Prologue: Rale begins rupturing the membrane / Demons from the other realm are trying to get loose on oursand the slow, inevitable advance of the agent of destruction (the ticking time bomb)
Tiercel does the mummery in the village / The hero in a secluded place longing for heroic deeds / Tiercel trying to show that he’s got worth and a grand destiny
The village abuses Tiercel to bring him back down to where he “belongs” / The threshold guardian keeps him in his place / The misunderstood hero, maligned and abandoned by all, but ultimately vindicated / The other thing Tiercel believes, that he is worthless, takes over and keeps him down
Tiercel on the ledge outside of town, thinking of suicide / The temptation to let the evil beliefs win out
The Pastor talking to him gently, asking him why he won’t just leave / Restoring his faith in the good beliefs
Back in town Tiercel sees the mischievous angel / The herald appears / Tiercel really needed the humor and you’re-worthwhile boost he gets when the angel opposes the proud in the village
The mischievous angel gives him a glimpse into the spirit world / The call to adventure / Giving a huge boost to the idea that God is there, cares about him intimately, sees his situation, and has a plan for his life
The mischievous angel tells him he’s got to get out of this town / The call to adventure
Tiercel refuses to leave; he’s afraid of going out and doing what he’s always said he wanted to do / Refusal of the call
The villagers continue to press him down / He lets them because he believes that’s all he deserves (evil beliefs)
On his deathbed the Pastor urges Tiercel to get out of the village because he can’t protect him now; you’re better than this / The call to adventure / A boost to the good beliefs that he deserves more than he’ll ever get here
When the Pastor dies, the village kicks Tiercel out / Crossing the first threshold
Tiercel wanders vaguely northwest toward the unknown and probable death, instead of east toward civilization / The hero out exploring the unknown, fancying himself a great hero / Two things mixed here: bad beliefs (I should go this way and just die) and good beliefs (perhaps now I can find my destiny)
Tiercel conquers the fear of the outside world and breaks out of his forest bowl and into the larger world / Crossing the first threshold and defeating the threshold guardian (including taking a talisman of his prowess)
Tiercel discovers all kinds of cool things he never knew existed / The joys of being free
Tiercel’s mischievous angel talks to him occasionally and leads him on the journey / Fortifying his belief that God cares about him and has a plan for his life
They come to the entrance of the fog forest / The mystical forestand being consumed by something larger and more powerful / Fog forest where the hero encounters the Spirit of the living God
Tiercel must learn the rules of the new world / First ordeal / Living in a fog forest, baby
Tiercel finds ruins of the lost civilization, including scriptures on the rocks / Living in a fog forest, baby / Fortifying his belief that God is real
Tiercel has a spiritual experience; he encounters God / Fortifying his belief that God is real and cares for him
Tiercel hears and is hunted by the monster / The ogre / A non-human creature that he must do battle against
Tiercel calls out to God and his mischievous angel, but neither is to be found / Fortifying his belief that maybe he imagined the whole thing and should just lie down and die
Finally, choosing to believe in something the scriptures say, he devises a way to set a trap for the monster / Choosing to believe; basing his actions, and his safety, on what he says he believes
He surprises the monster and defeats it / Growing up; being able to overcome more and more difficult tasks / The hero fights and defeats a monster / By making a leap of faith in heavenly things he is able to achieve victory in earthly things
The monster transforms into the mischievous angel / Shape-shifter and the knowledge of the violent side of God / His faith that God is there and involved is bolstered, but his confusion about what has happened increases
He meets the Mentor / The Mentor
The Mentor enlists him to come to the Paladin Academy / Paladins? An Academy? Sign me up! / Bolsters his faith that God is doing something in his life and has chosen him to be a great hero
Entrance into the Academy ritual / Being consumed; belly of the whale
The men’s choir high point moment; “Men of Harlech”; Tiercel experiences a place full of people who love God—it’s unlike anything he’s ever known (full of idealism); getting divided up into squads; meeting new friends; being completely geeked about the whole thing / Training at the Academy; paladins as elite special forces warriors (but with a Christian bent); he’s in heaven / Bolstering his faith that God is real and worth believing in (because so many man’s men believe it together)
Right away, though, he sees the segregation and cliquishness, plus the bullies; plus the fact that many here do not believe in the ideals of the Academy, or of God, in the slightest / Dashed hopes; once again what he thought could be real about God is thrown into question; maybe it’s all a big farce; the bullies tell him he’s worthless, too, so he’s beaten down again because of that
