I’ve been focusing a lot on Elysia during these fun facts. It’s time to focus on the other half of the Elysian Chronicles: Earth. In Out of the Shadows, most of the Earth sections take place at the United States Naval Academy.
One of the keys to the Earth/Naval Academy sections of Out of the Shadows (and actually to the entire trilogy) is Tommy realizing who he is and what he is meant to do. To help this process, I needed him to realize that cherubians were real real and that the memories he had suppressed when he was younger actually occurred.
One such memory haunts Tommy: seeing Davian and Eric (both morphed into humans) grappling on the floor. He wonders why they had such gaping holes in the armor in their backs.
Tom lay back down, trying to erase the dream—or the memory. One picture haunted him, a picture of Davian and the other soldier wrestling. Something about the image felt wrong—beyond two men wearing kilts and Romanesque armor in modern-day America. Tom replayed the dream. It’s the armor, he thought. The armor covering their backs was attached to their breastplates at the shoulders and dipped well below their shoulder blades, leaving the top half of their backs exposed. The back of their tunics buttoned at the nape of their necks but sported a hole in the same place, and Tom clearly saw their back muscles flexing while they grappled. Whoever heard of backless armor? And why a hole in the tunics?
“It’s just a dream,” Tom whispered. He refused to believe it was a memory. No soldier would leave his back exposed, and no one walked around in armor like that nowadays.
What Tom doesn’t realize at the beginning of the story is that Davian and Eric aren’t human. They have wings, which their armor has to accommodate when they are in their cherubian state. I needed Tommy to figure this out on his own–and preferably at the Naval Academy because with him being only a freshman, I couldn’t get him off campus.
I found the solution to my problem quite unexpectedly while I was on a tour of the Naval Academy. Inside the chapel I saw this window:
Admiral Farragut Stained Glass Window
It’s a stained glass window near the pulpit that depicts the Arch Angel Michael presiding over Admiral Farragut in the Battle of Mobile Bay. (Can I hear anyone say, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”?)
The armor Michael is wearing is the exact same armor Davian would have been wearing when Tom saw him in A Prophecy Forgotten!
The window was exactly what I needed Tom to see to realize that cherubians were real. My hands were shaking so badly from excitement that I couldn’t even take a steady picture!
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Fantasy, steampunk, and paranormal novelist M. B. Weston is the author of The Elysian Chronicles, a fantasy series about guardian angel warfare and treason. Weston is also the hose of The Final Cut In Movies radio show that airs on TMV Cafe Monday nights at 8:00 EST. For more information on M. B. Weston, visit www.mbweston.com. To receive notification of M. B. Weston’s book releases click here to subscribe to Dark Oak Press & Media’s e-newsletter.
