DESCENDANT
Debut Novel by Dan Stocks
After an attack on a prestigious family, only the son and daughter remained. Struggling through threats of terror, devastating attacks, and the loss of hope and eachother: Kai and Scarlet Grayes travel through a forgotten Eden to resurrect the dead.
Paradise falls, and with the idea that they can resurrect the Ancient Gods, their family, and those lost in the Immortal Race- the role of the Immortals is left to five teenagers.
Will their battles end in victory, or the destruction of everything around them?
Is it even worth it in the end?
EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 1
It was silent, the world just seemed to stop. No sounds at all: no wind, no sea, no air. The world turned to grey.
The smell of smoke permeated the air, wailing like ghosts through the shattered glass of our apartment windows. A single crack of another pane was all it took before fire burst out of every wall. The whole complex succumbed to grey smoke and trails of heavy soot.
I closed my eyes, only to see what was left of my family, my home. It felt like hours had passed by the time his very essence disappeared, the only other thing suffocating me was the silence. It was so quiet I could hear the fire crackling away at the walls of my home, I could hear the glass crackle under the embers, I could hear the smoke smash against the sky, I could feel my entire world crack, my heart break in two.
Throughout the writing process, I have taken inspiration through many different sources. When creating the world in my mind, I travelled to new and foreign places to fully understand the culture and atmosphere, to be able to comprehend how to write a different world. One of my inspirations came from the religion of Hellenismos, and the atmosphere of both Ancient and Modern Greece. I travelled to Athens, a city known for its unique setting of the thin line between Ancient and Progressive, and fully immersed myself in the experience. I used what I saw, what I felt, and what I understood, and portrayed it in a creative way through the starting setting of the book.
This project was one of importance to me, through countless drafts and rewrites, to learning the industry. From 2017, when the project started, to 2019, when I published the first version, I had grown not only as a writer, but as someone working in the creative industry. As a solitary writer, I learnt how to write, proof-read, edit, format, and publish in both manuscript, e-pub, and physical form. I used my skills in order to branch out, to find beta-readers to help aid problems, published on different platforms in order to reach my desired audience, and found myself within my writing.