One of the great pleasures of writing a long fantasy series is that every now and then, a character walks onto the page and refuses to behave like anyone else in the story.

Bem is one of those characters.

I spent part of this week revising Chapter 5 of Touch of the Eternal, the first full novel in The Graethean Chronicles, and tonight I found myself smiling more than once while working through his introduction. That is not because he is safe, and it is certainly not because he is simple. He is strange, disarming, talkative, faintly ridiculous at first glance, and far more important than he seems. In a story full of violence, prophecy, fear, and old powers stirring in the dark, Bem brings something I enjoy very much as a writer: surprise.

He also happens to be one of my favorite characters.

What I love about him is that he does not enter the story like a hero, a warrior, or a grand mystic. He arrives as an irritation. A nuisance. A man who prattles too much, smiles too easily, and seems entirely too comfortable in a world that ought to have scared the good sense out of him long ago. For Samien, who is raw, suspicious, and carrying more bitterness than he wants to admit, Bem is exactly the sort of person he would rather avoid.

Which, of course, makes him perfect.

Here is a small excerpt from that scene, when Samien first truly notices him.

He sat three tables away, long-limbed and narrow as a marsh heron, with a patched robe the color of old parchment and boots that had seen better centuries. A cheap wooden sunburst hung at his throat, though it was carved in no style Samien recognized. The man’s scalp shone in the firelight. His nose and ears were too large for his face, and his mouth looked made for smiling even when it ought not to have been. He spoke to anyone who passed within earshot, and to several who did not.

“…and that’s the whole trouble, you see,” the man was saying to an exhausted wagoner who manifestly did not see, “everyone’s forgotten the old names. Hard to be saved by a god no one remembers properly. Not impossible, mind you. Merely inconvenient.”

The wagoner grunted and moved away.

The bald man sighed cheerfully and accepted the rejection as if it were a private joke.

A dead-faith zealot, Samien thought. Wonderful. He went back to his stew.

waiting too long for the barmaid to make another pass, Samien rose to fetch her himself. As he moved by the bald man’s table, he heard him murmur to himself in a tone wholly different from the one he used aloud.

“…in the slag left behind in the forge of the night…”

Samien halted.

The words struck some hidden place inside him, not memory exactly, but something denser and harder to name, more like pressure. Heat. Hammer on metal. For an instant he did not smell stew and smoke but forge-fire and hot iron plunged into water.

He looked over.

The bald man was watching him openly now.

Their eyes met. The man brightened at once, as if he had just found a lost coin in the mud.

“Oh good,” he said, rising with awkward enthusiasm. “You heard that. I was hoping you might.”

Samien’s expression went flat. “Stay where you are.”

The man ignored him and came over anyway, carrying his cup with both hands. “Bemenelethonos,” he said. “But sensible people shorten it to Bem. Cleric of Graeth. Pilgrim. Occasional finder of things I was not looking for and sometimes things that I was.”

“Go away.”

Bem blinked. “Well, that would save time,” he said, followed by a small, fluttering chuckle that sounded as though it amused him more than anyone else.

Characters like Bem are a big part of why I love writing fantasy. In a dark world, they keep the story from becoming one note. They bring friction, humor, mystery, and sometimes a kind of truth that more serious people are too proud, too wounded, or too blind to speak aloud.

And in Bem’s case, he is carrying much more into the story than Samien realizes.

If you’ve been following along here, thank you. I’m continuing to build The Graethean Chronicles piece by piece, and I’m grateful to have you with me as I do.

Also, beginning last month, new subscribers receive a free download of my prequel novella, Divided Together, in PDF or EPUB format. If you have not subscribed yet, that is my gift to welcome you into the world.

Until next time,

J. James Adler

In the quiet moments of writing, I often find myself reflecting on the nature of “the chosen” trope we read so often in fantasy works. We frequently see stories where the hero is born with a clear halo or an unshakable moral compass. However, the reality of the human condition and the reality of the world I am building in Morian is far more complex.

