Before Ankhara, There Was AltWorld
The original idea was much bigger than a single novel.
I wanted to create an entire history.
And when I look back at that world now, it's surprising how much of Ankhara was already hiding inside it.
There were four gods.
There was an Elemental War.
Fire fought the others. The other three gods united against him and managed to stop him.
More importantly, they managed to make him bleed.
And blood mattered.
Even the place where Gaia—the Earth God—lived was remarkably similar to the place where Tuth would eventually live.
The DNA was there.
But there was one enormous difference.
The gods stayed.
They continued living in the world alongside humanity.
My Year Zero
The first story was going to be something like The Da Vinci Code with fantasy elements.
A modern adventure moving across the world.
Gaia would travel with one of her disciples, searching for her missing siblings, who were believed to have disappeared or perhaps been wounded.
Then came the twist.
The disciple was the villain.
He would eventually kill all four gods.
But he wouldn't necessarily see himself as evil.
In his mind, he was doing something noble:
Their power wouldn't disappear. It would spread.
Humans would begin developing superpowers.
And that would become the beginning of my superhero universe.
The event was supposed to function as Year Zero.
If I wanted to tell stories before it, I could go backwards into mythology and fantasy, to a time when gods still walked the Earth.
If I wanted to tell stories after it, I could move into a modern superhero world.
One universe. Multiple genres. Unlimited possibilities.
It sounded brilliant.
There was just one problem.
Unlimited Possibilities Are a Nightmare
I actually tried to write it.
This was roughly three to five years before Ankhara.
And I kept getting stuck.
The problem was exactly the thing I had thought made the universe exciting:
Once the gods died, I had essentially released theoretically unlimited power into the modern world.
So what were the rules?
If someone could do one impossible thing, why couldn't someone else do another?
If these powers existed, why would the modern world continue functioning in any recognizable way?
Every rule I created seemed to require another rule. Every solution created another question.
I wanted fantasy. I wanted extraordinary things.
But I still wanted stories that felt like they had solid ground underneath them.
I had accidentally built a world that kept removing the ground.
“Then Why Didn't Gaia Intervene?”
The stories set before Year Zero had exactly the opposite problem.
The gods were alive.
They were physically present in the world.
Which sounded wonderful.
Until I tried to create a major conflict.
Because the moment anything became important enough, one completely reasonable question destroyed the story:
Or one of the other gods.
If the stakes were small enough that the gods didn't care, the story couldn't become as large as I wanted it to be.
If the stakes became large enough, I had to explain why literal gods were sitting around doing nothing.
I had created beings so powerful that their mere existence limited the stories I could tell.
AltWorld wasn't working.
So I stopped.
But apparently I wasn't finished with AltWorld.