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Of all the POV characters in The Silk & Steel Saga, there is one that intimidated me more than all the others combined, and that one is the Mordant. How do you write from the perspective of a thousand-year-old being? How do you show, not just tell, that kind of age? How do you portray that kind of evil without just spattering blood all over the pages? In The Silk & Steel Saga, I challenged myself to create a very malevolent, very sophisticated evil, not just a wizard who hurls fireballs. So I put a lot of thought into my uber bad guy. In much of the saga, I treat the Mordant like the shark in Jaws. The Mordant lurks beneath the story's surface, a dread menace with few details. The reader gains clues to his methods, but never really knows where or how he will strike. The Mordant becomes a malevolent story question. Not until the third book, The Skeleton King, does the Mordant rise out of the story's depths to reveal his true Darkness. This reveal is not just told, it is shown. The showing comes on the form of the twisted culture, crushing architecture, and soul-damning magic of the Dark Citadel. I put a lot of thought into building the Mordant's domain, for it is in 'showing' that stories have their true power. In the fourth and fifth books, the Mordant submerges again, only to reemerge in The Prince Deceiver, launching the Great Dark Divide. Writing from the Mordant's perspective was a major challenge, but one of the goals of my saga was to show my readers the motives and mechanisms of true evil.