Bringing in a Jack (Patreon)

If you want to know what Jack Fyrebeard looks like, imagine your well dressed dandy of a pirate who is lean and quick. Jack Sparrow fits this stereotype, but he wasn't the inspiration for Fyrebeard. But if we start with sparrow, replace the hair and beard with bright red hair ablaze with flames, and bring his gear up a few notches in quality, then you have an idea of how this god looks in my head. And he smiles. He smiles all the time.

He smiles because he's a trickster and a con-man, a rogue, and maybe a hero. He's a Jack. And that's his real inspiration. He fits into the stories the way Jacks fit into fairy tails. Not alwys good, not always bad. Jack the giant killer. Jack who tamed fire by leaping over it. Jack who lured innocent Jill up the hill and lost his crown. Jack Frost, who shows up too early for farmers to ever like him. He's a carpenter who builds crazy houses and an innocent boy caught with his thumb in the pie.

My favorite contempory Jacks are in the books Jack the Giant Killer by Charled De Lint. One of the early urban fantasy stories. And of course the Fables comic book series where we see the character of a man named Jack who was the inspiration for all of the other Jack stories.

So who is Jack Fyrebeard and why is his name spelled with a Y? I made a decision early on to differentiate Fyre and Skye, which are elemental planes from the more mundain sky and fire. When it came to Jack's last name I went back and forth, and finally stayed consistent. He's linked a bit to Fyre, so he got the Y.

Jack is a coin with two faces. One one side he's the Burning Man, the God of Angry Warriors who fight kraken with harpons or leap across to an enemy ship in a berserk rage. The Burning Man also deals with the dead. He catches their souls as they sink in the smoke, and only lets the worst fall into the fire. The others he gives to Old Smoke who breaths a bit of life back into them, and puts them on a ship that will take them back to the living.

But Jack is also a mischievious rogue who doesn't want the responsibility and runs off to cause trouble and 'fix' problems. Some problems are caused when Jack is off playing and doesn't take care of his main buisiness.

He has a really BIG problem right now, and is twisting the strands of fate a bit.