Sword Design

The bronze sword that Thorn is being compared to is called a kopis and is a traditional form of ancient Greek sword. It’s curved forward and shaped somewhat like a larger version of a kukri. It’s more sharply curved than Thorn and has a convex tip, for a number of reasons; this makes it less suitable for thrusting. Thorn is more similar in profile to some of the thinner forms of the Illyrian sica, which has a longer, thinner, and less sharply curved blade. Unlike a normal sica (or a kopis, or a khopesh, or a falcata, or a kukri, or…you get the point), Thorn is sharpened on both edges. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly related to how much more you can get away with as a swordsmith when the material you’re working with will be made supernaturally durable. Mundane blacksmiths have to manage an inherent property of steel, which is that harder (i.e., able to take and retain a sharper edge) alloys will also be less tough (i.e., they will be brittle and prone to shatter).…

Chapter Two

Maddie didn’t take us all the way home, and I didn’t ask her to. She had offered to drive because she was making the trip anyway. She lived pretty close to the Blackbird Cabaret, in the same largely-abandoned post-industrial ghost town of a neighborhood. I was pretty sure she was there for similar reasons, too; it was quiet, and defensible, and there were no neighbors to cause a fuss. She had a meeting in the middle of the night tonight at Mark’s, the bar that was one of the other major local social spaces for our crowd.

So, she drove us there and then dropped us off outside the bar. Her need to be early for that appointment was obsessive enough that trying to get her to take us the rest of the way would have been a waste of effort. And it was only a few blocks from Mark’s to my house, anyway. Comfortable walking distance, and both Raincloud and I could handle the cold just fine.…

Chapter One

Attending a show at the Blackbird Cabaret was always a fascinating experience.

The building itself contributed a lot to that. Capinera actively refused to add permanent furniture, so you either stood, or you brought a chair or blanket to sit on if there was room at the event in question. The ceiling was open to show ducting and rafters from when the building was a warehouse, and the floor was open concrete except for a single, simple stage. The overall impression was an odd, surreal minimalism. It lent the Blackbird a sort of raw feeling, unfiltered and without any pretense.

Then you had the audience, which was its own kind of bizarre. Capinera didn’t exactly bar normal humans from it (though some of the individual performers did), but the crowd was always mostly or entirely drawn from the supernatural community. That never made up a large portion of the total population, but Pittsburgh had enough people to still maintain a decent crowd of us, and the Blackbird had enough of a reputation by now to draw people from further afield as well. I’d seen a lot of very strange people there, many of whom were barely even pretending to be mortals.

And, finally, there was the performance itself. Capinera was easily the most gifted a capella vocalist I’d ever heard, and those nights were so intense in their sound and emotion that I could barely tolerate being in the room for them. But most nights, she wasn’t performing herself, just providing the space for someone else. Those performers could be very, very strange, and unfortunately their quality was…not often on par with hers.…

Prelude

If I have a wish   it is to find you   where I find poetry

Do you ever   close your eyes in full sunlight   Here close your eyes

You are everything   that has not yet been lost

-Joanna Klink, excerpted from “Aerial”, Raptus, 2010…

Enthrallment

Thralls are a complex concept in this setting, and one which varies widely in execution. The basic concept of enthrallment is that a person is subjected to intense enough mental magic that their actions are effectively under the control of someone else. There are a ton of ways to do this, and pretty much all of them are pretty fucked up. Enthrallment is not at all the same thing as subtle mental influence, or even the kinds of high-intensity emotional manipulation which Capinera is capable of. There are qualitative differences that are somewhat hard to define but extremely significant.

To start with, enthrallment is a sustained state. It is not a spell you cast on someone once and move on. Capinera makes you feel something while you’re hearing her sing, but when the song is over you get over it. That’s a big part of what produces the qualitative difference. When the CIA was doing extremely unethical large-scale experiments with LSD (yes, this is a thing that really happened, and Project MKUltra is fascinating to read about in a horrifying way), this would be the difference between the people they dosed once during an interrogation and the people who were on a bad acid trip for six months straight in a mental hospital. One of these things is going to do a hell of a lot more harm to someone than the other, even though both are using the same drug and the same basic methodology. A thrall is like the second one. The enchantments applied to them are not transient in nature, and that matters a lot.

There are a lot of ways someone can go about this kind of magic. By and large, they’re going to be sorted into categories in two distinct ways, depending on which part of the experience is being discussed.…

Melissa

I wake up early. I didn’t especially mean to, just woke up an hour before my alarm. I hate it when that happens. I have a hard time getting to sleep, so trying to get any more sleep will take long enough that I might as well just get up now. So I do, stretching. Shoulder feels stiff. That’s annoying. It’s been three days since I helped Shawn carry furniture around. I don’t like that my arm is still complaining about it.

I dress myself with barely-conscious movements. It’s a familiar routine, and I wake up sluggish, so it runs on autopilot. It’s just a t-shirt and jeans anyway. Hoodie today, because it’s cold out. Normal.

Check my bag, it’s fine. I don’t really have much else to do before school. I sit and try to play video games to distract myself, but I’m already too distracted for it to help. Can’t focus through the intrusive thoughts. I don’t know what it’s about, not really. I don’t know why I’m having intrusive thoughts about poison, about fire. It’s not something I remember thinking much about until recently.

There are a lot of things I don’t remember happening until recently.…