People sometimes ask writers where their ideas come from.
In the case of Ankhara, I don't think there is one answer.
I don't think Ankhara came from an idea at all.
I think it came from decades of learning what stories could be, trying to tell my own, getting things wrong, starting over, and slowly discovering what kind of world I actually wanted to create.
So if you ask me when Chronicles of Ankhara: Quest for the Godkiller began, I can give you a fairly recent date.
But if you ask me when Ankhara began?
For that, we have to go much further back.
First Lesson: Reality Is Optional
It probably started with morning cartoons.
As a child, I didn't think about storytelling theory, worldbuilding, internal consistency, or any of the things I think about today.
I just watched cartoons.
And cartoons quietly taught me something incredibly important:
You can invent places that don't exist. You can create impossible characters, creatures, powers, and rules. Gravity can work differently. Animals can talk. Someone can fall off a cliff and come back in the next scene.
The real world doesn't get to decide what you're allowed to imagine.
That sounds obvious now. It isn't obvious when you're a child discovering it for the first time.
Second Lesson: Imagination Doesn't Have an Age Limit
Then came comic books.
And they changed the lesson.
Cartoons had shown me that reality wasn't a limitation. Comics showed me that age wasn't one either.
Adults created these worlds. Adults read them. Adults cared about them.
There were enormous universes filled with characters who had histories stretching back decades. There were tragedies, politics, deaths, moral questions, complicated relationships—and, yes, people in ridiculous costumes punching each other through walls.
And apparently all of this was perfectly acceptable.
Apparently, You Can Just Make a Mythology
Then I discovered The Lord of the Rings.
And Tolkien broke something open in my head.
Of course, Middle-earth was enormous. Of course, the story was epic. But that wasn't the revelation that stayed with me.
The revelation was much simpler:
Mythology, to me, had belonged to ancient civilizations. Gods, creation stories, legendary wars, ancient heroes, lost ages—these were things humanity inherited from people who had lived thousands of years ago.
Except Tolkien had simply created one.
A world could have its own ancient history. Its own legends. Its own peoples, wars, languages, beliefs, songs, heroes, and things that had been forgotten before the story even began.
You didn't have to inherit mythology.
You could create it.
When I look at Ankhara today—its creation story, its Elemental Gods, the Elemental War, the Godkiller, and five hundred years of history before our characters ever appear—I don't have to look very hard to see where that door was first opened.
Fantasy Doesn't Have to Feel Like Mythology
Then came Dragonlance.
And Dragonlance showed me something almost opposite to what Tolkien had shown me.
You could build the enormous world. You could have the history. You could have gods, legends, ancient wars, magic, and all the machinery of fantasy behind the story.
And then you could just...
go on an adventure.
Characters could fight. Argue. Make mistakes. Move from one danger to another. The story could be fast, exciting, funny, dramatic.
It could almost feel like a game.
The mythology could make the world deeper without constantly demanding that the story stop and admire it.
After Dragonlance, I tried to read pretty much everything fantasy-related I could find translated into Turkish.
Drizzt and the Forgotten Realms never affected me as strongly as Dragonlance did, but that period taught me something useful in its own right.