Fayanora: The Djao'Mor'Terra Collective

It took me all night, but I started and finished that prologue chapter with the Dwarves in it, though they're not the main focus of the chapter.

Only thing left to do is actually describe the Dwarves, somehow, given the only scenes they're in are both in darkness. They were briefly described back in book 2, but this prologue is for book 8. I wouldn't expect anyone to remember a vague, one-sentence description of a character with no lines that was simply passing by in that scene after six books, after all. And even if I did, I want to build on that description.

Maybe I can have one of the crowd that gathers be a Dwarf with anti-daylight goggles on. Yeah, I like that. Then we can get a good look at one in the light of the sunrise.

"Good morning and welcome back to 103.3 MM 'The Wand', your number one magical radio station covering the Portland metro area. I'm your host, Joshua Alderman; and in case you missed it, our special guest today is Doctor Aldric Johannessen, world-renowned expert in faery sociology.

"Earlier in our broadcast, Dr. Johannessen was telling us all about the various faery species who have been gracing Fae Springs these last few years, with special attention on the Fir Baite and Fir Ghobhar, since two of the new kids this year are outcasts from Fomor. But if you missed that, I'm so sorry to inform you we're doing general faery questions now. If you want to hear what you missed, you'll have to download the podcast version from our website, which is available for free at GTN://www.1033MMTheWand.com/podcast.html

"And with that out of the way, we can get ready to take your calls. Are you ready, Dr. Johannessen?"

"Yes, that I am," said a man with a low and soothing voice.

"Excellent. So let's hear from our callers." (click) "Hello there, you're first. Name and question?"

"Hi Joshua, I'm Ethel. Long time listener, occasional caller.”

“Welcome back, Ethel. What’s your question for the good doctor?”

“Well, I'm calling because I was in the Goblin Market last Saturday, and there was an incident with a Gremlin chasing some Goblins around with an iron skillet nearly as big as she was. I'm still confused about that. I thought faeries are allergic to iron? But the security that handled the situation didn't seem surprised by any of this. Can you explain?"

( Answer under the cut, as it's rather lengthy. )

Came across this video about a post claiming there were no female authors before J. K. Rowling, and the resulting thread providing SO many examples of how wrong that claim is. Like to the point that science fiction, fantasy, and novels in general wouldn't exist without female authors. Also, a female author started the trend of letting children have books that are more than stories to convey morals.

My contribution to the comments:

Rowling wasn't even the first female author to write a series about a young child going to a school of witchcraft with an eccentric headmaster and a stern and irascible potions teacher, featuring a horrible, blond, wealthy, stuck-up antagonist student as the protagonist's foil.

She basically plagiarized "The Worst Witch" series by Jill Murphy, gender-bent a bunch of the most prominent characters (Miss Cackle into Dumbledore, Miss Hardbroom into Severus Snape, Ethel Hallow into Draco Malfoy, and Mildred Hubble into Neville Longbottom), turned the original protagonist Mildred Hubble (gender-bent) into a side character, and spliced in a plot about wizard Nazis while replacing the much more interesting Mildred Hubble with a British children's fiction cliche character of "the poor unlucky orphan." All while being racist, transphobic, whatever you call being racist against the Irish, antisemitic, ultimately making the statement of "slavery is actually good mmkay," and being a bad writer with plot holes you could pilot a 747 through with plenty of room to spare.

I need to think of a good slang term for something in the witch world. The something in question is... how to explain this... when shadow-walking¹ (teleportation), what the magic is doing is you hide your body so the magic can force your whole body into a macroscopic quantum superposition, so it's technically quantum teleportation on a macro scale; the concealment is to prevent the observer effect from interfering.² And in very rare instances, sometimes the superposition collapses in a way that the person ceases to exist. I haven't decided yet if that's an actual thing or just exceptionally rare, but either way it's something some witches use to excuse why they don't shadow-walk... they don't want to cease to exist or end up somewhere they can't get back from. That phenomenon, real or not in-world, is what I need a slang term for.

