The world is Atwan, or what and why?

Instead of an introduction.

Fantasy, fantasy. And why, in fact, fantasy?

Oh, there are many answers to this question - any author writing in this genre, and not one at a time.

Fantasy is really so much around now - books and movies, games and TV series... so why? In the case of Eirik Godvirdson's books, the answer is - because it's a story about a dream.

Always about something that touches the soul, worries the heart. What I want to think about, even after the credits, after the last page, after the curtain fell over the story.

These are the stories on which both authors, who subscribe with the pseudonym "Eirik Godvirdson", grew up. Stories of worlds that are similar and not to ours, whether funny, scary, full of heroism... bright, memorable. Beautiful. "The kind of stories that stick in your memory even if you were just a kid..." - yes, Sam, one of the best heroes of the Lord of the Rings saga, was right.

Maybe at first another fantasy world seems like a game and something frivolous.

Maybe many of them are written on purpose - we won't say for everyone.

But the most fascinating thing, and perhaps the most important thing for us in this genre, is that at some point the given conditions of the world and the characters of the heroes begin to build a story, sometimes in the most bizarre and unexpected way.

And then the author himself turns from an inventor and a conductor into a chronicler of his world. The world writes its own history, according to the internal laws of this very world, the author needs to be attentive to his creation, and then. Oh, then the magic of literature will happen - you will believe in them. Into the world of heroes, their adventures, ups and downs, sufferings and joys.

And we wanted to tell readers this world so that they would believe.

So began a cycle about the world called Atwan.

What is Atwan. From idea to reality.

The world began with a dream. To some extent, this happened with Atvan, in the distant 2006 (if not even earlier) - with several comic cards and the "dictionary of the Cortuan language". These were, for the most part, attributes of children's games and inventions in the footsteps of books read, and even then - well, who was not engaged in inventing languages and comic ciphers on it in his early youth! Only it didn't end there. Then a couple of short stories were born, and after some time the stories were continued. It was only in 2009 that the world began to take shape. His "creation" began. Stories cannot take place in the "void", therefore, their own peoples, cities and countries, events appeared. Slowly the laws of the world and its architecture, cosmogony began to take shape... The world began to receive its own history from the first ray of the sun and beyond. Of course, there were still several years before co-authorship and literary works.

At some point it became clear that it was no longer necessary to take any specific events (creating references to the Earth's history), or to draw portraits of old earth cities - now only hints, light brush strokes on the canvas are enough, behind which the shining horizon opens. It became clear that, for example, the Cortuans are similar to the peoples of the real Mediterranean only at first glance, and the Elleral elves have only appearance and name in common with their relatives from the Middle-Earth world. The world of Atwan was not a continuation of other people's stories, that's what's important.

Over the years, the expansion of the world continued, the first versions of novels were written, combined into a cycle, short stories-sketches that refer us to the novels only partially, but all this was "on the table" - it was too "raw" and incomplete, until the appearance of the co-author, from that moment, we can assume, Eirik Godvirdson became a single whole and earned at full capacity.

Now the expansion of the world has stopped, its deepening has been going on for several years, the expansion is not external (new peoples or lands), but internal - local stories, the national flavor of each individual people, myths and legends. Everything that no world can exist without, whether it is a real world or a fantastic world. On this substrate, our own subgenre (especially in short stories) can be safely designated as "ethnographic fantasy" - when the main character of any story is primarily the world and the way of life in it.

Despite all the fantasticism of the world (dragons, magic, spirits are real everyday life here, not speculation), its inhabitants are tormented by very real problems, and they are not threatened by an evil dragon or a ruthless magician (although this is the place, what! after all, people are always people - and our stories are about people. But let's not get ahead of ourselves) and things of a different order are nothingness and emptiness. Entropy, if you will.

Only now it has found form and reason. Evil is not colored black - evil has no color. For the name of the evil of our world is Nothing.

After all, what would happen if Nothing took shape? How to stop what is impossible to comprehend and is eternal life possible, if not for man, then for the world in general? Is there a point of harmonious balance that will allow the sphere of the world to rotate endlessly?

Probably, in a global sense, this balance of "to be" and "not to be" is what the books of the Atvan cycle are about

The heroes of the books are doing their best to answer these questions, looking for, sometimes finding glimpses of the answer, sometimes making mistakes, getting hurt for their mistakes, and some of their mistakes are incredibly expensive; They win and lose, rejoice and despair, love and hate - they remain people. Dragons and alfre, dwarves and magicians - in fact, they are all under this familiar "people". Intelligent living souls that want to be, and want to preserve their world. And they stand up against the great Nothing - with the weapons that they can shoulder. With a sword. With a word. With a spell. With faith and hope - sometimes it is also a weapon.

And that's why the answer to the second most important question is - what is this book about? - it sounds like this: about people. About the living. About life.

Despite all the fantasticism of the world, it is in many ways the same as ours - precisely because there are people like us in it. They care about the same thing as us - and are tormented by troubles of a very similar sort. Everyone is struggling with their own Great Emptiness. And whether he has a chance to win with emptiness inside - this is our stories.