The story of Devious Arcana and the 33-book, two-million-word backdrop that sets it up.

The Devious Arcana Trilogy 1 box set had to be written so that Braiden Thane, Lady Cecelia, Kifferd, and a few others were not level-1 orphans when the finale begins. Also, I needed to freshen up on the 2 million words of fantasy that make up the backdrop for this last trilogy. Since I haven’t written in three years, it was the perfect vessel.

Books 4, 5, and 6 of Devious Arcana are where it all comes together. One can read books 4, 5, and 6 of Devious Arcana without reading all two million words that make up the backdrop (if they have read Devious Arcana 1, 2, and 3). The backdrop is listed here in timeline reading order: Perpetual Fantastica, The Wardstone Trilogy, The Dragoneer Saga, Crimzon and Clover, The Legend of Vanx Malic.

Here are a few of the hundreds of things you will miss if you don’t read the backdrop first. I am calling it the backdrop here because I have yet to think of a name for the whole of the world.

Braxton Bray and Nixalia, from Perpetual Fantastica, gave birth to a witchy little girl named Willa in book four and then moved to Highwander (where The Wardstone Trilogy takes place) so Dahg Mahn could mentor her. She eventually becomes the first Queen Willa the Witch.

Also in Perpetual Fantastica, Chureal, the sweet young girl Braxton finds wandering a bloody battlefield, befriends a yearling blue dragon she names Cobalt. Cobalt later travels across the sea with Braxton’s family.

At some point in time, Cobalt goes through a phase of attacking pirates. One of those pirates was Barnicle Bones. Cobalt snatched his whole ship out of the sea and carried it to his island lair, possibly with him aboard.

The entire second book of The Wardstone Trilogy revolves around Hyden Hawk, Phen, and Oarly questing to Cobalt’s Island to retrieve the Silver Skull of Zarellon, rumored to be aboard Barnicle Bone’s ship when it was snatched.

Phen, who was turned into stone and eventually saved by Claret, the mighty red dragon in Wardstone, ends up marrying the Queen of the Evermore Elves in Wardstone Three. Because of all the powerful magics it took to change Phen back from stone—and the fact that the woman he married is an elf with a 500–800 year lifespan—their children were unique. Phen and Lady Telgra’s children formed a whole new race, called Phenzythans.

The Phenzythians were uneasy around older races, and their birthrate was so low that they crossed the world and took over a small island they named Zyth.

Seven thousand years later, the first human-Zythian child was born, and his name was Vanx Malic.

The Paragon Dracus in Vanx Malic 6 and 7 is none other than the one-time leader of the Royal Dragoneers, Prince Richard. He was banished from their realm by Princess Amelia when she wielded Iron Spike against him and learned to manipulate the rate at which she travels through time. That battle takes place in The Dragoneer Saga Book Six: Blood and Royalty.

After his defeat, Prince Richard slunk away and began torturing enslaved dragons for their magic. He continued this for thousands of years, which is how he became the Paragon Dracus.

Another Dragoneer, who was saturated with dragon magic to the point of barely being in the realm of the living, is Jenka DeSwasso, the Emerald Rider. You will encounter him in Devious Arcana Book Four. He and Richard were brothers.

Currently, in Devious Arcana Book Four, Braiden Thane (an Imperial) is fighting alongside Jenka and a few others. Jenka is calling the group the Imperial Dragoneers.

I could continue endlessly weaving the connective threads of my tapestry. (I discussed these tapestries, woven through the ages, way back in The Sword and the Dragon.) I only bring that up, because AI writing programs go to the tapestry reference more than a fat man goes to the fridge. In fact, Phen was digging through racks of these tapestries in the latter chapters of The Sword and the Dragon, or the early chapter of Kings Queens Heroes and Fools, when he met Hyden Hawk for the first time.

Pavreal is the person who, in the history of the Wardstone Trilogy brought together the Giants, Dwarves, Elves, and Humans, and with the help of the dragons forged Iron Spike, and created the Demon Seal that protected the world until the evil wizard Pael broke the seal in The Sword and the Dragon.

Since it is revealed in Devious Arcana Trilogy 1, this will be the only true spoiler I drop here. Knowing all the twists, turns and connections, that I revealed above will not spoil anything for you. What it will do is make you wonder how the hell I created a story so huge, that those details are minutia. And did so in a Texas prison, twenty years ago.

This is the last of the multi series connections I can give away without stepping on my own toes.

**SPOILER ALERT**

Pavreal’s parents are Lord Braiden Thane, and Lady Cecelia. You’ll have to figure out how continuation and chronology work, to grasp the how of it, but that is what Devious Arcana is all about and why I had to dedicate a trilogy to his parents, before I could tell the last bit of the tale.

I have never made a book outline in my life. Every series I have ever written started with a blank sheet of notebook paper and a pen, or a blank screen. I wrote the entire Wardstone Trilogy in six months, in prison, in longhand. The audio book for that trilogy is 61 hours long. I also wrote the 4 books that make up Perpetual Fantastica, and the first two books of Vanx Malic, in the exact same cell. I split the two Vanx Malic books into 4 four books for that ten-book series. All of them written in prison, in long hand, with no computer or spell check or dictionary. I didn’t learn to type well until a few years ago. I paid a human typist to sit with me after I was released to take dictation while I deciphered all those pages of notebook paper, then paid to have them edited, several times.

The only fantasy books I did not write in Tennessee Colony, Texas between 2006 and 2008, while at the Michael’s Unit Maximum Security Ad Seg, while doing a two-year sentence for the possession of ecstasy, are The Dragoneer Saga, the last six books of The Legend of Vanx Malic, and Dragon Racers, and of course now, Devious Arcana.

So if you can fathom all the connections I did not list, because there are more than I can remember, you’ll see Devous Arcana is not some afterthought, written to stretch threads to meet ends that don’t match, it is its own story, and I took the liberty of adding Vampires, Shapeshifters, time-travel romance, and a few dozen other genres, into my arsenal for the sole purpose of drawing those readers into my greater world, where there really is no genre, there is just some kick ass fantasy stories that revolve around dragons and wizardry, that together tell a greater story, that is over two million words long.

All of my books are on Kindle Unlimited, which does not reflect in Amazon sales ranking.

Devious Arcana Book Four is written, five and six, are in my brain, and once written will wrap my M.R. Mathias pen name’s writing career, for all but a story or two, here or there.


Enjoy the journey. It will be spectacular.

~M

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