Weaving the threads

 This week I’ve finished the second book of my riddle quest trilogy. The book builds on the quest in the first book, where my characters had to find the answers to seven riddles,

The answers were a series of objects which spelled out a name.  In the second book I pick up with a second riddle quest.  This one is based around finding paintings which have riddles on their backs. And at the end of that quest they finally learn what the mystery word they uncovered in the first quest means.

I will need to link the third book into the first two.  So I’m picking up a thread from book one for the locations of the places my characters have to search,  I’ll be using the same idea of finding seven locations, each of them on the lands of a Great Family, but this time they house the remains of alien bioengineering facilities. 

To have my characters find those places I’ll be linking back to book two, and the clues contained in the paintings my characters found there.  One of them remarks that finding the paintings was a waste of time for the second quest.  All they needed were the riddle clues attached to them.  But in book three they will need to use the physical location details contained in those paintings.

My characters have acquired an alien database which contains informationon the seven sites they need to find.  But those names are recorded in the aliens’ language, and even translating them doesn’t reveal their present-day names.  So they need to look back to other information in the paintings.  Those paintings all depict mountain areas, and my characters will have to match those scenes in paintings hundreds of years old with the current-day landscape.  For another helpful clue, each painting contains a big cat.  And my main character is big into conserving big cats, so she knows which habitats each different cat lives in.  This information can link together with the mountain data to confirm the right sites.

In book one I introduced soulships, which are sentient and carry the memories of their previous human captains.  In book two I developed them, describing their origins as skywhales snatched from a gas giant planet and bioengineered.  In book three I will develop this by having the soulships choose their futures. Arrien believes they have been enslaved, and gives them the chance of a different life.

There are threads about Arrien’s brother which also run through the three books.  He starts a gay relationship in book one, and takes his partner along for the quest in book two.  In book three they’ll be put. in danger again, and at the end of that book will get Bonded.

I’ve written one other trilogy with interweaving threads like this, but the current work feels even more tightly woven together.

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