Songs of Stone Inspiration

Since Songs of Stone has been out for a little while, today I’m talking about the inspiration behind it! Some spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Songs of Stone yet! (And a small spoiler for Stalks of Gold!)

We’ll start with the Pied Piper! There are actually quite a few variations of this legend out there as well as some actual historical record related to it, which is super interesting. But since I’m not a historical fiction author, we’re just going to be focusing on the legend!

Here’s the hallmarks I found:

• A rat infestation
• Afraid of rats carrying illness
• Useless/corrupt mayor
• Piper has a long, brightly dyed coat with a matching scarf
• Piper interrupts a town meeting about the problem, offering a solution
• Uses a fife/pipe to walk the rats into the river and drowns them
• Mayor refuses to pay the fee
• Piper leads the children of the town into a mountain that opens up and they’re never to be seen from again
• A blind child and a deaf child saw where they went and ended up left behind

As always, you can give or take a few details, which I did. For example, my Piper isn’t actually a pied piper because her coat is only one color. “Pied” means two or more colors, but not the way we typically think of multicolor fabric. Our modern methods of dying and textile manufacturing allows us to more easily have brightly patterned colors and organic shapes all on a continuous piece of fabric, but in medieval times, this multicolor pattern would be more inorganic and blocky, rectangles, squares, diamonds, etc, more patchwork and created from different fabrics and stitched together. But that’s a whole other tangent, suffice to say, I just made her the Piper and not the pied piper.

Now, there’s two main versions of The Sandman, and they’re quite different, so I’m going to break down both versions.

Andersen’s:

• Tells stories
• Good children get good dreams
• Bad children get no dreams
• Silk multicolored coat (I don’t know if this is essential, I just thought it was an interesting detail)
• Two umbrellas, one good and one bad
• Loves children
• Visited Hjalmar for 7 days

Andersen’s is probably the one people are more familiar with even though it’s still not a very well-known fairytale. When I read the fairytale, I realized the Sandman was a perfect opportunity for me to bring in another imp, which I had been wanting to do since Stalks of Gold.

Hoffman’s:

• Nathanel’s father involved with a dangerous man and magic
• Nathanel spies on father and is caught and the man threatens Nathanel’s eyes with the embers and tortures him
• Nathanel falls ill for weeks
• Father is killed in a fire, and Nathanel wants revenge
• Nathanel reveals this to his beloved Clara
• Nathanel discovers the dangerous man and goes mad pursuing revenge despite Clara trying to dissuade him

(There’s a lot more to this story, but the beginning that I’ve listed here is what I used as inspiration and I ignored the rest of the story)

There’s this whole plot that involves this woman and eyes and she’s not a real woman she’s an automaton, it’s a whole thing. I just thought the backstory was really compelling so I used it as inspiration for my Piper’s backstory! Piper and Kimon.

So I modeled Kimon after Nathanel and Piper a little more after Clara. I really liked Clara because she was described as a more grounded, real, cold, and practical character which I loved seeing in a female character. Piper became a little more reckless than Clara, but Clara was just where I started. I would love to see more colder, practical female characters, so I guess I’ll have to write them!

But as you can see, and as I mentioned previously, these fairytales don’t have as many crossover points as some of my other combos, but there was one in Andersen’s Sandman and the Pied Piper, was they both have important interactions with children. So I made that center point of their interactions. Instead of having my Piper start off with catching rats I decided to start her off by kidnapping the kids, one at a time, so that my Sandman could do his job.

What was his job?

It had to involve dreams and therefore sleep, but how did that fit in to a bigger goal? I thought back to Ruskin and the way he operated, how he did the majority of his magic by making deals, particularly how he made a deal that allowed him to take Aurelia’s memories, and I knew what I wanted Sandy’s greater purpose was for his boss. I already knew the boss was the Red Enchanter since it was Castia, and an enchanter could possibly need and use more magic than they could generate on their own, and that was how Sandy’s part of the plot of turning memories into magic came to be.

But now that I knew Piper and Sandy’s main job involved the children aspect, I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of the pied piper story. I knew early on that the Black Plague aspect was important to me to include since the pied piper story is so closely connected to it, catching and killing rats, the villagers fears of disease from them, the massive loss of children they suffer, etc.

Plus, I still had Piper’s backstory to still work with, so I quickly decided to have her be a survivor and have her brother catch it and saving him from it being her motivation. So that was where the Blight came from, but I didn’t want it to be just a plague. I wanted it to be a weapon, these early ideas were happening around the time I was working on the last draft of Stalks of Gold and Mirrors of Ice, so when I set out to include it in those books, I knew it would be perfect as a weapon against the royals involved in the summit that resulted in Sterling’s curse.

And then the rest of the plot spiraled from that and into Cinders of Glass and Songs of Stone and on!

Of course, I still had to have Piper drown some rats and save the country from the Blight, so this was almost a reverse pied piper with the missing children first and the rats last. The magic caves also came from the fact the piper leads the kids into a cave and they’re never seen from again, and I quickly made it the way my Piper traveled around quickly and transported the kids to her boss. That’s how Castia become a particularly mountainous country!

Again, like always, this is a very linear structured post mortem. The process of just getting to a place where a have a full story idea I can start to outline with takes me a while as I think about the fairytales, the connections, the bigger world I’ve built, the characters, the kind of story I want to tell, what I want to focus on from the fairytales, and where I want to go next with future fairytales. This story I very much wanted to focus on a villain romance/ an anti-heroine and really dive into what would motivate the pied piper to do those things and the guilt that would come but most importantly why the piper can’t stop.

Up next I’ll be talking about Piper and Valens’ romance and diving more into those two characters and how they shaped the story as well as Piper and Sandy’s friendship!