The “chosen weapon” of the old god Graeth is not a polished saint. He is rough, morally flexible, and spiritually ambivalent. At the start of his journey, he stands at a crossroads. He possesses the capacity to become a terrible destroyer, driven by self-centeredness and the darker impulses we all carry. Yet, he also holds the potential to be a mighty protector. The only thing tethering him to the light in those early days is a fierce, protective loyalty to his mother.

He is an anomaly who was born from the least likely of unions. In a previous dispatch, we discussed the duality of our nature, but here the focus is on the choice itself. It is a reminder that a higher purpose is often laid upon the shoulders of those who seem the least qualified by the world’s standards. It is the internal struggle and the decision to turn away from destruction toward sacrifice that define a true unifier.

This tension is at the very heart of my prequel novella. I want to share that origin story with you today.

A Gift for My Readers

To better understand the foundations of Morian and the beginnings of this unlikely hero, I am giving away digital copies of Divided Together. This story serves as the origin story of the figure who will eventually reunite Morian’s scattered peoples.

You can download your ePub or PDF copy using the links below:

Divided Together Subscriber Gift

4.39MB ∙ PDF file

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Divided Together

5.8MB ∙ EPUB file

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As you read, I hope you see a bit of that universal struggle. We all have the capacity for both paths. It is simply a matter of which one we choose to walk.

Until next time,

J. James Adler

I know I’m late with this dispatch. February is already fading; the roses and greeting cards of Valentine’s Day have been exchanged, and the “day of lovers” has been forgotten for another year. But that is exactly why I’m writing this now.

We tend to celebrate love as a soft thing, don’t we? We like to paint it in pastels and talk about “happily ever afters.” But in the world of Morian, and often in our own, love is not safe. It is reckless. It can even be an act of defiance.

The Blade and the Bandage

In my prequel novella, Divided Together, I explore the origin of the one who will eventually save a fractured world and mend the broken kinship of its people. It begins with two people who, by every law and norm of their lands, should have been enemies: General Ahrien Que, a Black Elf warlord, and Shavanti, a human healer.

Their love wasn’t a courtship; it was a collision.

Ahrien Que is a man of iron and blood who commands the respect of his people. Shavanti is a woman not only of mending and mercy but also of great power and destructive potential. To choose each other was to choose certain exile. It was reckless. It was desperate. But it was also the only thing that made sense in a world gone mad.

The Hardest Act of Love

We often think love means holding on; gripping someone so tight that the world can’t tear you apart. But as I wrote Ahrien and Shavanti, I found a harder truth: Sometimes, the only way to love someone is to let them be exactly who they are, even if it scares you to death. Even if it tears you both apart.

Ahrien had to accept that Shavanti would walk into plague camps where he could not protect her. Shavanti had to accept that Ahrien was a weapon of war, and that asking him to be peaceful would be asking him to cease to exist.

They found enormous power in their brief but explosive love story, not in changing each other, but in witnessing each other. They stood back-to-back against the dark, distinct and dangerous, yet indivisible.

The Cost of Defiance

This March, I want to give you their story.

Divided Together is the chronicle of that desperate, defiant love. It is the story of how two people looked at the laws of gods and men and said, “No.”

If you are a subscriber, you will receive a FREE electronic copy of Divided Together next month. It is the perfect entry point into the lore of my first Graethean Chronicles novel, Touch of the Eternal, and a reminder that while love can save the world, it can also burn it down.

Let them be themselves. Even if it burns.

Until next time,

J. James Adler

As we all launch headlong into 2026, I thought it appropriate to reflect on the dichotomy of human duality, particularly this of all months, January. The Romans named this month Ianuarius (Januarius) after Janus, the Roman god of the threshold, who is most famously depicted with two faces. One looks back at the ancestors and the history that forged him, while the other stares steely-eyed into the uncertain future. The Romans understood a truth I grapple with daily: the truth that none of us is ever just one thing. I certainly am not. We are all the sum of our contradictions; the warrior-poets standing in the doorway between who we were and who we are becoming. We are all capable of both great tenderness and terrible destruction, depending on which way we choose to face.

