Ruuda
Lore, Misc Posts

International Women’s Day – Thread of Souls Celebrates

Here at Thread of Souls we are honoring International Women’s Day with a post about our female characters. As husband and wife co-authors, it is wonderful to take this day to celebrate not only Talia’s contributions to the books, but also the women of Thread of Souls that make it what it is.

From Talia

Hello! It’s me, Talia (aka Ashley) co-author of Thread of Souls and co-owner of Tal & Ru Travels LLC with my amazing husband. Growing up, I was exposed to a lot of sexism from my adoptive family on what a woman should or should not do, say, or believe (and a man, too, but that’s for another time). I am proud of separating myself from those punishing viewpoints, and proud to have a partner that thrives with me in fully embracing ourselves and our dreams for the future.

I have been writing all my life, even before I could properly spell words. I wrote my own books, and when I was old enough to have my own laptop I got into the world of fanfiction and won many awards for my works. Even though I drifted away from my path as an author by following bad advice, I have re-discovered my purpose and passion when I began Thread of Souls with my husband (then-fiance.) You can learn more about my journey here.

Being a female business owner and author, it gives me a wonderful opportunity to showcase characters for who they are in their hearts and souls, and not who they are as defined by gender. I am proud to push a narrative forward that shows complex female characters. Jade was my first character created for Thread of Souls, and the last 8 years with her have been wonderful. Dorian created two of our other major female characters, Ruuda and Jasita. If I had just met Dorian at a TTRPG table and saw the character he was playing was a dual-wielding, super strong, female dwarf with a beard I would have fallen in love with him all over again haha. And if I had met him again when he created and played Jasita, an asexual, analytical, numbers-focused researcher, I would have fallen in love a third time.

We do not create characters with defying harmful stereotypes in mind. Rather, we create a person. As complex, flawed, and beautiful as people are in real life. Men who cry. Women who don’t need romance. Bisexuals that are not horny. Black characters that are kings. For us, we simply ask Who is this person? Where did they come from? What do they want? And How does that shape their personality?

So let’s honor some highlighted female characters from our books below. There are so many more that we can’t possibly feature them all! Monster-hunter Encarna, vampire tyrant Corentin, high priestess Maiathah, and much more. Happy International Women’s Day, and may you continue to showcase complex female characters in your own stories!

The Characters

Ruuda of Clan Drybarrel is a pragmatic, fierce, and no-nonsense dark dwarf. She dual-wields a sword of fire and a war hammer, named Liquor and Forge Breaker respectively. Ruuda loves animals, and would rather spend a night camping under the stars than in the finest tavern in the world. Her love of beer comes from her Clan, which have been brewers for generations. She is the youngest of 12 children and is used to speaking up to get her voice heard. Growing up in a caste system, Ruuda never received a Blessing from their god, the Forge King. This has left a bad taste in Ruuda’s mouth for all things religious and celestial in nature. She has sworn to find the Forge King and make him pay for not Blessing her.

Ruuda

Jade Galanodel is a wild elf druid that lives a nomadic life traveling Corventos. Connected with nature, she avoids cities if at all possible, and is highly judgmental of the urban way of life. She travels with her rescued pet fox, and follows the signs the spirits of nature give her. An accomplished herbalists and cartographer, she is a powerful spellcaster that stands up against injustice. So long as it happens outside of the city walls. Those people can keep their own problems. After losing her fiancé in battle, Jade searches for a new purpose in life. She may have just found one with the mysterious creature known as Rehanine that attempted to kill her in her home city of Oceala.

Jade

Jasita Yolarin is a high elf crystalmancer, researcher, and telepathic prodigy. Growing up in the beautiful capital city Eleste’si to historian parents, she was identified at a young age for her talent and taken to the prestigious Citadel. A place of magical study, law, and authority. Jasita did not fit in well with the other students. She found emotions confusing and relationships complicated. Facts and numbers interested her far more. Especially the study of ancient and forgotten elven history that involves dark elves. Jasita excels in everything she puts her mind to, so long as it has nothing to do with people, and is happiest with a book in her hands. Her life is shaken, however, when she encounters a dark elf that has runaway from his home.

Jasita

The Spool of Souls: Updates & News

The Spool of Souls – Thread of Souls News for March 2023

Hello again! Got some exciting news for the start of this month!

Book 5

The fifth book for our Thread of Souls series is in progress! The very first chapter was actually finished on Friday! It’s been a few weeks of finalizing the outline and creating a timeline for the book’s writing, editing, prepping, and release. We’re so excited to start this journey! This is a book big for us since we are starting the second half of the Spider Octology. As the months progress, we will definitely share more about the book with art, excerpts, and a title release.

