Same Team
On leaving home, staying connected, and why two brothers from Chicago ended up inside a fantasy novel
Vaelorians,
I left home when I was nineteen.
My brother Daniel was eleven. Eight years between us, and suddenly a few hundred miles too. I moved from Humboldt Park to St. Louis to be with my father and start college, and Daniel stayed in Chicago with our mom and our pops. I use that word deliberately. Pops. Not a placeholder, not a technicality. The man who was there, who showed up, who is no less my father for not having given me his name. That’s just the shape our family took, and it was a good shape.
But it meant that when I left, I left a household. Not just a brother.
Daniel grew up in that house without me. He became someone I didn’t get to watch up close. I missed years of that. We both did, from opposite ends.
We never stopped being close. The distance didn’t do what distance sometimes does to people. We found our ways back to each other through games mostly. Star Wars Jedi Academy. World of Warcraft. We’d been heavy gamers since we were kids, always on the same team, always in the same lobby, and that didn’t stop when I left. It just moved online. We’d get in, pick our side, and for a few hours the miles didn’t matter.
My character was Desra. His was Kael Windu.
I didn’t know, then, that I was naming two people who would end up in a book.
There are two brothers in The Sagas of Vaelora who have been with me longer than the series has.
Desrael is a weathered ranger. Kael is a paladin, younger, and the two of them are separated early. Kael is called away by the Church when Desrael is fifteen. They spend years building separate lives that don’t quite touch. When they finally find each other again it’s on a battlefield, years later, with things between them that were never said and grief that was held alone longer than it needed to be.
The first thing Kael says is: “You always did need someone to rescue you, big brother.”
That line came fast. I’ve been on the receiving end of exactly that from Daniel more times than I can count. There’s a kind of teasing that only works between brothers, that would sound wrong from anyone else, and that line is it. You lead with the joke because the real thing is too big to open with. The joke is its own kind of love.
Later, when the fighting is over and it’s just the two of them before dawn, the harder conversation starts. Things they missed in each other’s lives. Grief Desrael kept to himself. Years Kael spent becoming someone his brother didn’t fully know. None of it wraps up clean. It sits between them the way old distance does, even after the people come back to each other.
But the love was never in question. That’s the thing. The separation was real. The gaps were real. The love just kept going regardless.
In the book, it’s the younger brother who gets called away. Kael leaves. Desrael watches him go.
That’s not how it happened with Daniel and me. I was the one who left. I was nineteen, he was eleven, and I put the miles between us. I’ve thought about why I wrote it the other direction. I don’t have a neat answer. Maybe it was easier to write from the side I didn’t occupy. Maybe Desrael is carrying something I felt at nineteen that I couldn’t name yet about what leaving costs the person who stays.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter which brother goes. Both ends of it hurt the same way.
What I know is that Desrael’s pride in Kael is something I recognize. There’s a moment in Book Two where Desrael watches his younger brother move through the dark ahead of him and just lets himself feel it. No words. Just the quiet recognition of who Kael became while they were apart.
I’ve felt that watching Daniel. The particular thing of seeing your brother become himself during years you weren’t around for. It’s not simple. The missing and the pride sit right next to each other and neither one goes away.
Babax Merrifur’s story runs on a different kind of loss.
His older brother Stumper disappeared five years before the story begins, on a trade road he’d walked dozens of times before. No bodies, no wreckage, no explanation that held up. Just an empty chair and ledgers still full of his handwriting. Future routes. Plans written out by someone who had every reason to expect he was coming back.
Babax spent five years tracing those pages. Then he walked out the door and followed the roads himself.
What he finds is not what he hoped for.
But Babax still loves him.
That’s what both pairs of brothers in this book are really about. Not adventure. Not chosen destiny. Just the stubborn fact of loving someone across whatever distance opened up between you, whether that distance is miles or years or something darker than either.
Desra and Kael Windu started in a character creation screen. Two brothers from Chicago who wanted to go somewhere together, so they made names and picked a side and went. We did that across a lot of games and a lot of years. When I started writing Vaelora in earnest those names came with me, grew into something larger, took on history and armor and weight I hadn’t planned for them. But at the bottom of them they’re still us. That never changed.
And that’s true of more than just them.
In a certain way, this whole story is my story dressed up. The world is big now, hundreds of years of history, multiple continents, wars and saints and creatures that don’t exist anywhere but Vaelora. But everything in it was born from something. A feeling I couldn’t shake. A person I loved. A loss I hadn’t finished processing. A game I played with my little brother on a school night when we were supposed to be asleep. Nothing in Vaelora came from nowhere. It all came from somewhere near and dear to me, and I’ve been telling it to everyone.
I think that’s what storytelling actually is, when it’s working. Not invention. Memory in a costume. The real thing, wearing a different name.
I didn’t decide to put Daniel in the book. It’s more that I couldn’t have kept him out. When I needed to write brothers who know each other without explanation, who reunite after years apart and open with a joke because neither one is ready to go straight to the real thing, I already knew what that looked like. I just had to write it down.
Daniel, if you’re reading this: I know I was the one who left. I hope you know it never changed anything that mattered.
Same team. Always.
The Sagas of Vaelora: The Burrow and the Blade is available now. Desrael and Kael are waiting for you there, along with everyone else.
Pick up the book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Learn more about the world at thesagasofvaelora.com.
And if you want to follow along as the world keeps growing, you’re already in the right place.
May your burrows be warm.
I'm glad you guys were able to stay connected. This is what they mean when they say write what you know.