Nipetaw: Blood of the Fifth Sun

Riding the Rails to 1519

I’m a hobo riding the freight train of literature, hopping boxcars between the worlds I build, chasing stories wherever the rails decide to run.

Sometimes the train takes me through Kentucky farmland.
Sometimes into dark forests.
This time it carried me to 1519.

I didn’t plan to go there.

But I kept seeing it.

Stone rising from water.
Drums in the distance.
A city under a sun the people believed was the fifth and final one.

When I step into a new world, I don’t step in loud. I sit quiet first. I watch. I listen. I let the people who lived there breathe before I start moving anything around.

So I started reading.

I studied the rise of the Mexica. I traced the fall of Tenochtitlan. I read Spanish accounts. Indigenous codices. Timelines. Trade routes. Political structures. Religion. The weight of belief in a world built on ritual and order.

I didn’t want spectacle.

I wanted to understand.

Because when you write about a civilization that once held millions of lives inside its stone walls, you don’t get to be careless. You don’t get to treat it like scenery.

You sit in the dust awhile.

You walk the causeways in your imagination.

You stand in the shadow of the Templo Mayor and feel how small you are.

That’s where Nipetaw began.

Not with a virus.

Not with blood.

But with a question.

What if history named the wrong killer?

The more I researched the conquest, the more I realized something important: people living in 1519 didn’t understand pathogens. They understood omens. They understood punishment. They understood fear.

And fear spreads faster than any sickness.

From there the rails kept running.

A priest who believes he is serving the gods.
A ruler unraveling under grief.
A seer who warns but is misunderstood.
A laborer who carries the weight of decisions he never made.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t just a historical setting.

It was a tragedy.

And tragedies require care.

So I mapped the timeline. I sketched the social hierarchy. I traced indigenous trade routes. I studied the geography around the Valley of Mexico. I looked at limestone cave systems. I asked hard questions about disease transmission, burial practices, and how oral legend survives generations.

The freight train doesn’t move fast when you’re laying track ahead of it.

You stop at small towns.
You ask questions.
You double back.
You throw out ideas that don’t hold.

That’s the work most readers never see.

Planning.

Outlining.

Re-outlining.

Building character sheets.

Letting the world breathe long before the first line of dialogue is written.

And somewhere in that process, I stopped being a visitor in 1519.

I started feeling like I was walking beside them.

That’s when I knew the story was ready.

Nipetaw: Blood of the Fifth Sun isn’t just about conquest.

It’s about belief.
It’s about responsibility.
It’s about the cost of disturbing what should remain buried.

And like any good freight train ride, I don’t entirely know where all the rails will lead yet.

I just know I’m on board.

— Gary Bowman