The Qarzeth Stories

Once upon a time, someone told the first Lie: no mere untruth, but a refutation of Truth itself. They tested their will against the edicts of the Gods like a sword cracking open the night sky and revealing daylight hidden behind it, and turned reality inside-out. The Gods did the only thing they could think to do: they ripped out the beating heart of the universe, swaddling up Truth for themselves, and fled into the darkest recesses of the cosmos, leaving their creations to fend for themselves, to forge new truths and find new lights in the vast darkness of their distant shadows.

But tearing the heart out from reality doesn’t come without its consequences. Like a meteor collision, the echoes of the Gods’ actions sent every cosmos spinning out, and whole universes came crashing into one another. Time folded onto itself, space became interwoven like threads on a starry loom. History became like a spiderweb, and there at the center, where the first Lie hung like a weight, the countless dewdrop worlds poured together. Whole worlds, having lived eons apart, were now swirled and spun, stuck together by the surface tension of a metaphysical catastrophe.

Here is Qarzeth, the bauble of worlds glistening on the Lie-weighted web, where history contradicts itself, and lies and truths are all True, and where only those who remember the Lie can follow the gossamer threads to see the paths from whence all worlds spun.

Writing is a solitary business in the most part. This means that when the chance to collaborate appears, you want to seize it at once. This is especially true when it’s the chance to collaborate with a good friend. The Qarzeth Stories are the combined work of James Rowland and Pete Crivellaro.

The world of Qarzeth is the creation of Pete, a beautifully realised and detailed world. Old fantasy tropes and metaphysical ideas combine in this strange universe. Human civilisations clash against one another over intense religious, political and ethnic divides, no more so than the two global supowerpowers. All the while warlords ride screaming across corpse-riddled battlefields, brilliant magi conjure boiling aether from the void with which they power their revolutionary brass machinery, and still-minded robed monastics awaken from meditation deep within the old growth of a forest found on no known map. And this says nothing of the transcendentalist elves, occultist lizardfolk, stoic and poetic orcs, and dimension-burrowing dwarves.

James has always admired Qarzeth, and when the opportunity presents itself, he loves to take certain stories and let them evolve and become richer for having taken place there. The Qarzeth Stories are those stories, either written by James on his own, or a joint protect between James and Pete, that explores this strange and wonderful fantasy world.