Sagas of Capes and Cowls

Author’s Introduction

For as long as mankind has had stories, there have been tales of people who are more than human. Larger than life figures, with incredible powers gifted by Divine means, inhuman training or simple quirks of birth. Kings, Demigods, folk heroes, adventurers and warriors, heroes and villains of a thousand stories from every culture and folklore known to man. A tradition that has lasted to this very day, appearing in its most modern incarnation, a genre whose popularity is practically worldwide at the moment.

Yes, I’m talking about Superheroes. No duh.

Now, some of you may roll your eyes at this sort of comparison, but really think about it. A infant sent away from a dying planet. A boy seeing his parents gunned down in an alley one night. A teenager bitten by a radioactive spider. Think about how much these stories  have truly embedded themselves into the psyche of our culture. Think about all the different ways they’ve been retold, reinterpreted, analysed and changed over the years. So is it really so much of a stretch to consider Superheroes a modern mythology?

But what if we made that more explicit? What if, instead of superheroes merely being the successors to the ancient epic fantastical stories of myth, they inhabited a fantastical world of their own? What stories would be woven? What tales could be told? What kind of world would a melding of these two mythologies create?

Basically, TLDR, ‘Yo dawg, I heard you like Superheroes and I heard you like High Fantasy, so how about I put superheroes in your High Fantasy?’

So yeah, this series is more-or-less exactly what it says on the tin. An attempt to mix the tropes of superhero stories with a High Fantasy world and see what results. However, I’m also going to try something more interesting than a single straightforward narrative. Instead, I’m planning on using the short story format to explore different corners and aspects of this world in small, mostly-complete narratives. Some stories will have reoccurring characters, others might be one-offs, some may explore different locations, others the same location from a different point of view, some may even be historical records or in-universe folklore. I’ve got a lot of different plans and hopefully I’ll manage to do something for each of them.

Also, if you enjoy these stories and/or my other works, it may interest you to know that I have a brand new Patreon, where you can not only support my work, but also get early access to stories a week before they end up here! (Along with various other perks.) In fact, I already have a new 12,000 word villain-focused story, named ‘The Baron and the Princess’ already up and available to Patrons (although I will publish it here some time next week).

Contents

Prologue- The Day of Prime

Black Cowl- The Black Cowl Rises

Trinite- The Baron and the Princess

Casimir- The Gifted Hunt

Scrapper- Scrapping and Sidekicking (Part 1) (Part 2)

History- Even a Superhero has to Deal with Politics

Trinite- Twisted Sister