Back around March of 2002 I had the great privilege and adventure of getting what is known in fan fiction circles as "a plot bunny." I ran through Final Fantasy X in about 45 hours over two or so days and became hooked on the character of Auron. He intrigued me, as did the history of the world of Spira. I began having some rather strange and vivid dreams where Auron would show up and tell me things about his life. To say I found it disconcerting would be to put it mildly.

I was sure that either Square or someone else had already created a comprehensive and believable backstory for this man. I got online and went searching, mostly to shut Auron up so I could get a good night's sleep. I hunted down some pretty obscure stuff on Japanese websites. I had the Japanese game guides shipped to me and checked through them. I surfed loads of links. While there was plenty of good fiction in the FFX fandom, there simply wasn't, at that time, anything I would have called a complete history of Auron's life.

So I caved. I started writing.

Though I had participated in fandom, attended cons, and lurked in online communities off and on for a good fifteen years, I had never written for fandom prior to Legendary Guardian. And, while I graduated from college with a degree in English Literature, I had not used that degree in at least six years (nor had I been required to take any kind of fiction writing class in order to graduate). I created an outline for the story that looked like it would be about 35 chapters, sat down with my references, and rolled up my sleeves.

Over the course of about three months I managed to write 150,000 words and posted them here (136,000 of them in Legendary Guardian alone). I met a lot of very nice people and polished some very rusty grammar skills. Since then I have moved on to other writing projects in other fandoms as well as original works, the first of which is tentatively due to be published as a manga in Japan in 2007.

Around March of 2003 I no longer felt that Legendary Guardian was anything more than a very rough draft. It was my opinion that it had distinct flaws, the least of which were some serious typo mistakes and annoying grammar problems (not to mention POV shifts that would make any professional writer blush). In hopes of reworking and expanding the story from 74 chapters to three full-length novels, I took down Legendary Guardian and archived the original away for later work.

I have begun the first part of that long journey.

The original 74 chapters of Legendary Guardian are now undergoing the first rough edit stage. This means that I am hoping to fix the basic grammar flaws within the text, catch the more blatant of the typos, and to make personal notes to myself with regard to where I need to expand portions of the text for plot and characterization purposes. Some of the original chapters will be removed completely. Some will change POV for consistency. A few details might be tightened up to reflect additional canon information about Spira offered when X-2 was issued.

Because I continue to receive reviews and email asking when I will repost this work and/or to send a zip file of the original .html documents to fans, I have decided to repost this first rough edit here in addition to my writing LJ (where I now post the majority of my fan fiction). This will, by no means, be the end of my work on Legendary Guardian . Once this first rough edit is complete and my list of additions is ready I will return to the text for the next round of changes (which will change LG into three books of about 130,000 words each). It's a lot of writing and a labor of love. I don't know if I'll manage to get it done, but I plan to finish the first rough edit of LG by the end of 2006 and here it will remain.

Important Notes and Disclaimers:
The game Final Fantasy X and characters contained within that game are the copyrighted property of SquareEinx (Formerly SquareSoft July of 2001). Executive producer for the project was Hironobu Sakaguchi. Scenario writer was Kazushige Nojima. Producer was Yoshinori Kitase and the game directors included Motomu Toriyama, Takayshoshi Nakazato and Toshiro Tsuchida. Art design was directed by Tetsuya Nomura. Digicube produced the Japanese language game guides and Brady Games produced the US language game guides from which I have taken additional information not available during game play. I owe a great debt to all of these individuals for creating such an inspirational world and characters with which to spread my wings.

All characters not directly encountered within the game mentioned within this work are original and my own creations (IE: OCs) and copyrights to these characters are reserved (circa May 2002).

Now, on with the show.