I was fourteen when I first wrote Torven.
He wasn't called Torven then: he was Lothrien. I thought that name was incredibly cool at the time.
I remember that first scene I put together. Middle of a clearing—no frost, I hadn't thought of that yet—but tree sprites surrounding the edges of the screen. Lothrien on the left, a glowing baby sprite on the right. His captain walking away.
I was trying to make a video game.
This was the late nineties. Y2K era. I'd taught myself QBasic from the early internet: forums, fan sites, copy-pasted code I didn't fully understand. QuickBASIC 4.5, to be precise. If you know, you know. A programming language that feels ancient now, came free with DOS, ran on a computer that took three minutes to boot.
I wanted to make something like Final Fantasy. The early ones, where sprites walked across tile maps and combat happened in a separate screen. Where stories unfolded in text boxes and you had to imagine the rest.
I built parts of it. A title screen. A menu system. Some maps you could walk around in. A battle engine that mostly worked, except when it didn't. Pixel art flames flickering in torches. Try the dark mode toggle in the top corner; you might see what I mean. The little dragon took me an embarrassing number of attempts to get right.
But the game part was always secondary. What I really cared about was the story.
I had Word documents full of it. Character backstories. World history. Political systems. A magic system based on dragon blood that I thought was incredibly original. The kind of elaborate worldbuilding only a fourteen-year-old with too much free time can produce.
The plot was convoluted: I remember something about warring kingdoms and a prophecy and a betrayal. But underneath all the fantasy trappings was this image I couldn't shake: a man defying orders to save a child everyone else wanted to leave behind.
What happens to that child? What happens to the man who saved him?
Those questions were the seed of everything.
The game never got finished. Of course it didn't.
I was fourteen. I had school. The codebase became unmaintainable—not that I knew that word then. I just knew that every time I tried to add something new, three other things broke. Eventually I stopped opening the project. Then I stopped thinking about it.
The story, though. The story stayed.
Over the years, it would surface at odd moments. Waiting for a bus. Falling asleep. In the shower. I'd find myself thinking about the settlement, about the exiled boy, about the father who saved him and the weight that saving would carry.
I never wrote any of it down. Not properly. It just lived in my head, evolving slowly, pieces clicking into place over decades.
The magic system changed. The politics simplified. Characters merged or split or disappeared entirely. But that core image—the soldier, the snow, the child—never changed.
Twenty years of thinking about a story I'd never written.
I'm a software engineer now. I've spent my career building things with code: products, systems, tools. The craft of making something work, of solving problems piece by piece. It's satisfying in ways that are hard to explain.
But I've never stopped being that kid with the Word documents. The one who cared more about the story than the game.
Recently, I started writing it down.
Not as a game. As a novel. The medium I probably should have chosen from the start, if I'd known myself better at fourteen.
It's strange, finally putting words to something that's lived in my head for so long. The story has grown up with me. The themes I care about now—parenthood, the way love can fail even when it's real—weren't things I understood at fourteen. But they were always there, waiting for me to catch up.
The soldier carrying the child through the snow. I understand him better now.
I don't know if this novel will be any good. I've never written fiction before—not seriously, not at length. I'm figuring it out as I go.
But the story has waited twenty years. It's been patient.
I figure it's time to see it through.