The two strolled side by side through the streets of Haile and marveled at the citizens who were all busy continuing to restore homes and businesses. They stared at Knights Runn and the pulleys and levers in place to hoist new bricks to fix the broken wall. They walked out of the city and toward the setting sun, toward a new destination.
***
Razzius stood up from where his horse had fallen dead from exhaustion. He looked around and saw nothing but dying grass, dirt, and large tombstones as far as his eyes would take him. The thought of his master’s last order, telling him to leave because he could not defeat Lawrence and Benni, irritated him to no end. It annoyed him to think that the same Knights that were no match for him individually during his training were his equal on the battlefield when they fought together. But he knew that Bloodletter could easily kill either of them with one solid blow. He had never seen such deep wounds and cuts inflicted before, and it was reassuring to him to know that if he ever did land a blow, it would be deadly.
He surveyed the landscape some more and soon a familiar voice echoed in his head. They await you underground, Razziussssss. They ssssseek to bring back the evil one. You will find them in the catacombsssssssss. Go now and find the Cultusss Necrusss.
The order lingered in his mind for a moment. Razzius looked down and saw a massive gravestone etched with the words: Here lies Ghaston Murrio, betrayer of the lands.
Razzius looked out over the sprawling cemetery and replied in a sinister voice, “Yes, Master.”
To Be Continued…
Acknowledgments:
In order to truly record every single person, place or thing that in some way, shape, or form had an impact on this story it would most likely take me a year of sitting at my computer and doing nothing but typing. I do not have the ability, or the desire, to tackle that feat. I do, however, want to thank some people who were very instrumental in helping with this project.
The first person I wish to thank is Adam Hopfensperger. Without your mentioning of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I would never have written the story that inspired this literary creation, and would not be releasing my first novel. Thank you.
Second, I want to thank Isaiah Noll. Without your commitment to the project and its many different pieces of art, I would not have a cover for my book because I have zero artistic ability whatsoever. I appreciate every moment that you dedicated to The Trinity of Heroes. Thank you!
Third, I need to thank Mervin M. Mason. You have been the best uncle I could ever ask for, and your constant support and love has helped me realize many of my dreams. I still remember your D&D character, the female Paladin, Sunblaze. I’ll never forget the time that Merlin (my mage character) and she quaffed brews at the pub! It was things like this and other games that you played with Jared and me that would inspire me to eventually create this piece. Thank you for your love and for playing all those fantasy games with us!
Fourth, I want to thank Peter Cardinal. The man, the myth, the legend! What else can I say about one of the few people who were willing to read my story and take their own personal time to edit and comment on its contents? Your witty and excellent comments helped us improve and complete this novel. I appreciate every single second that you spent ripping this story apart and helping us rebuild it.
Fifth, I wish to thank Angela Truskowski. I appreciate you giving my story a chance and taking your own personal time to read through and make many grammar, spelling, and structure corrections. Your attention to detail was incredible. I had no idea how you would respond to my creation, and I am forever grateful for your input. You are truly one of the most talented editors on the planet.
Sixth, I wish to thank Colin McCambridge. In all truth this story would never have been finished without your honest input and criticism. I remember sitting down one night early on in the development of I Will Protect You and basically running through my entire story with you. Your responses to it were less than positive, and it was that conversation that we had that night that would prompt Jared to join me on the project. Thank you, Colin, for pointing me in the right direction and for giving my story the spark that it desperately needed.
Seventh, I need to thank my aunt Barb. She provided numerous grammar, spelling, and word choice corrections. Aunt Barb, I love you and appreciate the time you spent working your way through my story. I realize how different this kind of story must have been for you, and appreciate you stepping out of your comfort zone to help Jared and me!
My mother and father have been a very important influence in my life. They have always nurtured my creativity and pushed me to explore it to its limits. Mother, thank you for being so active with our initial drafting of I Will Protect You, and for giving us advice about character voice and the concept of “would they actually say that?” It’s always nice to have your family’s support while writing a novel and even more important when writing a multi-book series. Father, thank you for always letting me bounce ideas off of you, and I appreciate you always being honest with me. I know if anyone is a good indicator of whether or not something makes sense it’s you, and I can always count on you to let me know how you feel. Thank you both so much for your love and support! It has meant the world to me!
To videogames like Resident Evil, the entire Panzer Dragoon series, the first two Dead Space games and Tales of Vesperia, thank you for being so good. In my early years I grew up with games like Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat and I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I can’t wait for the next one!” Games like these inspired me to be creative.
