Behind the Iron Curtain
Category: Author’s Note
From the Desk of: Frank De Witte
When I first began creating the world of The Cartographer of Forgotten Fronts, I wasn't looking at fantasy maps. I was looking at the silent, rusted skeletons of 20th-century Europe.
There is a specific kind of melancholy found in the industrial decay of the Danish countryside and the hollowed-out factory districts across the continent—places where history didn't just pass by, but where it seems to have ground to a halt. In these landscapes, the structures don't feel like they were built by individuals; they feel like they were birthed by a system that eventually forgot why they existed in the first place.
This is the foundation of the Eternal War.
In most stories, war is an event—an interruption with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But in the Eternal War Chronicles, war is a state of being. It is a climate. It is the Doctrine of Continuity in action. I wanted to explore the philosophy of a conflict so old and so vast that the people within it no longer remember what "victory" or "peace" would even look like. They only know the grind.
In many ways, Elian Vost is not the "hero" in the traditional sense. He is a witness. In this series, the world itself is the true protagonist. The geography, the shifting borders, the necrotic soil of Sector 4, and the cold, bureaucratic heart of The Ordnance Board are what drive the narrative. The characters are simply trying to find a way to navigate a map that is being rewritten—or erased—around them.
Writing "The Cartographer" was an exercise in peeling back the vellum of our own history to see what lies beneath the surface. I wanted to capture that feeling of looking at a modern city and sensing the ghosts of the trenches and the ironworks underneath.
We are nearing the launch of this first chapter in the Eternal War Chronicles. If you enjoy stories where the atmosphere is as heavy as the stakes, I invite you to join Elian in the Archive.
"The Cartographer of Forgotten Fronts" is now available for pre-order.