Mentor takes him aside and gives him a pep talk: you’re going to have to grow up here / Bolstering his faith in himself and in God
The power struggle begins; Tiercel gains the ability to stand up to the bullies to defend someone else; people are drawn to him; he does something that gets him in extreme trouble with leadership, but he doesn’t betray a confidence and for this he gains the respect and admiration of faculty and cadets alike; a hero is born / He’s gaining some confidence and belief that he has worth and might just be important to God
Harsh physical training; new skills; learning about strategy and tactics and mixed force battle formations; finding he’s got leadership skills—he’s learning and growing and finding he’s good at this; loving the theological studies, too / Training of the hero / The swashbuckling hero who gains mastery of single combat with the sword / He’s gaining faith in himself and his worth
He is selected for the spiritual warfare special training school / Spiritual warfare as an über-elite form of SpecOps Christian training / Bolstering his fragile belief that God has set him apart for a special purpose, that he is a hero with a great destiny for God
Here he learns to see the spiritual realm; he may even catch sight of his mischievous angel; plus he sees that evil is growing / The hero’s special ability and a reminder of the ticking time bomb / Getting a glimpse of what his destiny might involve—stopping this growing tide of evil
He grows in his ability to see and even manipulate things in the spiritual realm / The hero’s special ability
Battlefield drills, including a full mock battle with infantry, archers, engineers, and cavalry (the latter of which chafe and being held back behind the infantry and missing out on the glory); including use of spiritual warfare component / Great battles as a setting for epic heroism and treacheryand spiritual warfare as the highest battlefield maneuver
Tiercel is named rival commander against the spoiled rich boy; he has to designate officers, assign squads, devise tactics, etc. He chooses well and the challenge is on / It’s just cool, man / He’s beginning to feel that he’s got a place in the world, a future, a destiny
The rival commander resorts to bullying, name-calling, gossip, spying, sabotage, and even treachery / Betrayal / I like the theme of betrayal, especially as it concerns how Tiercel is betrayed / The evil beliefs resurface
The time of training is coming to an end; the Mentor is getting urgent and cryptic; the competition is neck and neck; Tiercel’s team is really clicking now; rumors are reaching them of bad things happening in their homelands; Tiercel is reaching proficiency and mastery; the final day comes; as a result of some hugely big something, and despite treachery for the opponents; Tiercel’s team wins the prize; they go into town to celebrate not only their victory but their graduation / Tiercel becomes a spiritual warfare elite Paladin / Tiercel imagines himself assigned as a junior officer to an infantry division of the paladins—at last, a grand destiny and part of something big that God is doing; he is a holy warrior at last
While they’re in town celebrating, the Academy is attacked and burned to the ground; all the faculty are killed; Tiercel sense the spiritual evil and does what he can to oppose it (saving the Mentor’s life, for a few moments, anyway) and they rush back to the Academy; he hears the Mentor’s last words: you must find what’s really happening and stop it; don’t be fooled by what everyone else thinks the real enemy is / The hero escapes the belly of the whale; he is thrust back out into the world, but now he is better prepared for what will come next; he arrived a helpless weakling and has emerged a mighty hero / The Mentor’s last words give him purpose
Coming of Age Story
- Naïve hero enters into the great big world.
- Suffers lots of setbacks because the game is played at a higher level out here.
- But he finds new allies in unexpected places, and things seem like they might be manageable.
- Then he meets the girl. Ah, the girl.
- But the challenges get fiercer and he comes into more direct contact with the villain, first through his henchmen and then directly.
- Then the gauntlet is thrown down and he must face the villain alone. His friends can help him so far, but there comes a point where he has to go on alone.
- Everything hangs in the balance as he squares off against the villain.
- He must reach deep down and, with the help of some kind of divine intervention, overthrow the villain.
- And get the girl.
- He ceases to be a boy with potential and emerges as a man in full. That’s the story.
The Hero’s Journey
- Sheltered hero longing for adventure
- Herald that brings the call to adventure
- Inciting event
- Departure
- Fish out of water
- New rules
- New allies and enemies
- Mystical forest
- Epiphany (key lesson learned)
- Confrontation with shadow
- Confrontation with ultimate enemy in the belly of the beast
- Winning of the maiden
- (Return home?)