Or at least that's what their best scientists think the magic is doing. Whether they're right or not... I dunno. But I treat it as though it's accurate until I decide otherwise.

The assumption with the phenomenon I need a term for is that either the shadow-walking person couldn't muster enough Will to reappear at their destination while still mustering enough to vanish, or that something else sees them in the stream and snatches them away in the middle of the trip. Which, given the existence in-universe of Shadow People, that isn't an impossibility.

The truth is that, whether it happens at all or not, it would be exceptionally rare regardless, because it takes a LOT of magic to cause something to go into the superposition state to begin with, and the matter "wants" to exist; whether it exists in point A or point B is irrelevant... if the process is interrupted, there's a LOT of weight to existence, so any chance of the matter not existing is so tiny that for all practical purposes, it's zero. But the phenomenon still needs a name because some people are scared of it and so they would still call it something.

The only real evidence for it being real in-world, and not just an urban legend, is the fact that if your thoughts wander when you shadow-walk, there's a possibility you can end up somewhere other than your destination. In the chapter I'm working on, Vedya experiences this first-hand by reappearing near Dalia instead of where she was trying to go, because she had been thinking about Dalia at the last second.


1 = Shadow-walking/light-walking/mist-walking, and also (sort of) with Blinking. Blinking, while it's mistaken for super-fast shadow-walking, is slightly different from shadow-walking, as there's no real concealment. The person literally vanishes in the blink of an eye; the Blinking tattoo speeds up their perception so they can do it at all, and forces observers to blink their eyes when the user is about to vanish.

2 = Yes I am aware that the person teleporting would be an observer, and also it is possible to bring other people along while shadow-walking (but not with Blinking), adding another observer. But the concealment process blinds the observers temporarily. Yes yes, I know, I know, but it works anyway Because Magic.

Been thinking of creatures that live in the forest of Tirffiniol, not just from folklore but just coming up with ideas, mainly for an upcoming scene in book 7. Deer sized or smaller, magical or mundane, but preferably things that would be terrifying yet mostly harmless. The scene I have in mind is going to be a mostly safe but scary adventure in some woods at night with wards that keep out anything too dangerous to be around kids, with a preliminary scene of the same area of the woods during the daytime for them to see animals that won't scare them off from going in at night.

While some animals there are related to Earth animals by way of Earth animals occasionally falling through the Veil into Tirffiniol and using the high magic there to evolve in many interesting ways, most species there are not related to Earth animals. But they may look like Earth animals or something that could exist on Earth, via convergent evolution.

Even if you can't think of anything specific, I love hearing ideas because then the ideas mix in my brain and give me amazing ideas like some recent ones: carnivorous deer the size of cats that climb trees, something resembling a cross between a monkey and an owl, and spider-like things the size of pomelos.

Also feel free to draw from stories you know of various cryptids, small humanoid creatures, and anything spooky you can think of, especially as doing so might jog my memory of similar stories.

Oh, I also want to note this is in the part of Tirffiniol you can only get to by portalling in from Earth in the pacific northwest region, so I'm shying away from cryptids and mythological beings from places other than North America unless they resemble something we have in North America such as how a peryton is a winged deer (and also I have griffins of various sizes), and also selecting for roughly the same sort of ecosystem/climate/landscape as the Pacific Northwest, IE mostly forested, hilly and interspersed with mountains and buttes, and has a wet season; just a little bit drier and interspersed with fields of what looks like grass but only looks that way because of convergent evolution. (These "grass" fields are big enough that massive, elephant-sized unicorns graze in these fields, only going through the wooded areas to get to more grazing areas. But Fae Springs is on top of a cliff on the other side of a ravine from most of these grassy areas, and leans more towards the forested side.)

But that's more for me to worry about. Just hit me up with ideas if you feel like it.

This is an interesting YouTube video (only a minute long) that talks about ways to have disability in a D&D setting, but could be adapted to other fantasy settings.

A comment I left there:

Another way to do it is with the mechanic of "curses that cause damage that can't be fixed." In my main fantasy series, in addition to magic being unable to fix congenital issues, some curses and even some kinds of magic cause damage that cannot be fixed even after the curse is dispelled.