Thank you to my brother Jared D. Mason Jr. I have always been a little “different” and never quite fit in with everyone. I appreciate you always including me and making me feel like a part of the group. It has been an absolute pleasure creating this world and the characters that inhabit it with your help. I remember when I Will Protect You was just simply “one big battle,” and since you came on board with the project it has grown to so much more. Without you I would not be able to call myself an author. It was your constant asking of the question, “Will that really work in the world that we have created?” that helped me build the world of Veronicia to where it is now.
Finally, I want to thank you, the reader. I Will Protect You is a concept over a year in the making, and while many concepts came before it, I firmly believe that what Jared and I have written is an interesting tale of brotherhood, love and devotion. I hope you have enjoyed this first book, and I would like to personally welcome you to the lands of Veronicia. Thank you for reading!
Justin Marcus Mason
October 2013
Afterword:
God, Family, and the Green Bay Packers. If you are from Green Bay, WI, like Justin and I are, you know that life pretty much revolves around those three things. Work during the week, go to church early on Sunday, and get home in time for the game. Unfortunately, there’s a long, long offseason. So when our heroes in green and gold weren’t on the field, we decided to create our own.
We’ve always played make-believe. From as early an age as I can remember, Justin and I have fought aliens, evil monsters, giant creatures and anything else our minds could imagine. Our uncle Merv, more than anyone else, encouraged us; hell, he even played with us. We’ve read the books, seen the movies, and played every game from Magic: The Gathering to Dungeons & Dragons to Warhammer 40K.
But something changed. Maybe things got too repetitive. Maybe we’ve played one too many video games and watched one too many movies with cookie-cutter characters and rehashed plotlines. We didn’t want to live in someone else’s poorly realized world anymore. So we set out to create our own. We wanted to tell an age-old story, the way we wanted to tell it, not the way others deemed it should be told to us.
Regardless of the reasons, somewhere along the way Justin got a crazy idea. It was November 2012 and he told me that he was going to write a novel. I’ll say that again. Justin told me he was going to write a novel, for National Novel Writing Month. Apparently, thi
s was an “idea” he got from one of his friends. Now, I want you to imagine my initial reaction. Justin is a full-time manager/owner at Mason Bros. Red Owl Food Center. He works seven days a week, seventy-plus hours a week. He was more addicted to playing video games in his free time than I was. If you think that I didn’t believe him, then you are correct. If you think I thought he would only write one or two chapters and move on to the next little distraction, then you are even more correct. I wasn’t going to stop him, but I had no intention, at that point, of helping him either. I was too busy watching incompetent referees screw the Packers out of victories.
A novel is a complex and very exhaustive task. It has characters and motivations, actions and reactions, causes and effects. Certainly a novel that you expect people to buy and read cannot be taken lightly. It’s a huge project to create a world and characters that people care about enough to invest their time in.
I’ll admit that it was around this time in November 2012 that I was crazily addicted to watching Netflix when the Packers weren’t playing. I had just subscribed a few months earlier and I couldn’t believe how awesome it seemed, at first: An entire video store, just waiting for me on my Xbox every night after work. I wasn’t going to waste my free time writing a book when I could be spending it watching a movie!
But November became December and Justin was still writing. In fact he stopped playing Xbox and Playstation, stopped watching Anime, and stopped watching movies altogether. He just wrote. And wrote.
By January Justin had completed his first foray into writing, a brief work called I Will Protect You. It was a cool concept about a hero who never swings a sword. He only uses a shield to protect those he cares about. It was only about one hundred typed pages and covered three generations of characters. Then, one of our employees basically told Justin that he had sort of re-written Eragon. Imagine Justin’s surprise, and disappointment, seeing as how he had never read Eragon, or seen the movie. So he went back to the drawing board. His story would have to evolve.
Justin began working on a concept for a different story called Shaman: The Journey of Noble. It was a different take on typical monomyth, but after twenty-three long, arduous pages Justin became disenchanted with how convoluted the story was becoming. He tried to explain it to me, and I told him that I couldn’t follow it, that I was going to get back to watching another movie. After all, if the author can’t explain it, how can the reader understand it?
Justin shifted gears, and decided to write a straight up adventure story with good guys battling bad guys. However, after only five pages, Justin put the project on hold, deciding that he didn’t have a concrete world for his characters. After all, they didn’t just exist in a dark, empty void somewhere. So, he began work on a tangible world where his story could be told.
He knew that one place needed to exist, the home of the sorcerers from his five pages of random battles, the Everglen. Then he conceptualized the city of Haile, and the Blazing Sands Desert, and the Endless. Now, Justin had places for the characters, and the beginnings of a world, but he still didn’t have a concrete, flowing story.
