Amalia Dillin Guest Post & Giveaway

BEYOND FATE Character Spotlight: Elah the Goddess

BEYOND FATE introduces us to some new characters, and while I don’t want to spoil anything for you, I did want to talk a little bit about Adam and Eve’s daughter, the Goddess Elah.

Writing Elah was a huge challenge for me, because inside the Fate of the Gods world, she’s the next level up in terms of power and omniscience. Unlike Thor or Athena, she has her fingers in every pie, parts of her (and Elohim’s) spirit spread throughout Creation, from the Host to the men and women and children born and living every day. She has only to look and the world is revealed through their eyes.

But that also makes her less human, and less understandable. Thor is a god of the common man, with his goats and his drinking and brawling, but Elah is something else altogether. In many ways, she IS Creation, and it is only through her will that the world as Eve and Adam and Thor know it is maintained. It’s a lot of responsibility, and for Elah, likely a lonely position to be in – there are very few others who operate at her level. And of those residing on earth, Bhagavan is likely the singular exception. Which makes him, potentially, her most powerful enemy, too.

I settled for writing her as I would any other character – a third person limited approach. But I couldn’t help but wonder how much more I was missing. Is there a constant stream of information in the back of her mind? How does she sort through it all, if so? Is it like Adam and Eve, where they have to make a conscious choice to read the mind of a person near them, or does she just see every thought, even the deepest darkest secrets, unless she makes a conscious decision not to? How disconcerting would that be to the people around her?

And I’m not the only one who wonders about the answers to those questions or who worries about how much Elah knows, or might discover. There are plenty of Fate of the Gods characters who are deeply concerned for their privacy as well –

But you’ll have to read BEYOND FATE to find out how they cope with the new and very powerful Goddess in their midst!

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Amalia Dillin began as a Biology major before taking Latin and falling in love with old heroes and older gods. After that, she couldn't stop writing about them, with the occasional break for more contemporary subjects. Her short stories have been published by Daily Science Fiction and Birdville magazine, and she's also the author of the FATE OF THE GODS series and HONOR AMONG ORCS, the first book in the Orc Saga. Amalia lives in upstate New York with her husband, and dreams of the day when she will own goats--to pull her chariot through the sky, of course.

Learn more about Amalia at www.amaliadillin.com.

More from Amalia Dillin and the Fate of the Gods series:

Nekked and Afraid

A fully-grown butt nekked man ran into the street in front of my minivan at 3:30 p.m. today. I’ll wait while you reread that sentence.

Nekked Man sprang from the bushes on the left side of the rural road I happened to be traveling, dashed across the black top with all the grace and enthusiasm of a baby elephant, and then halted before turning to…urm…face me.

Naturally I was alarmed. At 36 years-old, I have never seen a fully-grown nekked man in broad daylight in the Great Outdoors. I took my foot off the accelerator and scanned the left side of the road, looking for whatever may have sent Nekked Man scurrying into the street after apparently devouring only his clothing, but saw nothing. I dared a few glances at Nekked himself, trying to decipher if he was injured or bleeding, but too embarrassed to look at his face.  And that’s when things got…interesting.

It took me a second to realize that Nekked was just kind of standing there. Despite the ample overgrowth along the right side of the road, Nekked didn’t throw himself into the bushes or attempt to conceal himself in any way.  He just stood there:  tall, virtually hairless, and glowing fishbelly white in the afternoon sunshine.

Like any good Southerner, I knew what must be done when confronted with a roving nekked man during peak school bus traffic hours. At a stop sign in the fork of the road, out of sight from Nekked, I called The Law.

A friendly receptionist at my local Sheriff’s Office answered the phone. “Hello,” I said, “I need to…urm…make a report.”

“I’m sorry, m’am, but you can’t make a report over the phone, you have to come in to do that.”

Crap! Guess I should have called 911. Nekked’s junk, while impressive, hadn’t seemed to warrant an actual emergency call.

“Um, well, I only needed to let someone know that there is a fully-grown nekked man running across and along Old Sulpher Springs Road in Alexandria right this very minute.”

“Let me transfer you to Dispatch,” Ms. Friendly answered.

Dispatch had a few questions for me that I was ill prepared to answer. Specifically, they wanted to know if I could provide a description of Nekked.

“Well, not really,” I said.  “He was white, tall, adult, and well…nekked.  To be honest when I saw that he didn’t look hurt and that he wasn’t gonna try and hide his nekkedness from me, I was afraid to look directly at him.  I’m pretty sure he’s the only nekked man you’re gonna come across out there this time of day, though.”

I have done nothing the rest of this afternoon but wonder if The Law caught up with Nekked. I am most likely to live another thirty-six years without ever again encountering anyone like him. The thought fills me with both immense relief and weird disappointment. Thanks for the memories, Nekked!