as above, so below
The narration mentions in places that Kyoko draws conclusions about someone based on their presentation and particularly on their use of language. This has shown up a few times now, and with Cassie the narration also observes how the way she presents herself has shifted. So why do different characters use language the way they do? It’s not the same pattern for everyone, not at all, and the differences are significant, even when they’re subtle.…
I do not like hospitals.
I am aware that this is not exactly a shocking, novel opinion. Nobody really likes hospitals. They aren’t a place anyone goes for fun. They’re a place of death deferred, of fear and pain and sickness. The patients go because they’re seriously sick or badly injured. The families arrive full of anxiety, sick with worry that something will go wrong, that they’ll be leaving in mourning. The staff mostly go there while tired, stressed, and badly overworked, hoping that nothing goes too terribly wrong today, that they won’t be the one who has to deliver bad news, all while their empathy is being steadily ablated away by the sheer volume of tragedy they’re immersed in. Virtually no one goes there because they like it.
And that emotional resonance sinks in. It makes the structure feel like fear and pain and grief. There are exceptions, sure. There are individual departments and wings that have a very different mood. They are a place of healing as well, and sometimes that shows through more clearly. But by and large, hospitals ache with the negative emotions that have passed through them. I really did not like that feeling.…
People in this setting have and use a wide variety of weapons. I think now is a good time to start breaking down what they are and why, since it’s now apparent what more of them are. There will be more on this in the future, as a broader perspective develops on how people in this setting fight. But this is a good time to start.
Beginning with Kyoko, we can for the moment set aside Thorn; there are a lot more things to say about that sword than would fit here, and it also doesn’t say that much about her given she didn’t exactly pick out what it looks like or how it works. But as was already apparent, when she visited her armory earlier, Kyoko has a whole lot of weapons for someone who hasn’t gotten in fights much. Many of them have never been used. Why?…
It made sense, I thought dully, as I watched Andrew realizing what had just happened. That was the worst part in some ways. It made total sense. I could have seen it coming a mile away if I’d stopped and thought about it. Andrew looked down at the sword now protruding from his chest. He was dead; his body just hadn’t figured it out yet. The strike was placed well, cutting through the spine. I was betting it was charged silver, too. Coming on top of all the other injuries, I was quite sure he was dead.
Audgrim, who had only ever agreed to work together until the hunt was concluded, pushed the dying werewolf off of his sword. Andrew fell to the grass. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Audgrim turned on Jack next, while the exhausted druid was just beginning to process what had happened. He didn’t stab Jack, though, perhaps feeling like he wouldn’t be able to cut through that magically reinforced coat. He just punched the other man hard in the face.
It was enough. Jack was already injured and running on fumes, and at the end of the day, as strong as Jack Tar was, underneath all the magic he was only human. Audgrim was stronger than a human, wearing heavy steel gauntlets. Jack went down hard, and he didn’t get back up. Audgrim, as I’d known he would, turned towards me next.…
Magic in this setting obeys a lot of rules, and they aren’t all obvious at a glance. Since the mechanisms and effects are starting to come up in more depth, I thought I’d talk about that, because they very much do matter. And they actually have more in common than you might think with theoretical physics in the real world. This is going to be a particularly lengthy discussion, and while it may come up over the course of the story, including it directly in the narration would be quite a bit of needlessly-technical exposition. So, while it might be an interesting example of how I think about the setting, it’s not necessary information to understand the story. That said, here are the basic rules about how magic works and where its limits are.…
Now that you’ve seen more of what mages are capable of, the question arises: Are mages human? This is a question that’s kind of interesting to look at, and it isn’t as simple to answer as it might seem. There are a number of elements that have to be considered to really assess it. The first, and probably the most intractable, part is: At what point does someone stop being human?
Certainly they started out human. But Kyoko thinks of vanilla humans and mages as being very distinct categories, and in some ways she has a point. How much humanity can someone shed and still be reasonably called human?…