He would spend much of January writing twenty-eight pages of a side story to take place along a new re-imagining of I Will Protect You. This was where Justin first created the concepts for Sora and Deminion, basically the God and the Devil, or the evil and good forces that struggle for control. This re-imagining introduced many concepts and characters, and though many did not make it to the final work, they would all inspire parts of it in some way.
Justin decided there was something that wasn’t quite complete about his re-imagining. He had to switch gears. He began by writing the end of his original concept first. After about eighteen pages he began discussing it with me and a good friend of mine (who worked tirelessly to help us edit and format this book). Our responses were less than enthusiastic. Basically, Justin had a giant battle between characters for no reason. Things simply were, simply existed. We were quite harsh with our critiques. So, Justin stopped working on the project entirely.
But something piqued my interest. It was March, by far the most boring month of the year (except for March Madness). And I just couldn’t stomach any more of the same old stupid “car breaks down on the side of the road and a bunch of stupid stereotypes get killed by hillbillies” type movies that flooded Netflix. And the video games weren’t much better. Maybe I was secretly a bit jealous that Justin was pursuing a dream of mine. I guess, deep down, I always really wanted to write a fantasy novel, but I knew that I had no creativity whatsoever, so I never tried. But, I could write pretty well and had a decent vocabulary. And, wow, Justin had ideas! Lots of them!
So one night, instead of flipping through the endless waves of boring movies, I asked Justin to explain the concept for his story to me. I told him I loved some of the ideas, but it needed a backstory, it needed defined characters that people could care about and love or hate. The world he created needed a history. And everything that happened needed to flow logically. So, we started hashing things out, and then, we started writing.
The story was written almost entirely from end to beginning in only a few short months during the summer of 2013. No, that’s not a typo. We built our characters backwards, as we kept asking ourselves “why?” until we felt like we had every single important detail of their lives hammered out. After all, we had to care about them if we expected our readers to.
Like I said, with all of Justin’s ideas it was very easy to write two-hundred and eighty typed pages! We took his original concept for I Will Protect You, which at its roots is a story about love and friendship, jealousy and betrayal, and created a world around the characters. Some of the characters changed in name and description, but for the most part, many of those original ideas are present in some way. The novel, in its finished form, is about 140,000 words and is only the first in what is a planned six-book series. Did I mention Justin’s creativity?
Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the novel is the “flavor text” that precedes most chapters. It’s a really neat idea that we borrowed from Magic: The Gathering. It’s a way to divulge bits and pieces of character motivations and histories, without bogging the story down with chapters and chapters of backstory. We don’t want this to read like a History 101 textbook. These little blurbs before chapters are meant to give additional details and depth to our world and characters, and hopefully they allow you to gain insightful, added knowledge of that world, those characters, and their motivations.
The odyssey from one small, simple battle to a complete world filled with characters with their own motivations has been a fantastic journey. Justin and I firmly believe that the most important thing a novel can do is create true, raw emotion in a reader. Whether its hatred or love, happiness or sadness, laughter or tears, you have to feel something. It’s the guiding principle behind everything we have written and hope to write. We write to entertain, and we hope you, the reader, have enjoyed the beginning of this incredible journey into the world of Veronicia!
Jared D. Mason Jr.
October 2013
About The Authors:
Jared D. Mason Jr. graduated from UW-Madison in 2008 with a degree in marketing. He co-owns and operates Mason Bros. Red Owl Food Center in Green Bay, WI, where he currently lives. He is a die-hard Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers fan. In his free time he is an avid moviegoer, Dodge Challenger enthusiast, and golfer.
Justin Marcus Mason graduated from UW-Oshkosh in 2010 with a degree in criminal justice. He co-owns and operates Mason Bros. Red Owl Food Center in Green Bay, WI, where he currently lives. He enjoys many outdoor hobbies such as trout fishing and bow hunting. In his free time he watches Anime, plays video games, and collects rare figures from his favorite games and anime series.
Join the discussion about the I Will Protect You saga and follow updates on upcoming titles in the series:
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Check out all books by Jared Mason Jr. and Justin Mason:
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I Will Protect You Series:
I Will Protect You Volume 1: The Trinity of Heroes
Tokyo Lightning Series:
Tokyo Lightning Volume 1: Chained Lightning
Tokyo Lightning Volume 2: Z-No More
A Quest of Dragons Series:
A Quest of Dragons Volume 1: The Book of Dragon
The Trinity of Heroes (I Will Protect You Book 1) Page 42