- Act I: Departure
- The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure.
- There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion).
- Act II: Ordeal and Initiation
- Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests)…
- …and some of which give magical aid (helpers).
- When he arrives at the nadir (lowest point) of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal…
- …and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again—if the powers have remained unfriendly to him—his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of the consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom).
- Act III: Return
- The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight).
- At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).
The Hero’s Inner Journey
- Tiercel was going along fine thinking he could make it with the wrong belief if he just could do X. So we’ve got to come to him trying to achieve X in some extravagant fashion.
- But “fate” intervenes and does not let him succeed with the old way. God comes in and begins to show him the bankruptcy of that old way.
- All the events in the story are God showing him that the old way doesn’t work (and suggesting a new way) and Tiercel trying to shoehorn the old way into the situations where it doesn’t work.
- Events keep beating him down until he’s finally teachable and begins to understand why the old way has been hurting him and others.
- Everything heads toward the moment of truth when he has to decide, once and for all, to hold on to the old way (though it will destroy him) or let go of that and embrace the new way (though it cost him his pride and require a leap of faith). There’s the story.
- Said another way:
- What is the issue or flaw the protagonist has?
- What does God want to teach him?
- How will God use the story to bring him to a point of accepting or rejecting that change?
- How will the protagonist work to resist making that change?
- What does “rock bottom” look like for this character and in this story?
- What will he ultimately decide?
The Ultimate Cool Things List
- The Hero’s Journey (including Mentor character and the hero’s mystical ability)
- Fog forest where the hero encounters the Spirit of the living God
- Using a water-filled Mars map as the map of the world
- Jeff’s Ultimate Hero Quest: idealistic hero like me who becomes an adventurer; the young hero sallying forth in idealism and naiveté, but in purity of heart; the quest, the adventure, the heroic deed that must be performed; castles and knights-errant; the D&D style of adventurer
- Tiercel the Holy Warrior: Paladins as elite special forces warriors (but with a Christian bent); academy/seminary for paladins, that is now only nominally Christian; spiritual warfare as an über-elite form of SpecOps Christian training; spiritual warfare as the highest battlefield maneuver; Tiercel becomes a spiritual warfare elite Paladin
- An alternate form of Christianity (begun here and expanded in second trilogy)
- Female love interest/damsel in distress
- Great battles as a setting for epic heroism and treachery—including at least one in which the paladins fight as a mixed force (and the cavalry tries to steal the glory)
- Demons from the other realm are trying to get loose on ours
- The message: God is there, and He knows and cares; God is ultimate reality
- Castle siege and defense, possibly including the Paladins arriving to save the day
- Human villain modeled on Rale/Sting
- Human villain modeled on John Malkovich—hero’s shadow self
- A fully functioning, thriving world with kingdoms, history, and rising and falling powers
- The collapsing pocket while Tiercel does the crucial spiritual warfare thingy
- The misunderstood hero, maligned and abandoned by all, but ultimately vindicated
- I like the fact that the supposed good guys do not intervene in the ethnic cleansing
- I like the theme of betrayal, especially as it concerns how Tiercel is betrayed
- Only Hinted At: Differing realities and reality magic
- Only Hinted At: Recovering true religion and recovering the true scriptures
- Only Hinted At: An alternate system or systems of magic and power
- The swashbuckling hero who gains mastery of single combat with the sword
- The slow, inevitable advance of the agent of destruction—hurricane time-bomb
- Human villain modeled on Simon Callow—Rabdominius Qayle
- I like the epic scale of this story, which may mean I need lots of parallel story lines
The Secondary List—Things That Are Cool but not Uber-Cool
- Hero trying to be accepted by the in-group of nobility, but will only ever be a servant
- Tiercel distinguishes himself in battle and receives a battlefield commission/knighthood
- Inhuman über villain modeled on cancer
- Living in a castle as one of its proud defenders
- Villains who are after something besides world domination. I just get so sick of that.
- The whole story is based on the interplay between human choices and divine intervention
- The charismatic movement arose as a “corrective” to mainstream Christianity
- The so-called feminine hero’s journey (from 45 Master Characters)
- Fighting against powerful non-human creatures
The Tertiary List—Things for the Second Trilogy