Nine days and counting until the #kindle release of my new short story “Amethyst” that takes place in the Dark World Universe! Wahoo!
Who is Amethyst?
Even though the core novels in the Dark World Series are all told from the point of view of one character, Ruby, when Amethyst appeared in the second novel, The Lockdown, I became intrigued by her backstory and her motivations. It wasn’t relevant to explore those within that particular novel, so I thought she would be the perfect character for me to explore in order to kick off my short story series.
Amethyst is the daughter of Commander SueLee who is in charge of The Complex (underground fall-out shelter where the main character, Ruby, spent the first sixteen years of her life). SueLee’s father, Winston, was essentially the founder of Doctrine, the laws in which citizens of The Complex are expected to abide by.
When Ruby meets Amethyst she assumes that she is just as cruel as her mother, but I knew even as I wrote the scene in which Ruby and Amethyst first met that the two characters, Amethyst and her mother SueLee, were drastically different. SueLee is a sadist, a narcissist, and possibly even a sociopath, but Amethyst, despite her rough appearance and snappy attitude has a sense of morality and genuinely cares about what happens to the people in The Complex. There is no denying that she was cruel to Ruby, verbally taunting her about her imprisonment and the potential future torture she may have to endure, but Amethyst doesn’t actually resent Ruby, she resents what Ruby represents to her mother. She feels inferior to Ruby in every way and she views Ruby as dangerous, not by Ruby’s intent by simply by her existence. The way she treated Ruby was simply Amethyst’s misguided defense mechanism.
I hope that by learning about Amethyst’s story, people will have a deeper understanding of not only how she treated Ruby in The Lockdown, but also for the way that novel ended. The last scene was a dramatic and future-defining one, and Amethyst’s choice was extreme. Well into the third novel, Ruby is still confused by Amethyst’s final choice, but I’m happy that I have this opportunity to give the readers a deeper view into the tangled web of this future world, and to finally learn some things about the Dark World Universe and the other characters that Ruby doesn’t know. As we all know from our own lives, what we see and what we experience as individuals is barely a sliver of the pie that is our current civilization.
Kell Frillman - Author 