In this unassuming clumsily-restored medieval hall lie the deepest roots of Valdyas.

My first time in Ghent was in the early nineteen-eighties with someone I was in love with. We played tourist for a few days on a cheap Dutch Railways city trip and ended up, as tourists will, at the Gravensteen. Being interested in history and romantically inclined, we played at being Burgundian nobles. This grew into an ongoing, or at least recurrent, sort of live roleplaying in an alternate fifteenth century with psychic powers and a strong good-versus-evil theme.

Then in the mid-1980s we broke up, mostly because I wanted for-better-or-worse and the other party wanted only the good parts, with a side order of assumption clash.

I was down in the dumps, of course. Someone at folk-dancing who had just gone through a bad breakup herself took pity on me and said “you need a break, and I’d like one too, let’s go somewhere for a weekend”. The place we ended up was… Ghent. Not on purpose to wean me of it, but because she’d been wanting to go there forever and knew of a really cheap hotel. (I could write a whole blog post about that hotel alone, but I’ll pass.)

We went to a lot of different places and a lot of the same places; much of it hurt, but because I was with someone I had no romantic interest in but who was just a friend I was having fun with, it was possible to pull the sting out of it. When I was standing in the same spot of the Gravensteen, pulling that particular sting, I thought “but that’s too good to throw away!” and it set me thinking, and gradually —combined with another world-in-my-head that was lying in shards, this one because the person I’d been making it with had died— something grew out of it that was the beginning of Valdyas.

This time around, more than twenty years later, none of it hurt or embarrassed me, though some of it made me wistful. And it was very good to show my other half, who has known Valdyas almost from the beginning, the place where it started.