“Rayth” the Name

“Rayth” the Name

In my first edition of “Fun Facts about Expedition: Andromeda,” I thought I’d give you a little background on where I came up with the term “Rayth” to define the race of hybrid human and Rayk beings.

It was actually a long process. At the beginning of the story, I refer to the hybrids as Nix and was going to keep that. But as I got several hundred pages into the story, I grew to hate the term. They are, after all, not half-fish. And I hate fish.

I had already decided that the ancient human race would be called “Mythicans.” They were one half of the beings from which the Nix/Rayth were derived. I had also settled on the word “Rayk” as the evil race that the Mythicans were fighting to the brink of their own extinction and thus pushed their scientists to create this hybrid of humans and Rayk to fight the Rayk.

Zy’nayth, of course, is my leading male protagonist (though the story is more from/about Victoria’s point of view). His name was there from day one. I love anything with the letter “z” in it and I loved his name. It wasn’t going anywhere.

So I took out a piece of paper and began listing all types of combinations of words: human, Rayk, Mythican, etc. I agonized over this for months, especially when I decided to start posting the story on my blog. I had to have it finalized before I went through editing two million words (this was supposed to be a “short” story).

Then it hit me.

“Ray” from “Rayk” and “yth” from “Mythican.” It was staring me in the face all along.

It also worked well with “Zy’nayth” since the “ayth” was common with his race name and he’s one of the last remaining fullblood Rayth in existence when the story starts.

I also had written (before deciding on “Rayth”) that “nayth” in the Raythian language meant “warrior.” And since Rayth were created to be warriors, and Zy’nayth was even further genetically modified to be the perfect warrior. Thus we have the “ayth” carried through from the race to the name to the term for warrior. It seemed to work perfectly.