There is also a condition called "magic burn" that is basically "too much magic use over too short a period of time can cause something like radiation burns." Especially with combat magic. This condition, if not treated in time, can do anything from causing lesions on the skin, to nerve damage, muscle damage, or even death. How easy it is to get magic burn depends on your skill level and giving your body time to work up to a certain level. That is, even if you learned how to do an advanced spell very early on, using it or just using it too much can be deadly at a low level even if it's not deadly at a higher level, because the higher level mages have had longer to adapt their bodies to the higher magic amounts. And if you get magic burn, the treatment involves removing the magic from your body to stop making the damage worse. Yes, some of the damage can be fixed with healing magic later once your body has had a bit of time to recover, but sometimes the damage is too extensive to fix. Especially if performing too difficult of a healing spell was the cause of the magic burn, then more healing magic would just make things worse.

Also there's "magical exhaustion," when your use of magic has exhausted you physically and/or mentally enough to hurt you. It's a lot harder to die of this condition, but not impossible.

Another thing I use is that magic can't fix delicate structures like eyes and the inner ear, or else any fixes done to those parts is limited, or the magical surgery to fix it is super expensive because the number of people with the skills to effectively do such delicate work are few and far between. This is how I justify having deaf people in my fantasy setting. Well, that and some people are born deaf, and again, magic in that world can't fix congenital issues. (Well technically it can, but it takes years of regular sessions and is super expensive unless you've got a friend willing and able to do it for free. The skills to do so are not common, though.)

~ End comment ~

Obviously I was talking about my Ravenstone series. This gets mentioned as early as like, the first or second chapter of book one, after someone sees baby Dalia with her congenitally missing left foot. Her parents mention it could be "fixed," and they know someone who would do it for them for free, but the process takes so long that she would already be used to functioning without it before any changes would be able to manifest.

I will also add that while it is sometimes doable and relatively easy to regrow a lost limb, the process of losing a limb you previously had (if no curses were involved) takes between a few days and a few weeks. This is because, while it is technically possible to do it in less than an hour, the process is tortuously painful if done too quickly, and some people have even died from the stress of it. So it gets done slowly when possible, to make the pain more bearable. Also, on Earth the level of magic available for witch use varies by location and by who is in the area... some people's bodies generate a lot of magic that can be used by other people as well; on the other end of the spectrum, some people don't generate much of their own magic and are largely dependent on ambient magic for spells past a certain threshold. So whether you even have the magic available to attempt to regrow a limb depends on those factors. Desert areas like the American Southwest are notorious for being magic dead zones largely dependent on human-body magic generation, reservoirs of magic deep in the earth coming from other parts of the world (which take special practices to access), or open portals to one of the faery realms if you want to do anything as magic-heavy as any kind of healing magic. (Because life, especially sentient life and ESPECIALLY sapient life, is what generates magic, at least in that part of the multiverse. Humans and faeries and other sapient beings capable of tool use and civilization generate the most magic of all.)

Oh and I haven't even gotten, in the books, to trying to repair or replace entire organs with magic. Though thinking about it now, I think the easiest thing would be to do a mundane organ transplant and then use spells and potions to keep the body from rejecting the organ. Or, if you have enough time and money, have someone use blood alchemy to grow a replacement organ from your own stem cells.

And like the original video says, some conditions are either with you at birth or come later because they're in your DNA. There's no magical cure for Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, for instance; one character who has it, the only thing they can do is use spells that either help keep their skeleton in the right configuration, or if something happens like their shoulder popping out of its socket, using a spell to put the bone back into its socket. Another character has epilepsy, and there doesn't appear so far to be anything magic can do for her, apart from cushioning spells to keep her from hurting herself during a seizure. Asthma is another one that doesn't have any magical treatments.

