“Evermore was not created by gods—it was born from their mistakes.”
— Echoes of Despair
Where the Map Ends and the Story Begins
Every world starts as a sketch.
A mountain here. A river there. A few names scribbled across an old notebook while the coffee goes cold beside you.
But Evermore wasn’t like that. It didn’t come to me as a map. It came as a wound.
I didn’t design a place for my characters to live. I built a place where they would be forced to confront themselves—where every crumbling wall, every whispering wind, every fragment of light carried memory and consequence.
Evermore is the reflection of the human mind when it’s tired of pretending.
It’s the realm that forms after loss, after truth, after the world you know has already burned.
It is, in every way, the anatomy of a broken world.
Excerpt from Echoes of Despair
“The sky cracked—not with thunder, but with memory. A thousand voices, once silenced, trembled in the air. The mountains wept molten gold, and the rivers carried echoes instead of water. This was Evermore—where time went to die.”
The Fractured Symmetry of Creation
I think, deep down, every author builds their own Evermore.
Mine just happened to be literal.
I wanted a world that didn’t play by the same rules as ours.
A world where time fractured, where grief lingered like smoke, and where the remnants of the divine rotted alongside the mortals who once worshiped them.
Evermore’s geography is emotional, not logical.
Mountains rise out of memory. Rivers bend around regret. Forests bloom where guilt takes root.
The longer I wrote it, the more I realized—it wasn’t just Xander walking those shattered plains. It was every part of me that I’d buried beneath responsibility and silence.
Writing Evermore was like dissecting my own soul and finding that it had its own weather system.
The Gods That Fell First
When I began outlining the lore of Evermore, I didn’t want gods who were untouchable or flawless.
I wanted gods who bled.
The divinities of Evermore—those few that remain—are creatures of habit and hubris. They are reflections of what happens when power outlives purpose. Their temples are tombs, and their prayers are unanswered because they no longer remember how to listen.
Evermore is what happens when faith decays but memory doesn’t.
It’s what remains when the gods die but the belief in them refuses to.
It’s a world haunted by its creators—and by the mortals still trying to understand why they were abandoned.
The Physics of Emotion
I’ve always believed that worlds should have rules.
Even the broken ones.
In Evermore, time doesn’t flow—it circles.
Dreams aren’t illusions—they’re warnings.
Death isn’t final—it’s a doorway that sometimes forgets to close.
Every rule came from an emotion I didn’t have the words for at the time.
Grief became gravity.
Hope became decay.
Memory became the cruelest form of immortality.
And at the center of it all stands Xander Angel—a man trying to rewrite the rules not with magic, but with meaning.
Because Evermore doesn’t respond to strength. It responds to conviction.
Excerpt from Echoes of Despair
“He stood on the edge of the world and saw it bleeding into itself. A loop of pain and promise. Evermore was alive—and it was hungry.”
Why Broken Worlds Matter
When readers ask why I make my worlds so bleak, I tell them the truth: because beauty doesn’t mean anything without the cracks.
Evermore had to be broken because so was Xander.
Because so was I.
There’s a strange comfort in creating something that mirrors your own fractures. You start to see that imperfection isn’t failure—it’s proof of survival.
Every ruined temple in Evermore, every fractured sky, every dying flame was a reminder that destruction can be sacred if you learn from it.
The pain wasn’t the story. The rebuilding was.
The Echo That Never Ends
Evermore isn’t just a setting. It’s a mirror.
Every reader who walks through it brings their own ghosts along.
Maybe that’s why I love it so much—it’s alive in a way most worlds aren’t.
It changes depending on who looks at it.
Some see hope in its ruins.
Some see a warning.
Some just see themselves, staring back from the dark.
That’s the real secret of world-building. You’re not creating something new—you’re revealing what’s already inside you and daring others to step inside it.
Pull Quote
“Evermore was never meant to be beautiful. It was meant to be honest.”
From the Author’s Desk
Evermore is my confession written in landscapes.
Every scar on its surface is one I’ve carried.
When I close my eyes, I can still hear the wind in its dead forests—the sound of promises that never learned how to die.
In Echoes of Future Past, we return there. But this time, the world remembers Xander too.
And the past? It’s waiting for him.
— Brandon Fragale
Author of the Echoes Saga
Next in the Series
Up Next: “The Peacemaker’s Flame: What Drives Xander Angel”
The anatomy of resolve. The burning core that turns grief into purpose—and a father into something more than human.