First Sentences: God of the Dark Chapter 1

To lead up to the release of God of the Dark, I am posting the first sentences of each chapter, with a little bit of insight.

Chapter 1:  Adrastea descended into the dark.

It took me years before I could come up with a first line to Chapter One that I liked. When I first started writing Of The Dark waay back when, I focused mostly on the adventure of the storyline. Later, as I matured as an author, I started playing with themes. The most blatant one is the question about what it means to be Dark. While I like my metaphors to be more subtle than this, I couldn't resist peppering the opening scene with a few of them. (I also like the opening of the first scene because it satisfies the Bechdel-Wallace test.)

Here we have Our Heroine literally descending into a dark cellar to investigate something. She can't take an incendiary light source, due to the nature of the problem she's investigating. Instead, she must rely on other senses.

Darkness has a way of obscuring or hiding things.  Darkness can also be seen as an absence or a vacuum, one that sometimes begs to be filled. In this first scene, she literally descends into a dark cellar and then must find a way to thwart the darkness and allow herself to solve the problem she came to solve. By the end of chapter one, she is confronted with Darkness itself and is thrust into a situation with a difficult choice.

Often we are faced with choices that seem difficult not because they are morally ambiguous--they may be quite blatant in right or wrong--but because of what we must endure to stand by our choices.