Hardcovers

Finally, finally, hardcovers for Thread of Souls are a thing! The hardcover for Phantom Five just released. We got the proof in and are very happy with the results, it’s definitely a beautiful book! You can expect the hardcovers for Ash & Thunder, Path of the Spiders, and Asunder to all go live this month.

Art Commissions

Talia draws all the art for Thread of Souls, giving life to this world through cultural concepts, character designs, weapon designs, and more. We also plan to release a graphic novel in the future, and right now we’re both working hard on getting everything set up for that. If you like Talia’s art, she is offering commissions! Check out her DeviantArt page to learn more.


Thread of Souls, World Building & Lore

Thread of Souls Lore Feature- Who is the Holy Dragon?

The Holy Dragon, also known as Halathras, is one of Thread of Souls‘ dragon gods. As one of the Protector Gods, they are worshipped by those who follow honor, loyalty, and truth. They are commonly depicted as a large gold or platinum dragon who resides within a section of the Celestial Plane called the The Platinum Halls.

Significance in the world

The Holy Dragon, along with Iosis the Blight Dragon, created the first dragons in the world of Theretos. Through their creation, the dragons molded and shaped the land. During the Divine Wars, the time period where the gods fought one another on the Material Plane, the Holy Dragon battled the Blight Dragon on the Elemental Planes. Dragons took sides during the fight and in the end Halathras defeated Iosis.

After the Divine Wars came the construction of the Gate of the Gods. This barrier prevented gods from returning to the Material Plane, though they could still aid their followers through as needed. Halathras watches from their seat in The Platinum Halls, granting boons and powers to those who worship him.

Who follows the Holy Dragon?

The Holy Dragon is followed by valiant warriors, healers, paladins, and leaders. Those who worship the great platinum dragon agree to follow a creed to put all other before themselves. Paladins take up the following oath.

I devote my life to follow you, Holy Dragon.
In your example I will be honest, and keep my word in all
things.
I will protect others as though their life is greater than
mine.
I will show mercy to my foes, but punish those who do
evil.
I will obey those with just authority.
I will answer for my actions and ask forgiveness for any
wrong I have done.
And in all things I will be honorable.
May you guide my steps and my voice, so I may always
serve you justly.”

Thread of Souls Phantom Five

What is the Holy Dragon’s symbol?

The Holy Dragon’s symbol is a golden eye. Warriors and paladins carry a shield or armor depicting the eye while clerics and healers wear robes of white and gold.

Thread of Souls book depictions

Excerpts from Thread of Souls

Zok spun his hammer, taking out his shield that
was emblazoned with the golden eye of the Holy Dragon.
He readied his stance. “Round two.”’

Thread of Souls Phantom Five

He supposed he’d always been drawn to the things the Holy
Dragon valued. Kindness, honor, loyalty, honesty. Doing
good to others and helping out whenever one could. He
was in his early twenties when he swore his oath to the
Holy Dragon and became a paladin. And he felt his life
was fuller because of it.”

Thread of Souls Phantom Five

The Temple of the Holy Dragon was beautiful.
Settled on the coast, its gardens were immaculate and it
rose three stories tall, all white and gold. Stained glass
windows of blue reflected the sun.”

Thread of Souls Ash & Thunder

The Spool of Souls: Updates & News

Spool of Souls – News of February 2023

Happy February! A bit late on the draw this month, but we have our Spool of Souls monthly update on what we are currently working on, and our new releases.

Upcoming Book Releases

After a big delay due to an injury, we finally have a date in mind for the publication of the promised lore book “Jade’s Alphabet of Animals”! We’ll be sending it out to ARC readers in March, with publication in April. It will be our first picture book, and will give whimsical insight into lore for Thread of Souls. If you are interested in being on our early reader ARC team, please reach out!

Podcast

We’ve mentioned before that we will be launching a behind-the-scenes podcasts that talks about the creation of the books. That was supposed to launch this week, but we’ve had a few setbacks just with our own scheduling. Life gets hectic. We hope to have it going later this month, and it should be available the same place as our newly released soundtrack.

Merchandise

Our Corventos map blanket is here! It is so beautiful! We have that and many more items available in our Redbubble store. Our roadmap for the year is to release a new product each month, so keep on the lookout for them!

DeviantArt Subscriptions

If you are one who likes to support artists, we have recently opened up subscription tiers on DeviantArt. These include early access to art as well as once-a-month requests. If you haven’t visited our DeviantArt yet, check us out! That’s the main place for all Thread of Souls-related art, and we occasionally host contests, a well!

The Spool of Souls: Updates & News

The Official Thread of Souls Soundtrack

It’s an exciting day! Our Thread of Souls soundtrack is officially completed and live. This is volume 1 of what hopefully is multiple albums all exploring Thread of Souls through music. Our friend and composer, Sean Gartner, has truly created beautiful and moving music.

