Today, we welcome Author Yehya Safwat
Today, we welcome Author Yehya Safwat and his exciting new book, “The Dark Season Saga: The Final Harvest.”
The Dark Season Saga: The Final Harvest by Yehya Safwat
Book Description:
In every world, there are the players: listeners, doers and sayers. They are those who define their world as they build and destroy civilizations. Yet there are other, more mysterious, players who have lived across the ages … undetected. Those are the watchers and takers, and the greatest of them is the pillar of our story.
Talor is a world with calamities similar to ours; a world that witnessed all forms of the good and evil dispute, much like any mature world. Yet there is a battle that went on unseen across the ages, a clash too big that few ever took notice of. And as is the case with every battle, it has to come to an end. The obscured titanic conflict of Talor is ready for the final curtain to drop and no one is aware of this down the chain. Only the enigmatic and shrouded leaders of the world know which part of the game is this.
The sad news is that the end seems grim and the forces of darkness are one step away from achieving total victory.
The Protagonist:
Nymtha, the Shadow Pilgrim, is an elite member of the genn, a subterranean race of shadow and earth, who has been silently watching the world of mortals since the beginning of time without the slightest interference in the affairs of men.
At the turn of the tide, when Talor is getting readied for the last chapter, Nymtha gets his hand on the most coveted treasure man ever sought, something that no one foresaw its retrieval. Now he is forced to make the choice every genn fears to face. Finding himself in the middle of the greatest battle man ever saw, Nymtha, after millennia in the dark, may be forced to run into the light … onto history’s stage.
Yehya Safwat, you come from an engineering background. When did you become interested in poetry and writing?
I think my interest in poetry and writing started way before I became an engineer. Perhaps it was ignited that moment when I had my eyes closed trying to visualize outer space in my physics class with the song My Lady D’Arbanville playing in the back of my head. Science has its own poetic aspect and … magic.
I must also admit that playing Dungeons & Dragons as a game master when I was young greatly enhanced my imagination and added to it the beautiful flavor of fantasy. Especially, that I often improvised for entire sessions. Sometimes neither the players nor I knew what is behind the door they were about to open, which made our experience quite unique.
Besides that, part of the engineering skill relies heavily on imagination. Once you are in that zone where you start constructing things in your mind a whole new array of possibilities and hidden doors suddenly appears.
I understand you developed an analytical view of the world and you believe we can predict emotions with great accuracy. So, does this analytical viewpoint of the world complicate your personal enjoyment of life or does it make things safer and easier?
Oh, this is a painful question to the extent of pleasure. It does complicate life, but in the same time, it magnifies its elements ten-fold. Everything is louder; happiness, sadness, hope, despair … everything is so overwhelming, but once you have a taste of it, you won’t settle for less.
What gave you inspiration for writing The Dark Season?
Everything around us and everything that led to it. Despite it is a work of fiction and fantasy, my greatest concern was to make everything make sense and allow readers to relate everything they find in there to real life pictures with relative ease.
I wanted a fantasy saga that it is a mix of genres that doesn’t revolve around one type and fall short on other flavors. Also, I wanted a mystery that rivals that of Jaqen H’ghar’s shrouded ambiguity in the Game of Thrones. Finally, I wanted to experience shocking exposure of plots par that of Primal Fear the movie. Romance must be more anguished than that of Achilles and Briseis in Troy and warmer than the Ghost movie. The heroic action needs to match that of The Lord of The Rings battles. But the truly unique addition I wanted to focus on is the philosophical insights and projections behind every detail like that of The Matrix.
And I wanted them all in one tale. So I created the Dark Season Saga
Nymtha, the Shadow Pilgrim, is the Protagonist in this story. What was your process in formulating this character?
Nymtha is the silent conscious of man. If we can imagine connecting humanity across its entire journey in the material world, and this entity has to witness all our deeds, all our gains and our shames, what would it say to us?
This is how Nymtha describes himself in his message to his daughter:
“I was a genn of Verda. We lurked behind curtains throughout history and witnessed it written with our own eyes. Whether a historical meeting which ends in a world changing deal between nations, an obscure assassination of an iconic figure or the veiled events that start a war… we are there … unseen, watching silently. Then when the storm passes and the place is abandoned we walk in and collect. In our hands, forsaken legacies and wasted chances finally reside; crowns of fallen kings, tomes of forgotten knowledge, crumbled thrones of wasted nations, broken scepters, abandoned weapons of legendary warriors, and many more.
Despite all of that we were a nation of loners, a nation of lurkers and takers with a dark legacy, a self-weaved curse.”
Of everything that is Nymtha, what one quality is fashioned from your experiences and viewpoint of life in the world today?
I like to look into things differently and Nymtha as a silent observer and appraiser has unique standards on the value of things. Nymtha both values the world he lives in yet, in a way, also mourns it. If humanity has a voice of its own I think it will scream in our face with heart-crushing agony.
In this book, I ask a question that everyone seeks its answer: Is there any hope left?
Yehya Safwat, would you please share an excerpt from the book with my readers?
A ghastly manifestation gradually appeared above her dead body, and I could recognize her pain-filled features. She smiled the moment she laid her eyes on me.
Then she spoke…
“Nymtha. I am not mistaken.
“I do not regret keeping what I felt for you to myself. I do not regret falling for you, alone, in the eternal spring of my heart. I do not regret being strong enough to be weak. It is something that I could have waited my entire life for, without finding it. But now I thank you for giving me that, even for that short period. Now, I die fulfilled. I only regret my failure to save you.”
She broadened her smile and continued with misty eyes, “Do not mourn me, Nymtha; let me mourn you. Let me weep for you eternally… for you are the one who will suffer. You are the one left behind in that wretched world of ours. You may feel alone, my love, but the fact is, it is me who was alone. You are one with the world, and the grayness you have inside paints our entire age. It is me who stood out amidst those colorless wastes, breathing among the dead, hoping among the desperate, and loving across seas of hatred.”
Thank you so much for participating in Saturday’s Pick, Yehya Safwat! We are all looking forward to the next book! Also, we are grateful to you for sharing your book with us under a FREE offer today!
Connect with Yehya Safwat below:
Amazon Link – Hurry! FREE Today!
The book is available also at all Amazon Kindle stores and Createspace