Choosing a title for “The Trial of Bells and Blood”

While working on The Wind Mage and the Wolf, I was still thinking onward to the next book of the Legends of Cirena series.

Problem is, I hadn’t decided on a title.

I mean, I kind of had an idea of what I was leaning toward, but I wasn’t sure it was really right.

(Choosing a title, like blurb rewriting, is usually one of my writing banes).

I tried brainstorming potential titles by jotting down the first ones that came to mind and then branching off from those.

Some of them seemed promising.

Some of them really didn’t fit the story.

Some seemed like… maybe?

After a bit, I whittled the choices down to three and asked the Wishing Blade Universe newsletter readers for feedback.

I gave them some details about the book I was trying to title: Legends of Cirena #8, which brings in the characters of Hahven (The Cursed Halls of Kalecen, Legends of Cirena #4) and Alia (The Scars of Her Past, Legends of Cirena #5).

Synopsis

Hahven is a duelist who would rather train his students to protect themselves than spend his time serving a vengeful god of justice, but due to an event from The Cursed Halls of Kalecen, he’s now stuck as the vengeful god’s champion. He’s forced to serve the god, or risk going back on a deal.

Thanks to those same events, he also has a rather annoying chesnathé horn growing from his forehead that intrudes on his thoughts with the guilt or honor of nearby people. Unfortunately, the horn also comes with a desire to stab and kill those he deems guilty, or to stab and grant immortality to those he finds worthy.

(Either way, the horn tends to be on the stabby side).

So when his god calls on him for a mission, he dreads learning what he might be asked to do.

Meanwhile, Alia is a merchant with a past she has tried to atone for and forget (as detailed in The Scars of Her Past). She’s almost ready to start a caravan of her own when one of the criminals she crossed during her time as a guard makes a plea to the vengeful god Hahven serves, determined to get revenge on Alia.

Problem is, that vengeful god takes a liking to Alia instead, and wants Hahven to convince her to serve him, too.

Alia isn’t having it.

Neither is Hahven.

Determined to keep her from facing the same fate he did, Hahven calls upon the high god for help circumventing his current master, and he’s surprised when he actually gets an answer.

The high god sends Alia and Hahven to the southern desert of Neel via a caravan that belongs to the gods. But when they get there, they discover an atrocious murder that tests Hahven’s increasingly irritable horn, and forces Alia to reconsider whether or not she’s really done protecting people from those who mean harm.

So that’s the overview.

These were the titles I presented that I thought might work, and there was one in particular I was leaning toward, though I hadn’t settled on anything and was open to ideas if readers were willing to share.

The Trial of Bells and Blood
- There are multiple trials throughout the story, the bells are a symbol of the vengeful god, and the horn wants blood… constantly nagging at Hahven to kill those it finds guilty. Also, it was the vengeful god’s blood that gave Hahven the judgmental horn.
- However, the downside of this one was that it was very close to the title of our work-in-progress Multiverse Chronicles story and its Battle Decks edition: Trials of Blood and Steel.
The Bells of Truth and Blood
- The bells are a symbol of the vengeful god, the horn sees the “truth” of people, though its judgement is skewed, and the horn wants blood.
The Caravan of the Gods
- Alia is given a caravan to take to Neel where she and Hahven investigate the murder. As the caravan was organized by the gods, it’s a “caravan of the gods.”