one of the three soldiers accompanying Bartram. I first thought it’d be Rab. But after working with the second episode, I thought I could do more with Rab while he was alive and have it contribute to the moral. I made up Platt’s backstory on the fly and found that it could also work with the project's overall theme.

I try to bring faith into Bartram’s stories; this story was no exception. That and a little bit of magic addressed the PTSD issues and spoke to the larger moral.

This work probably isn’t for everybody. It contains some challenging themes surrounding PTSD, adult language, graphic gore, and medieval violence.

I think the reception’s been good; rankings after three weeks:

There are a lot of D&D elements in the work that would attract the gamer to the story.

They’d notice the Paladin’s capabilities, the Oath of the Ancients and its abilities, the monster’s capabilities, some of the spells, and the constraints explored in the combat sequences.

I think non-gamers would appreciate the story for its action and grit, and its attempt to make something bigger out of the story.

This story is about the importance of earning something.

You just can’t be a great fighter overnight, like in Rab’s case; Platt worked for five years to earn his place in society; Bartram had to earn a lasting peace by heading into the Murkwode. Nothing’s handed to you. And doing the work is hard, and it takes time; the journey will put blisters on your hands or calluses on your feet.

It was very fun to write! I’ve been wanting to do an exciting Bartram story for a while.