I feel this tension every day. I am a man defined by the war between who I am and who I strive to be.

I believe that every human heart holds the capacity for immense kindness and love, yet we all harbor a dark potential for deceit and cruelty. I believe in rugged self-reliance, but I also know that the only path to an authentic life is complete surrender to something bigger than myself. I honor the “antique” ways, origins, and the blood of my ancestors, but I am fiercely loyal to the progress of the future my children will inherit.

Growing up, I was an athlete. I focused on the physical, the tangible, and the fight. I played many sports and later as a young adult, studied the martial arts for over a decade. The idea of duality became clear to me through those studies. The particular martial art I studied, and later taught, was a “complete” system; meaning, we not only learned hard linear movements (think front kick) but also soft, circular movements (think Aikido). We learned specifically how to dislocate bones and strike pressure points, but we also learned to heal. The idea of the warrior-poet fascinated me, and it was in this laboratory of pain and healing that my novel series was born. I wanted to write about characters that were deep, that had genuine problems, talents, victories and defeats. In those early years, I did not know what to do with the stories that blossomed in my mind. I was no writer, but now over twenty years later, these stories demand to be told.

This fascination with the “complete” system, the hard and the soft, is the DNA of Touch of the Eternal, the first installment of the Graethean Chronicles series. I don’t want heroes who were purely good, nor villains who were cartoonishly evil. I want characters who, like us, are at war with themselves.

Take Samien Jin. He is the embodiment of the tension between self-reliance and surrender. He is a man who wants nothing more than to carve his own path, relying only on his skills and the iron in his hand. Yet, he is bound by a heritage he hates and a destiny he never asked for. He’s a “mongrel” and a duality made flesh, caught between two worlds that both reject him. He has the capacity for immense violence, which he views as a curse, yet it is the very tool he must use to survive.

Then there is Fahrenweh, who represents the delicate balance between the warrior and the poet. She is a cleric, a healer, and a maiden of the Geldenaei, trained to preserve a life with tenderness. Yet, she rides a griffin, a beast of absolute predation, and wields a lance. She is the “soft” circular movement and the “hard” linear strike wrapped in one. She proves that to protect the things we love, we must sometimes be capable of destroying the things that threaten them.

And finally, there is Riegend. If Samien and Fahrenweh represent the struggle for balance, Riegend represents the danger of the scale tipping too far. He shows us what happens when we direct our “surrender” at the wrong master. He is the shadow in the mirror and the reminder that the same passion that fuels a hero can consume a villain.

These characters are my attempt to answer the question that started in that dojang twenty years ago. Can we be both iron and velvet? And if we must choose, which face do we show the world?

My wish for you in this new year is that you find the courage to embrace both sides of your own nature. We do not need to choose between strength and softness. We simply need the wisdom to know when to deploy them. As you navigate the months ahead, may you find the resilience of the warrior when the seas are rough, and the heart of the poet when you finally reach the quiet of the mountains. Thank you for reading and for walking this path with me. I will be back next month with more from the world of the Graethean Chronicles.

Until then,

J. James Adler

Welcome to The Chronicles.

This website is the official headquarters for my fiction—specifically The Graethean Chronicles. These are stories of gritty fantasy where heroes are scarce, monsters are ancient, and survival is never guaranteed.

What to Expect: I will be posting monthly updates to keep you connected to the work, including:

• The Vault: Exclusive fiction, lore drops, and early access to books (starting with the prequel novella Divided Together in March 2026).

• Field Notes: Observations from the deer stand, the writing desk, remote destinations, and the research trail.

The Plan: We launch fully in March. Until then, sign up, settle in, and sharpen your steel.

— J. James Adler