Anatomy of an Idea: Three Great Loyalties

This post is (more or less) spoiler-free, but you might get more out of it if you click the link below to Niteblade and read Three Great Loyalties first. It's only a suggestion!

This story started as an hour writing prompt - from which I've gotten a lot of my best work, but these also tend to be the stories that need the most front-end editing to remove slowness. The prompt was to turn a bad day at work into a fantasy story. I chose a wedding I had played for where I was contracted three weeks out and ... well, the logistics of setting it up were a mess, and then it was a September evening wedding and the bride was upwards of forty minutes late - so our thirty minute prelude went on a lot longer than that. While it was getting dark. And cold. I distinctly remember a bridesmaid in a sleeveless gown with a massive rose tattoo on her shoulder.

Very little of this actually appears in the story. In hindsight, I should have at least included the tattoo. But the configuration of musicians - harp, dulcimer and flutist - is accurate, though the genders were flipped and the personalities given a makeover. That is to say ... any resemblance to real-life figures is coincidental.

But for me, stories rarely come from a single source, instead resulting in a collision of two unrelated ideas. In this case, the opposing force was the idea of ghost brides (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_marriage_(Chinese) ). I had just seen an episode of Numbers which featured this concept, and I wanted to tackle it in my own fashion. Very well, then - a bride for the afterlife. But in a fantasy setting, the dead don't necessarily remain mute ...

So a late groom, in this case - in both senses of the word. But that was just the setup ...

This story is slightly unusual for me in that the point of view character is more of an observer - it's not her story. The main characters are the flutist and the bride ... and with that, I run back into spoiler terrain, so thanks for reading and enjoy your day.