Matabar

We have all heard the legends of great wizards, but do we really know how those stories begin? Ardan Egobar, a young man living in a remote corner of the New Monarchy Empire, does not. He doesn't realize that this story is about him. Not yet...

In a world where steam locomotives chug along iron rails, where massive airships hover in the skies, where you might encounter orcs in suits who are involved in organized crime in the big cities, dwarves with cigars controlling the major banks, or elves strutting down fashionable boulevards, where humans have built vast nations on the brink of a world war, almost anything seems possible.

Maybe, in such a world, even an ordinary young man, the last of the mountain hunters, might one day become the greatest wizard of all time.

This is a story I’ve been working on for the past three years, or since COVID struck, whenever that was... Yeah, in today’s world, it might no longer seem like the big problem it once was...

I have no idea what genre this story is. My beta readers have each found something different to focus on. Some say it’s fantasy, others call it action, others still claim that it’s a detective story. I have received feedback calling it slice-of-life, adventure, progression fantasy (which I didn’t even know was a thing), diesel/magicpunk (the story is set, roughly, in the early 20th century). To me, it’s just a book.

It isn’t a fast-paced one. No one’s going to grab you by the throat in the first chapter in an attempt to keep your attention. The narrative here is measured and steady. It’s a series of four books, each about 4 million characters long (Editor’s helpful note: in terms of words, that’s about 600-900 thousand words). The series is called ‘Matabar.’ The first book is ‘The Last of His Blood.’

Oh, and if anyone says that the New Monarchy Empire, where the first book (the first four parts) takes place, is a replica (not in appearance, but in essence) of the Russian Empire, I will proudly dust off my historian’s diploma and say that that’s mostly true, though with a lot of nuances and adjustments.