By Nick Hayden
February 7
Next week, we’ll be premiering our third Bron & Calea novella–The Well’s Orphan. The story so far has been largely personal, detailing how Bron, Calea, and their new companion Nyasha deal with the effects of the Cataclysm. The Well’s Orphan is no exception. In fact, it is the most personal story yet.
I wrote The Select’s Bodyguard and I had not planned to return so soon to write on the same storyline, but after Laura delivered Calea a crushing blow at the end of The Doctor’s Assistant, I felt compelled to return. Because, you see, I care about Calea.
Now, I know Calea’s not everyone’s favorite character. (Anyone’s favorite?) She’s rude and demanding and arrogant and ungrateful. Bron’s a saint (or a madman) for putting up with her. My guess is that most readers are just waiting for her to get what’s coming to her.
Don’t worry. She will, one way or another.
But, see, I understand Calea. Don’t ask me how. She’s complicated and injured and recalcitrant. And I wanted to let the reader see through her eyes, at least once. Maybe it’s a bad idea, but it’s an idea that grabbed me and forced me to write.
One of my favorite authors is Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novel Crime and Punishment follows a Russian student who commits murder to prove the philosophical point that great men are not bound by morality. As I understand it, many contemporary readers thought Dostoevsky was writing a condemnation of the students in Russia and their philosophies with this novel, but Dostoevsky admitted to someone that he wasn’t condemning the Russian student but writing a lament for him.
This, in other words, is where such a person with such thoughts ends up.
And, so, I like to think of The Well’s Orphan as a lament for Calea Lisan, one of the greatest minds of Jalseion, a brilliant, maimed, hard-nosed, abrasive woman who has just had her entire world taken from her.
She doesn’t want to die, as the tagline for the novel goes, but she doesn’t know how to live.
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