Questioner
Did you always intend for Eithan to be Ozriel?
Will Wight
Yes! That's one of the things I've addressed a lot in comments this week. I think if you go back over the other books now knowing the revelation you'll see that it was in place the whole time. And this brings me to the story that I'm going to tell. So buckle up because I'm going to spend a few minutes answer a question from me. A lot of people were asking what the journey was with Eithan, when did I decide he's Ozriel? When did I decide to make this part of the books? The funny part is, I've answered this a little bit on Reddit and Discord, but I'll go into it a in a little bit more detail here.
Back in college, in 2011 I want to say, I had a couple of ideas for a story that I thought would be really good. A couple different stories. One of them was a story about magic kind of coming into a world and therefore just the existence of magic in the world, a world like ours but not ours because I am against writing in the actual real world, it merges with other dimensions that have magic. So other iterations. And therefore it develops a magic system, but it's not a magic system that anybody's familiar with. It's a new magic system, so it causes an apocalypse. That was one. And I was like, "Oh, I really like that idea but I don't think I'm good enough to write that." The other one was a system where there are a set of guardians that guard over the multiverse, and they use the way. And the way between worlds is the source of all order, and there is the void, the source of all chaos and destruction. And the guardians are called the Abidan, and they wear white armor, and they gather a bunch of different multiverses together to protect them.
So that was the other general plotline, and the idea there would have been that we would have followed a character who was going to the Abidan to be apprenticed to them. And he had risen from a mortal world, and once he joins the Abidan he is taken under the wing of Suriel. Who in this case, was The Ghost. So she was originally intended to be The Ghost, and her personal name was Mercy. So she was The Ghost, and she would take this guy under her wing, and start training him. Well as he went on these assignments, he also got mentored by a guy who popped out of nowhere, and had long blonde hair, and was dressed as a janitor. And he had a pristine janitor's uniform on. I wrote this scene years ago. And his name was Eithan, and he could apparently see everything that was going on around him at any time. So this guy remains mysterious, and he keeps popping up at different points in the story dressed in whatever uniform is necessary. So one time he'll be dressed as a mechanic, another time he'll be dressed as a librarian or whatever. And then the main character starts to wonder who this guy is, and he starts to investigate his background. And he finds that in every persona, his background checks out. So, he has been working for the janitor all the time, he has been working as a mechanic the whole time. And what the main character eventually kind of figures out by the fact that he can detect everything everywhere, is that this guy's gotta be The Spider. He's gotta be the Judge of the Spider division. And he confronts Eithan about this, and Eithan is like, "Oh yeah! That's totally me!" and of course it isn't. And it ends up that he is actually Ozriel, the Judge and solo member of the Reaper division. And he's out looking for people to join his division.
So that was the original idea. Also this main character, his whole powerset was that he could bind people to contracts. So he would help people or he would go on adventures and do things for people, and then he would cash in their favors. So he would collect all these things he would do for people, and then he would make them pay him back. And so he would cash these favors in and gain power. And his primary power set was the fact that he could tap into both order and chaos. So he wasn't as good at order as any of the Abidan were, but he could do both thanks to contracts with a small blue water spirit and a black dragon chaos spirit. And their names were Melusine and Oerthon, so those were the names I had for them. And the main character had both these powers, and was apprenticed under both these Judges.
So you can see how close that ended up actually aligning to what ended up coming out. It's kind of funny. When it came time to write Cradle, my primary inspiration were the Chinese cultivation novels. And a lot of other cultures as well, Korean and Japanese, but primarily these Chinese cultivation novels. And I knew that usually, there is a higher world or higher realm that you are ascending toward. So I repurposed the elements from this other story to Cradle. To be a layer over. So I had come up with Eithan's character years before. Now, this Mercy/Suriel character became several different characters, obviously it became Suriel and Mercy. And then, funnily enough, while she was The Ghost, one of her things was that she would pop up everywhere because you couldn't notice her. She was unnoticeable all the time unless she chose not to be. And the only person who could always her, of course, was Eithan. So she was always sneaking around everywhere and popping up out of nowhere, unless Eithan was around. Then he was aware of her the entire time. And then he was popping up everywhere because he could evade just like Eithan actually does. So you had two characters that could pop up in different ways. So that was the original inspiration behind Cradle. So not only did I know this from the beginning, I knew this years before I even started writing Cradle.