Reflections at the End of an Eight-Book Epic Fantasy Saga
The Last Chime brings the Saga of the Six Realms to a close; I feel several things at once.
I am proud. I am deeply satisfied but a little sad.
For years, the world of the Six Realms was a place I could enter whenever life allowed. Writing has never been my nine-to-five job. I've fitted it around business, advisory boards, and the demands of running an organisation. Finding time has been a constant struggle, but writing has also given me those wonderful periods when the everyday world could be suspended, and I could return to Mu.
Completing the Saga is therefore bittersweet. I have loved the journey.
From a trilogy to eight books
I originally conceived the Saga as a trilogy.
I knew where the story began and had a clear sense of where it would ultimately end. What I underestimated was how much would emerge between those two points.
The history deepened. The characters acquired lives and purposes of their own. The conflicts between the realms widened, and the older struggle behind them gradually came into view. What began as three books became eight.
It wasn’t a story simply running away from me. It was a deliberate evolution. In hindsight, the idea was always too large to fit comfortably within three books.
My writing also developed considerably along the way, so I returned to the earlier books and kept improving them. I know revisiting published books isn't necessarily conventional, but this is my story, my journey, and my creative work. If I can make the books better for the reader, I will.
The story must remain the hero
From the beginning, my guiding principle was to make the story the hero.
Epic fantasy asks a great deal of its readers. There are multiple viewpoints, large casts, histories within histories, and events unfolding across distant lands. Readers already have much to absorb simply to keep pace with the journey.
I therefore wanted to avoid long diversions, endless backstories, and descriptions that, however beautifully written, might allow the central story to fade. I wanted the Saga to retain the pace of a thriller and the pull of mystery.
Something should always remain unresolved—another question, another layer, another reason to turn the page.
Clues and plot elements introduced in Emperor of Mu do not reveal their full significance until The Last Chime. Wheels within wheels, plots within plots, and twists within twists are placed deliberately. As the reader moves further into the Saga, the horizon steadily broadens.
One of my greatest satisfactions is seeing those elements finally come together across eight books while the storyline remains coherent and keeps moving.
The Saga is best read at a steady pace, as returning after a long break can make its numerous characters and intertwined events harder to follow. That's why I developed the website as a reader’s companion, offering maps, histories, lore, character searches, and explanations of the forces influencing the Six Realms.
The world began with a board game
The origins of Mu go back much further than the novels.
I first created the world as a board game called The Middle Kingdom of Mu for my two young sons. I wanted to draw them away from passive digital games and towards something social and imaginative—something we could play together that would produce a different story each time.
Each game created new combinations of characters, places and events. Gradually, the world took shape in my mind.
In time, digital games evolved and became social, so the original reason for the board game disappeared. But the world remained, and I began to think about turning it into a story.
I never considered myself a writer. I worried about two things: whether I could bring characters to life and whether I could make the scenes vivid without relying on lengthy descriptions.
I gave some of the early pages to my wife, Susie. She told me it was like a movie: the scenes were large and visual, and she immediately knew where she was. She also began identifying the characters and explaining why she liked them.
Without realising it, she had named as strengths the two things I most feared I could not do.
That solved it. I kept writing.
Ecology, intelligent creatures and unfamiliar societies
My background is in environmental science, particularly ecology, freshwater limnology, marine biology and rangeland ecology. Although I never followed the conventional professional path in those fields, they strongly shaped the world I created.
They helped me imagine non-human life as more than mere decoration.
The dragons of the Saga are not beasts waiting to be ridden. They are an ancient civilisation with its own history, social order, relationships and view of the younger races. Even dragonets more than a hundred years old are considered young by dragon standards.
The serpents—the other First Ones—are equally fundamental to the world’s early history. Their creations include the Moontar, creatures that can acquire characteristics from the species they prey upon. After generations of feeding on humanity, the female Moontar—the she-devils—have become progressively more human in appearance.
That raises one of the Saga’s recurring questions: when does the dividing line between human and inhuman dissolve? And if an intelligent race has evolved beyond what its creators intended, can it ever find a place within the society that fears it?
The same ecological thinking helped shape relationships between species, the origins of different forms of majik, and the way intelligent beings adapt to their environments.
Identity, morality and different ways of seeing
Beneath its wars, mysteries and prophecies, the Saga repeatedly returns to questions of identity, place and purpose.
The rivalries between realms and races make familiar human failings more visible. Prejudice, loyalty, fear and ambition operate not only between individuals but also between peoples with very different histories.
I aimed to avoid a straightforward good-versus-evil scenario. While enemies exist, I wanted the reader to glimpse the world from their perspective. When opposing sides interact, I hope readers can understand both perspectives and remain unsure about who should ultimately win.
Sometimes the humans do not deserve to win.
Time is a recurring theme. Some entities in the Saga live for centuries, while others transcend normal temporal limits. A being without a natural start or finish cannot perceive existence the same way a human does, as human life quickly progresses towards its end. This challenge for temporal beings to comprehend such entities is a constant theme throughout the story.
So too does spirituality: the question of what gives someone purpose, what drives them, and where they believe they belong.
There are no bland characters in my mind, only different perspectives, cultures, backgrounds and ways of seeing the world.
The characters who emerged
People sometimes ask whether the characters were based on people I know. With one or two cheeky exceptions involving friends, the answer is no—not deliberately.
Without any deliberate planning, many strong, complex, and often formidable women emerged. Frequently, these female characters became the dynamic and captivating figures in the story.
On reflection, that probably stems from a lifetime spent among strong-willed women in my family and among my friends. It was not a strategy, simply part of my experience, finding its way onto the page.
I know where I want the story to go, but fleshing out those bones happens through flow. Ideas gather while I am doing other things. I wake with a scene or a solution forming in my mind, and I wait for the next opportunity to download it onto the page.
That process—entering another world and discovering how its many pieces fit together—has been one of the great joys of writing the Saga.
At the end of the journey
Now, as the final book is released, the journey that began with a board game for my sons has become a single story told across eight volumes.
The mysteries seeded in the beginning have reached their answers. The histories have converged. Characters who began far apart have arrived at the same reckoning. Prophecy and destiny have caught up with them all.
Completing the Saga does not mean I will stop exploring or improving its world. There are still histories to tell and corners of Mu that remain only partially illuminated.
But the story I set out to write is complete.
That brings pride, satisfaction and a genuine sense of loss. These characters and their world have accompanied me for a very long time.
To those who have already travelled through the Six Realms with me, thank you.
And to those about to enter them for the first time: the journey begins with Emperor of Mu.
The Last Chime, Book Eight of Saga of the Six Realms, was released on 21 September 2026.
Explore the complete eight-book Saga: https://www.sagaofsix.com/books
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