The Legend of Blazing Star

"I'll end it for you then, Swift Wing. I'll end the war for you."

Blazing Star always wanted to be the strongest warrior of the Shadow Legion, one of eight groups of dragons that have been fighting a war across the planet of Vocity for millenia. Just before her thirteenth birthday, she discovers that she is gifted with great power, the likes of which haven't been seen since the earliest days of the war. Personally mentored by Mdarion, one of the Shadow Legion's two leaders, and the leader of the Guardians, another group of powerful dragons that have allied themselves with the Shadow Legion and haunted by visions of a dark future, Blazing Star becomes the greatest warrior of the Legion, desperate to end the war before she loses anyone else.

The Legend of Blazing Star is our debut novel. Written almost exclusively by C, with a couple of jokes and small sections of dialogue written unintentionally by Juniper, before we were aware that we were a system, it follows the life of Blazing Star, a twelve year old dragon, orphaned before her and her sister hatched. We started working on it in 2017, and by the time we started high school in February 2021, we had written 81 pages. By the beginning of Year 9 (2022), that number had increased to 96, and by Year 10, it was sitting at 202 pages. The first completed draft was 100,002 words and 300 pages exactly. The first proofread version, completed on the 15th of December, 2023 and an attempt to shorten the final length by cutting unnecessary paragraphs, was 101,407 words and 332 pages. We don't know how this happened.

Fun Trivia!

Blazing Star's name was originally condensed into one word, but we got sick of BlazingStar setting off every grammar checker in a 10-kilometre radius.
The ending of the story (no spoilers!) was one of the only plot points that survived from the 2017 plan (the others being Blazing Star being mentored by Mdarion and Swift Wing's story
The weapon that the main villain, Inferno, uses in Chapter 31 was decided on the day of the chapter being written
In a modern AU, Blazing Star would listen to Fall Out Boy. I have no explanation for how I arrived at this conclusion but it somehow works
The first 81 pages were manually retyped after the original draft was completed
All the work done in 2023, with the exception of twenty or so pages, was done between the fifth of November and the fifteenth of December
In a very early draft, Aqualis and Vitali were Mdarion's kids, not Aura. This was adjusted because of the fact that they were all basically the same age
The entire novel in what was pretty much its final form was planned out in a microsoft notepad file, a project that took me the majority of a semester back in 2021, and was the reason very little work was done on the novel itself that year
Aura was not initially meant to be portrayed as autistic, as she was simply a reflection of myself. Then I got an autism diagnosis