One man's journey to save his soul.
The evil overlord Jarol Thriggo is overthrown after two millennia of tyrannical rule, and is cast into the afterlife. But as punishment for his wrong-doings, he is refused entry into The Garden, where he might have found peace eternally. In an effort to save his soul from The Shadow which awaits him, he strikes a bargain and is sent back as a body without a soul to wander the worlds in search of salvation, a salvation which canonly be reached if he fulfills one task...
On every world in the cosmos, unseen by the living, are the Doorways built by an ancient power, and used to travel between the very worlds themselves. If the man he has become can find that one that leads him back to The Garden, he may enter the afterlife and be forgiven.
Haunted by the ghosts of his past, trapped inside his decaying body, and pursued by a force of unimaginable malevolence, Jaro has only a limited time to find the Doorway before his body crumbles and he is forever lost in darkness.
This book's origins go back many years with several simple concepts.
The first one was perhaps the simplest of all: I wanted to write a piece in which the protagonist was the bad guy. They always made for more interesting characters anyway, and usually got less page time (or screen time) than the hero. That was the first idea. The second was to have my protagonist die on page one and go from there (without it being a flashback). I knew he wasn't going to be a ghost though, so instead I flipped that around to write about a body with no soul instead of a soul with no body.
I remember sitting holding one of the game pieces from board game Heroquest I used to play with my friends and looking it over and getting more ideas. It was the zombie character, and I remember thinking I could add that into my growing melting pot nad have my anti-hero slowly become little more than a zombie. I was interested in doing things the opposite of how they'd normally be done. And that's how Jarol Thriggo was born.
From there I meticulously planned out my story and set about the long process of writing it. It took far longer than I would ever have thought (going into years if you include do-overs and fix-ups) but here it is nonetheless.