Our Composer

Sean Gartner has been a part of Thread of Souls for a long time. He was one of our original players at the table when we started this TTRPG back in 2015. Even though he moved away in 2016 and wasn’t able to play anymore, we’ve always kept in touch. He has read the books multiple times, and was so inspired by these stories that he wanted to compose music for them. We had a chat through video call about our vision for a soundtrack for the books and for all things TOS, and was so happy he was on board! As you can tell from the songs, he is extremely talented! He’s also just a fantastic man all around, a loyal friend, and has a super kind heart. We cannot be happier to have him create this music.

What Songs Are There?

We have 14 tracks on this first album. If you have tuned into our Twitch livestream, you’ve heard Lively Tavern during our breaks! Jade has her own theme, we have Into The Gloomdwell from Path of the Spiders, The Utterer from the exciting battle in the same book, and much more!

Where To Find the Soundtrack

There are so many places you can listen to and/or download the songs! These are:

  • Spotify
  • Apple itunes
  • Amazon Music
  • 24-7
  • 7digital
  • adaptr
  • anghami
  • AWA
  • Ayoba
  • Boomplay
  • Hungama
  • iHeartRadio
  • iMusica
  • InProdicon
  • JOOX
  • KDigital
  • KKBox
  • kuack
  • Line Music
  • MediaNet
  • Napster
  • NetEase Cloud Music
  • pandora
  • Peloton
  • qobuz
  • resso
  • Saavn
  • Shazam
  • Slacker Radio
  • SoundExchange
  • TME
  • Tidal
  • TikTok
  • YouTube Music
us
The Spool of Souls: Updates & News

Thread of Souls – The Year Ahead

There is plenty to talk about here! We wrapped up 2022 with a meeting reviewing the past and planning the future of Thread of Souls. Here is what you have to look forward to over the coming year as we focus on making you laugh, and giving you moving stories with impactful characters.

The Books

Next month we will release the hardcover versions of all available Thread of Souls books! We also will be having two publications this year, which is the first time we’ve done so. After many delays due to injury, Jade’s Alphabet of Animals is finally coming in April! We also will have the release of the fifth book in the Thread of Souls series at the end of this year.

We’ve had questions about when audiobooks will be released. We had to pivot our expectations after the person we hired dropped off contact. So now Dorian will be doing the audiobooks! He has experience in voice acting as well as training, and we’re really excited to bring these to you. We don’t have a solid date yet, but it will be this year.

books

Merchandise

We have a lineup of new merchandise concepts to release across the year. We’ll be releasing one new item each month, and we have a lot of really fun ones that fans of the books will appreciate! We’re still working with Redbubble, and currently you can get a lot of merchandise with our logo on it.

New Ventures

We’re taking Thread of Souls down some new avenues this year. We are going to Twitch! We actually have had a couple of streams already, and by the end of January we will be streaming 35 hours a week, 6 days a week. This will include video games, board games, and a “behind the scenes” series.

We are also launching an official Thread of Souls soundtrack. Our friend and composer Sean Gartner has done 14 tracks for us so far, and we’re eager to finally make them available for all of you to listen to! These will be up most anywhere you can listen to music.

We’ll also have a podcast up each week starting in February. This will be the audio recording of our “behind the scenes” series that will be live on Twitch.


We are so excited for this new year and all the things happening! It is only the two of us doing all this, we don’t have a team and we don’t have a large fortune backing us. So you following us on this website and social media, joining our patreon, donating, or support in any way means the world to us and enables us to continue to do this. Thank you!


holiday
The Spool of Souls: Updates & News

Thread of Souls Holiday Gift Guide!

We are definitely cutting it close to the end of the holidays for this holiday gift guide, haha! It’s been quite the hectic time with food poisoning, being laid off, having to move, launching a new book, etc, etc. But! We are happy to highlight some fun gifts from the world of Thread of Souls!

New Books!

Yes! We have not only new covers, but also a brand new book! The fourth book in the series, Asunder, just launched and it already has two 5-star reviews! You can find all the books on Amazon, and the first three are currently available via Barnes and Noble’s online store. If you are short on time, ebooks make a great holiday gift!

New Merchandise!

We’ve got a completely re-done shop with lots of new merch in it! There are shirts, hoodies, dresses, magnets, pins, stickers, journals, bags, mugs, bottles, and more! All of it has our Thread of Souls logo on it.

merch

Gifts for D&D Players

Another great holiday gift if you are short on time is an item from our Dungeon Master’s Guild shop! There are subclasses, new spells, short adventures, downtime activities, and much more! These are all excellent gifts for the player or GM in your life!

Art Prints

We do offer a variety of art prints through DeviantArt. You can check them out here if you’re interested in showcasing characters from Thread of Souls. This is also a nice last-minute gift since you can just print the photo to let the recipient know the art is on its way to them!

yule log

Merry Winter’s Eve to one and all!