And, naturally, there are no magical cures or treatments for most mental illnesses or differing neurotypes. Some potions exist for anxiety or depression, but most of those are just using magic to make mundane ingredients / medications more effective, and/or to stretch out the supply of a mundane medication (put one pill into a gallon of the right potion, and you effectively turn one pill into 100 doses of potion with the same strength as the original pill, so I can see witches in the US buying exactly one pill of some expensive drug and using said potion to have enough of the medication to last a few weeks or months.) Mundanes are much further along with treatments for mental illnesses than witches are, so witches usually just use the mundane solutions there. Hell, a lot of illnesses have better mundane treatments than magical ones. Magic, in the medical field in general, is best used for healing injuries and fixing things done by other spells.

Oh and I almost forgot: healing magic works best if the person being healed A. Isn't fighting the process, and B. Is focusing their Will on helping the healing process. So healing magic is more effective on older witches who are cooperative than it would be on, say, an infant or other young child, especially given that healing magic often causes pain while it's happening, if for no other reason than the tissues being moved around to heal them effectively. So even if you opted to try to quickly "fix" something like Dalia's missing foot when she was an infant or toddler, her young Will would work against you because all she'd know is she was in pain. Such resistance isn't as effective in kids who haven't started doing magic unintentionally yet, but it's still a stumbling block.

I feel like, in the absence of their gods, some other religions would have risen up to fill the void. Sure, the goauld were horrible evil nasties, but people still worshiped them, and real people in the real world have put up with much worse abuses from religions through history and continued to be faithful. We know from history (cough cough Christianity, Islam, Scientology cough cough) that some of those can get pretty culty. Given the way in which the goauld were taken out, I could easily see a mix of things rising:

* Humans pretending to be a goauld (specific or someone new) and raising a cult around themselves.
* Humans claiming to be, like, ascended Ancients or just "true gods" or prophets of true gods to raise a cult around themselves. All they'd really need is enough charm, maybe some other tricks, but people would be desperate for something to believe in. They could be modeled after megachurh pastors.
* Humans coming up with new religions with new gods you can't see or hear because they're too good for this whole "base material world" thing similar to gnostic Christianity.
* LOTS of people continuing to worship dead goaulds, insisting their god simply Ascended or something. (Or maybe going the Hindu route of "oh that guy was just the latest incarnation of our god. He'll be back in a new body." Which TBH the goauld did a lot sometimes anyway, taking hosts was their whole deal.)
* As much as the Ori were interesting, I think it would have made more sense and been a better message for a monotheistic or bitheistic religion or ten to have risen up organically the way Christianity did, and then end up just as bad as the goauld because TBH that's how most monotheistic religions end up anyway. At least the ones that get enough power.
* No doubt some people would worship the members of SG1 as saviors. I can easily see people worshiping Daniel Jackson especially, as he literally did Ascend and then return. (OMG can you imagine the chaos if he had Ascended in front of some of those impressionable people?) This would be even more likely after he also helped take out the Ori.
* Possibly a few "cargo cults" popping up? People worshiping p-90's?
* The most harmless groups would probably just be like "frick it, we're worshiping the sun and the moon. At least they're real, do real good for us, and are not especially cruel."

In short, instead of one group rising to the top so easily, it should've been decades or centuries of chaos as a bunch of new religions duke it out. Especially when you consider the fact most people don't know how to operate goauld tech, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to repair it or replace it. That could leave the stargates the only viable option for travel between worlds, isolating most planets somewhat. And at least some of those people might be like "You know, we don't want anyone else coming here and messing up what we got by trying to conquer us, let's bury the gate."

And another thing: even the jaffa filling the power void would have made more sense than the Lucian Alliance, since they were the hands of the goauld to begin with.

I'm having a LOT of fun writing a chapter where the protagonist of the chapter meets undisguised High Elves for the first time ever. Whatever you're picturing at the words "High Elves," you're most likely wrong. High Elves, in the Ravenstone storyverse, are extremely bizarre looking with very weird bodies and with faces that are deeply and firmly in the uncanny valley. To the point where this character who normally prefers being around Faeries is so disturbed by them that he's thinking he's going to have nightmares about their faces, and he is regretting the life choices that led him to these circumstances. Luckily for him, he's only passing through their territory on his way to somewhere else.