Timothy M. Halliday

Sometimes I am in the roads. Sometimes in the houses. Sometimes in the ravens watching from somewhere nobody thought to look. Sometimes in the instinct to protect. Sometimes in the refusal to surrender something merely because another person believes they have the right to take it.

And sometimes I am simply the bloke who discovered that one ordinary life had accumulated enough stories, questions, grief, laughter, animals, friendships, losses and memories to require an entire world to carry them.

That world became Vardrum.

For much of my life I have written through symbols without necessarily realising I was doing so. Roads remember in Black Wings. Houses hold history. Animals notice what people miss. Shields protect, but they also declare who stands behind them. Ravens watch. People stand beside one another rather than above one another. And again and again, something refuses to be owned, silenced, diminished or made smaller.

None of this means that The Saga of Black Wings is autobiography wearing armour. It is not. The characters are themselves. The events belong to their world. Vardrum has its own history, laws, humour, horrors and mysteries.

But fiction and the person who creates it inevitably share some blood. I have lived long enough to know something about grief, loyalty, fear, humour, anger, protection, trust, loss and the extraordinary importance of having somebody remain beside you when the road becomes difficult.

Those things found their way into the books.

Perhaps that is why the idea of the Braid became so important to me. A braid is not one strand swallowing another. Each strand remains itself. Its strength comes from connection.

That matters to me.

So does the shield. I designed the shields of Black Wings myself, and they took years. They are not simply decoration. A shield protects what stands behind it, but it also faces outward and says:

“This is who stands here.”

Protection without disappearance. Identity without surrender.

And then there is the road.

The Road That Would Not Kneel

A road cannot literally kneel. That is precisely why the image stayed with me. A road may be travelled over, scarred, weathered, forgotten and crossed by countless feet. Yet it remains.

Not untouched. Not pretending nothing happened. Simply still there.

There is something of my own life in that idea.

Writing Black Wings has never been about claiming that difficult experiences somehow become worthwhile because art eventually grew from them. Pain does not earn redemption simply because somebody makes something beautiful afterwards.

I prefer a different truth.

And that distinction matters.

Vardrum did not save me. I created Vardrum.

The imagination is mine. The characters are mine. The shields are mine. The laughter is mine. The strange animals, impossible roads, old houses and black wings are mine.

Whatever experiences helped shape the soil beneath them do not own what grew there.

I do.

Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand the man behind The Saga of Black Wings.

“There is a real road beneath these books. But the books are not the road. They are what I chose to build upon it.”

Timothy M. Halliday · Storyteller · Dreamer · Witness