Jasita
Lore

Character Feature: Jasita

Jasita is this month’s character feature! Jasita is a crystalmancer and researcher at the prestigious Citadel. Analytical and fact-based, she finds emotion-centric people both fascinating and frustrating. Life is an experiment, and she is always gathering facts and conducting research. 

Jasita is good at being alone. An only child to absent parents and a young enchantment prodigy at the Citadel, Jasita has trouble in social situations. But she is intellectual, curious, and will happily study her way into exhaustion if it means learning a new spell. Many people don’t like her reading their mind without permission, and it easily puts her at odds with those who could otherwise be her friends.

Jasita

We first meet Jasita at the end of Phantom Five, apprehending Taliesin and Ruuda for being fugitives on the Surface, though they later escape. She makes a big return in Asunder when our heroes find their way to the Citadel. She realizes this is her opportunity to redeem herself before one of the most powerful people in all of Corventos, her boss, the Magistrate of the Citadel.


The Spool of Souls: Updates & News, Thread of Souls

Thread of Souls – December 2022 News!

It’s certainly been a crazy December for us here at Thread of Souls. Among us being super ill over Thanksgiving, being laid off, and moving, we managed to get through a lot and we’re here to share it all!

Thread of Souls Book IV: Asunder

Asunder is here! The fourth book in the Thread of Souls series was a complete wonder to work on. We remember playing through it vividly in our home TTRPG game and loved bringing each and every seen to life on pages. A lot of memories were formed when playing it at the table and we can’t wait to share it with all of you!

Asunder Trailer

Dorian has been hard at work with the trailer for Asunder. Using Talia’s amazing art, the official trailer was launched on December 7. You can check it out below.

New Music

Our composer friend, Sean, continues to supply us with fantastical music for Thread of Souls. The latest tracks are titled Jade’s Theme, Into the Gloomdwell, and Fate. While we’re keeping two secret for now, Fate can be heard in the trailer. It’s simply amazing.

Thread of Souls Merchandise

You want a T-shirt or phone case? Perhaps a pillow or nifty hat? Well, we’ve got the merch for you! Check out our new line of merchandise on Redbubble.

Updated Logo

A small yet big update for us is our logo. Our logo is now black and white. For the first eight books, it will include The Spider Octology but that will change with future storylines.

Misc Posts, The Spool of Souls: Updates & News

Asunder: Behind the Scenes of Book IV

It’s an exciting time! The fourth book in our Thread of Souls series, Asunder, is launching next week on December 15th! As we prepare for this final leg of publication, we’d love to share what’s been going on behind the scenes with the book.

Finalizing the Cover

We recently unveiled the cover for Asunder! We worked closely with our artist, Vivien Reis, to ensure it captured the mood and setting of the book. We are super, super happy with how it turned out! To help our artist out, we provided her with a lot of images seen in the recently released book trailer as well as some of the promotional artwork we’ve been using.

Asunder

The Summary

We also finalized the book’s back cover summary, going through various revisions until we were happy with it. The biggest hurdle we had to overcome was deciding which major character to feature on the back cover. We had Brother Zok for Phantom Five, Unole for Ash & Thunder, and Taliesin for Path of the Spiders. It was Dorian that had the idea we went with! The official summary will be unveiled this weekend across all social media!

Ordering an Asunder Proof

We are awaiting a final proof from Amazon to ensure it all looks exactly how we want it to! That consisted of formatting the book and dealing with all the annoyances that come along with that haha! It can be a two-day process of copying over the text, ensuring all chapter headings are formatted the same, adjusting picture ratios, fixing any lingering spaces between paragraphs, and even adjusting the margins. I ran into a problem with the page numbers being too low and it took me longer than it should have to realize what the problem was and how to fix it haha.

The Book Trailer

After a few months of work, the trailer is done! I drew all the art, Dorian animated, and we used a song our friend composed. Earlier this year we were for sure going to do the trailer, but then in the summer things got really busy and we abandoned the idea. But in October we decided to do it once again and we’re so glad we did! It turned out super cool haha. I drew the art on multiple layers and sent them over individually to Dorian, who used his magic to give them 3D-esque effects and make them move and glow.

A Difficult Time

As some of you know, it’s been a really crazy time for us. We were launching Asunder just a month after doing major updates to the first three books in terms of covers, the map’s format, and some other interior details. It also happened to be at the same time we both got laid off from our full-time jobs, then we got food poisoning, then we were moving, and then I re-tore my abdominal muscle (that I originally injured in 2018, and injured again in 2021). Throughout all this, we’ve tried to continue to put effort into our passion for Thread of Souls and what it means to us, and to our readers.

Thank you for your continued support of Thead of Souls! I hope you enjoy Asunder when it launches on Amazon on December 15th!