Tales of Varestal

Most people remember the battles.

They remember the kings screaming commands from horseback. The betrayals. The final stands. The sword through the chest. The line that changes everything.

But the scenes that matter most to me have always happened after the fighting stops.

The quiet conversations.

The moments where characters sit in silence because they don’t know what to say anymore.

A prince staring at a ceiling he hasn’t seen in ten years.
A rebel wondering if revenge actually fixed anything.
A king realizing power feels colder than he imagined.

That’s the part of storytelling I’ve been thinking about lately.

Anyone can write war.
War is loud.

But the aftermath? The emotional weight? The feeling that something inside a character has permanently changed?

That’s harder.

I think that’s why I’ve been slowing down more while writing lately. I’m trying to let scenes breathe instead of rushing from one dramatic moment to the next. I want Varestal to feel alive. Not just like a sequence of cool events, but a real world where people carry the scars of what happened long after the battle ends.

A lot of my recent work has focused on that idea.

Not just what happened to these characters.
But what it cost them.

Varian losing pieces of himself while becoming the Duke.
Lucian waking up to a kingdom that already buried him.
Caelan trying to carry the weight of a crown he once fought against.

Even the strongest people in Varestal are still human beneath the armor.

And honestly, I think that’s what keeps me writing.

Not the wars.
Not the magic.
Not even the politics.

It’s the moments where a character quietly breaks in a hallway and still has to keep walking.

That’s where stories become real to me.

And going forward, I want to lean into that even more.

The silences.
The awkward pauses.
The exhaustion.
The conversations that feel unfinished because life rarely gives people perfect closure.

I don’t want Tales of Varestal to feel manufactured.
I want it to feel human.

Messy.
Emotional.
Sometimes uncomfortable.

Real.

Because at the end of the day, the battles only matter if the people inside them do.

— E.J. Cordoue

Chronicler of Varestal.

Where kingdoms rise, and crowns shatter.