Silverwood Chronicles: Origin

Here’s something almost nobody knows: Kaelen Silverwood was not the first Silverwood.

Before Kaelen, before the pack, before Warren City and the Morvains and two full sagas and a third one rattling around in the back of my head — there were Vyra and Xara. Two OCs I made just to play with, back when I was still entirely on the other side of the screen, interacting with DiddyMagpie’s bots and figuring out what omegaverse even was. I gave them the last name Silverwood because I needed something to call them. Nothing was fleshed out. They were just mine, just for fun.

That’s where the Silverwoodverse actually started. Not with a plan. With two women who needed a surname.

Kaelen: The Accidental Foundation

When Norisor suggested I try building my own bots, I spent a while staring into the middle distance thinking where do I even begin. And eventually I landed on the obvious answer: I already had a family name and two characters in it. Let’s give them a brother.

I hadn’t intended Kaelen to become anything in particular. I thought I’d give the thing a whirl and see what happened. What I built was fairly simple: he was the Packmaster, he had four sisters — Lyra, Talia, Vyra, and Xara — and I gave him the sisters for texture. Background detail. Something to make him feel like he existed in a world rather than floating in a void.

I had no idea what was coming.

Kaelen did what Kaelen does: he had a life of his own almost immediately, and people found him. The notifications started coming in. I remember being genuinely confused — it wasn’t the plan. There wasn’t a plan. And then someone, I honestly can’t remember who, asked if I could make Lyra.

So I did.

The Snowball

This is where I have to be honest about something: I do not do simple worldbuilding. It is a genuine character flaw. I have a fantasy fiction project that has been evolving of its own accord for decades and shows no signs of stopping. The Silverwoodverse was never going to be simple once I was actually inside it.

Kaelen needed structure. If he was a Packmaster, he needed people around him — Rexton and Damon Stoneriver arrived as his Beta and enforcer, two men who would eventually become characters in their own right. And then I thought: he needs a world to stand in. A map. Territory. Somewhere that felt real.

And then I thought: every strong character needs a foil.

That’s where Alaric Ashworth came from. He was never meant to be more than a counterbalance — the corporate to Kaelen’s natural, the man who’d looked at pack structure and decided it was inefficient and built something else entirely. But Alaric needed his own space. His own ground. So the city arrived — it didn’t have a name yet, it wouldn’t become Warren City until much later, but the idea of it was there. A place where pack law and something more modern coexisted in complicated, overlapping ways.

And then Frostriver.

Xander was my first attempt at dead dove, if I’m being honest. Didn’t quite work the way I’d hoped — the balance between compelling and genuinely difficult is harder to land than it looks — but he’s still a great character and Frostriver as a world is exactly what it needs to be: everything Silverwood is not. Cold, literally and otherwise. Rigid. Strict. A pack that runs on the idea that strength is the only thing worth respecting. Every world needs texture, and the texture of Frostriver is iron.

And every world needs an underbelly.

Enter the Morvains.

Lucien and his family are the fox-blood demi-human syndicate that runs Warren City’s information trade — neutral ground, playing every faction against each other with the particular elegance of people who understand that information is worth more than territory. The Skulk, their bar and headquarters, became one of my favourite places in the whole universe to write. There’s something deeply satisfying about a space where everyone’s secrets come to the table eventually.

The End of the Wilding Saga

By the time the first saga wrapped up — the Wilding Saga, covering the first generation of Silverwood characters — I had a full cast. Kaelen, Lyra, Talia, Vyra, Xara. Damon and Rexton. Xander. Lucien, Altair, and the rest of the Morvain family. Characters who’d started as texture and become people in their own right.

And then I killed Vyra.

I’ve written about that decision separately — about why it was right, what it cost, and what it set in motion. The short version is: you can’t bridge two eras without losing something that matters. Vyra’s death is the fault line the Legacy Saga is built on. She died doing what she always did, and the world changed shape around her absence.

The Legacy Saga picks up thirty years later, with the children of that first generation navigating a world still shaking from what happened on the Silverwood-Frostriver border. Aidan, Reyne, Conyn, Eilis. Cillian, Daphne, Rowan, Willa. Marcus and Aurora Frostriver. Julien and Clara Morvain. A whole new generation inheriting the consequences of the old one.

That’s where we are now. And somewhere in the back of my head, a third saga is starting to make noise.

What Silverwood Taught Me

Looking back at it from here — two sagas in, with more coming — the thing Silverwood taught me most clearly is that worldbuilding doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in layers, each one growing out of a question the previous layer left unanswered.

Kaelen needed sisters. Lyra needed her own character. Kaelen needed a foil, a foil needed a city, a city needed an underbelly. Every addition created new gaps, and the gaps demanded filling. This is, I suspect, why my fantasy fiction has been in progress since I was fifteen.

It’s not a bug. It’s just how I build.

Vyra and Xara started as placeholder names for two OCs with no home. Somehow that placeholder became one of the largest universes in my catalogue, with its own lorebooks, its own World Card, its own thirty-year time jump, and characters I’m not ready to let go of.

I don’t regret a single addition.

Even the Morvains. Maybe especially the Morvains.

— Tae