The Well of Youth

༺⊰ The importance of backstories ⊱༻

Read about the evolution of Beira's story and the importance of backstories in general. Art in the header (and in the book cover) is mine. If you ask nicely, I'll describe how I did it.

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A long, long time ago, in December of 2018, one writer was on a journey to writing her most ambitious story yet.

Hehe. 😜 Let's get to the fun stuff. Who's Beira?

The hag, Cailleach Bheur, The Veiled One, mother of winter, storm and darkness, is the enemy of growth and all life. She raises storms to stop the grass from growing, to slay young animals, and prevent the union of her son with his fair bride.

Doesn't she sound like a piece of work?

Beira is a Gaelic mythical figure. People believed in her for thousands of years - long before the Celts came to the British isles. She is an ancient figure found in Scottish and Irish folklore alike, but for sanity's sake, I've been leaning towards the Scottish myths.

A lot was attributed to Beira—good and bad. Why do rocks fall from the mountains? Beira's giant sons throw them from the peaks. Where did mountain peaks come from? Beira created them with her magic hammer—one for each of her sons. Why are the mountain peaks coated with white? Why is winter so long? How did river Ness came to be?
It seems that all questions could be answered with "because of Beira."

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How this story came to be

To get to Beira's story, we have to take a step back from the land of mythology to fanfiction, and don't be surprised to learn that the two have quite a lot in common with each other.

If you've browsed my other stories, you've probably noticed that I'm a fan of Jack Frost from Rise of The Guardians (RoTG). While most people pair him up with Elsa from Frozen in a romantic story, I thought they'd make perfect twins. I wanted to throw them into Hogwarts and watch the insanities ensue as two winter spirits pretend to be human.

While writing my Jack Frost stories, I've developed my own nature spirit mythology and noticed a lot of parallels between the magic rules of that universe and that of BBC's Merlin. And thus, Merlin and the Secrets of Twin Winters (old title) came to be: a crazy multi-fandom crossover, made against all odds.

My initial idea for the twins' backstory involved them being on the run from someone evil like Pitch Black (the villain from RoTG). Pitch either killed their parents or stole the twins when they were small, and raised them, planning to use them for some evil plan.

To lock down the backstory, I decided to research the twins' parents. I dived into mythology because mythology's awesome. I considered many figures before I stumbled upon Beira, the Spirit of Winter.

Now, you might understand why a fan of Jack Frost would follow that clue.

I found a fascinating book on sacred-texts.com (Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend by Donald Alexander Mackenzie [1917]) which described several myths of Beira. I was instantly hooked. Her story was so rich, I scrapped the Pitch Black idea and chose her to be the villain the twins are running from, adjusting the main story to fit Beira's mythology.

But the more I researched her, the more confused I was. The different myths conflicted each other and there was no consensus on what type of being she was.