Scipio

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They all stopped working when they saw him coming.

Four coal-faced shovel boys and two carpenters, all of them standing just off the leaf-littered street, panting and sweating under the late-afternoon sun. Scipio nodded hello. They, as if sharing a single face among the six of them, scowled back. They were marking him as an intruder, making sure he knew he wasn’t welcome in their miserable little town, where even the most hopelessly lost was unlikely to stray.

But Scipio was far from lost. He knew it. They knew it. No one was under any illusions here.

Some twenty paces from the workers, he stopped and flashed a tobacco-stained grin. He gave them a moment to take him in: His long, unwashed hair; his scraggly, overgrown beard; the rune he drew on his forehead in ash; the indigo ink in which he dipped his fingertips to the first knuckle; his long wool coat, its threads once as blue as the sea he had crossed to marry the man he loved.

The man who had died.

(It’s pronounced SKIP-ee-oh. Hard k not soft c sound.)

Scipio has been in our head for a long, long time. Even before we named him, set him on his grueling journey in Fury’s Ashes, and began to adapt him to our ever-growing knowledge of narrative structure and literary character development, he existed as an hodgepodge of influences from various childhood stories, video games, and experiences.

For Sarah, there was Vanyel Ashkevron from The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey. Also, let’s be honest, Aragorn was as huge influence—both book Aragorn and Viggo Mortensen’s portrayal in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy.

Tim will never forget staying up all night to finish the last 100 pages of Return of the King so he was allowed to go to see the movie on opening night. Tim was also inspired by both Nintendo’s darker take on Link in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Eragon’s vivid transformation in Ellesméra throughout Christopher’s Paolini’s second Inheritance book, Eldest.

The characters in those stories shaped our imaginations. They made us believe in personalities so galvanizing they changed the course of history. They suggested that the fight against evil could be won or lost on whether one did or did not possess a hook shot or fluency with a magical language.

But adulthood has a way of shattering childhood simplicity, doesn’t it? And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. As adults, we are more aware of the world and our place in it. We’re more realistic about our own limitations. We measure our aspirations by the anticipated strain and investment of achieving long-term goals.

Enter Father Sebastian Rodrigues, the main character from Shūsaku Endō’s 1969 novel Silence.

Without Silence, there would be no Fury’s Ashes. We both read this novel in 2016, the year Martin Scorsese adapted the novel as a film. To say it made an impression on us is putting it mildly…

There’s no sugarcoating it: Silence is a brutal little novel. It’s the story of a 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit missionary who sneaks into Japan, hoping to revitalize Catholicism in the midst of the shoguns’ crackdown on Christianity. Rodrigues fails. His faith, which starts out invincibly strong, barely survives the sufferings and crushing disappointments he experiences.

At a time when American Christians were succumbing en masse to the influence of a white supremacist demagogue, both Sarah and Tim resonated with Father Rodrigues’s disillusionment with the world, his struggle to believe, and his disappointment in the church.

Shortly thereafter, the seed of a story took root in that rocky soil: a story about a grieving man’s quest to hunt down a dangerous religious leader whose teaching has blinded the world to innumerable injustices and abuses.

The story that would become Fury’s Ashes.

Before we knew it, our conversations over breakfast, or at dinner, would always include something like, “So, what do you think Scipio’s up to?” Or, “What do you think he’ll do next?”

And there’s only so many times you can laugh off the answering of that question before you’re staring at a 91,000 word document, one that you wrote.

Throughout many, many years of drafting and redrafting, which have culminated in the current iteration of Fury’s Ashes, Scipio has remained the heart of the project. Although he’s one of two equally-weighted protagonists in the novel (you can read about Eva HERE), Scipio will always represent our first foray into novel-writing together.

Into following that tantalizing “What happens next?” down the rabbit hole.

Into creating a story from the ashes of belief.

Into daring to hope that belief might be reborn.

—T.S. Austen

February, 2023