Fayanora: The Djao'Mor'Terra Collective

Over on BlueSky, someone posted the following question:

"Good morning, #AugustWorldbuilders! Today we're getting a little weird and vague again. Tell me something about your magic system which is strange and/or unique. What makes your magic system different from others? What gives it a special flair?"

My answer:

"I think the only thing really unique about it is that while there's different kinds of magic with different rules, especially out in the multiverse, what it boils down to is creativity & a magnified Observer Effect. Various magic types have different rules cuz they're the logic people thought up.

So magic type A might work by being a reusable spell getting fed by your body's magic, activated with a word, phrase, or poem. Then type B works cuz your mind creates a spell in your hand that exits through a wand. Each has its own rules thanks to the beliefs of the user.

There are some hard limits, but there's a lot of flexibility within those limits. One hard rule: magic is generated by living things. Another: Magic can bend the laws of thermodynamics, but never really break them. If you use magic to levitate something, that energy comes from somewhere.

It can come from you, from other people, or from the living environment around you, but it comes from one or more of those. In regions with not as much life, like deserts, any magic you use is mostly coming from your own body. It's precious, like water.

Faery realms have more magic than Earth cuz their ecosystems evolved to use it much earlier. On Earth, magic didn't really start until humans started using it. Worlds like Tirffiniol, evolutionary pressures had life thinking & dreaming, using its Will on the universe millions of years ago.

Another rule: Magic begets more magic. So it's a feedback loop: the more different lifeforms that evolved to use magic, the more other life forms had to use it too in order to adapt, which creates more magic available for use. And now you have worlds where even plants and insects use magic.

It's why so many sapient Faery species are so much more powerful than humans at magic: it's deeply in their blood, cuz thousands of generations of their ancestors evolved using it. Which gives them another advantage: their bodies create far more magic than human bodies do.

Whereas we've been using it for only about 10 K years. Their long history with magic is also why so many sapient fairies are extremely long lived, from hundreds of years to thousands of years old. Even human witches age more slowly & get a lot older than mundane humans."

And I will add here that if you're somewhere that has lower environmental magic than you're used to, you're at a greater risk of magical exhaustion from doing the same kinds of magic because you're using more of your body's own magic in those places. And magical exhaustion is potentially fatal. (I added this as one last comment over there, in case you're looking at both.)

I am glad this question was asked. It let me put into words ideas I've had about the magic system for a long time, and notice that I was accidentally being very internally consistent with it. There are even scenes in some of the books where someone who's lived a long time in a very low-magic place and managed to build up their body's ability to generate magic enough that when they had access to environmental magic ("ambient magic"), they basically had the magic equivalent of when you're picking up what you think is a gallon of water only to find it's empty.

Also, the above "magic type A" is called "faery style magic" in the books, even though there's variation of magic systems among faeries as well, just because it's the most common type of magic used by faeries in Tirffiniol. Whereas "magic type B" is "human style" wand magic. And yes, that does imply there are other ways of using wands. Hell, even some human witches have wands that just take some input from the human and make the spell themselves based on that. Happens a lot more often in magical staffs / staves, though. Magical staves tend to be so much more powerful than wands because they have to be made from living witch wood (the wood of a tree that is a magic user itself), freely given by the tree, and being so much bigger, they generate more of their own magic. Wands of living witch wood tend to need most of their generated magic just to stay alive and connected to their tree of origin, whereas staves have much more magic available to them.

Anyway, I gotta make breakfast.

Writing question of the day: When do most people have high school reunions? Is it around the time of year graduations happen, or later?

See, I've never been to one because I hated most people I went to high school with, as most of them were bullies. High school was a miserable time for me. And I live hundreds of miles away from Iowa now, and have not left the Pacific Northwest in the last 19 years. Furthest I've been from Portland since moving here was either this one ren faire somewhere in the middle of Oregon years ago, or this other ren faire up near (ish) to Seattle. Oh right, and I've been to Seattle once for a FaeryWorlds convention. (Took a train there with some friends.) Oh, and Brooke took me to visit her friend Kermit and his wife, I don't remember where that was. Somewhere in Washington, I think.

Point is, I know jack shit about high school reunions. Plan is, Orpheus gets a letter with an invitation to his 20 year high school reunion. He had an even more miserable time in high school than I did, so he's not going. I only need to know when most people have theirs, so I know where in the timeline of the story to put the scene.

EDIT: I wrote out the scene, and Orpheus might actually be going to it after all, for once. He did go back to that school during one of Vedya's dueling competitions in one of the books, so going to the reunion might be cathartic for him. Also Morgana and Nizoni will be there with him for morale support.

(Yes I know the phrase is "moral support" but that never made any sense to me, so I use "morale support" instead because that actually makes sense to me.)

LOL. You ever make a decision in writing that seems reasonable at the time and later realize it's not reasonable? In my case today, I realized that two scenes in book 7 should be changed because 1. I decided Portland doesn't have its own international portal hub (similar to an international airport, but with portals). Which, okay, fine. Whatever. But 2. I had the groups in both scenes choose to use the one in San Diego, and had one of these groups driving there for some reason. So 3. Driving? When shadow-walking is a thing for them? When Vedya was younger, that might have made sense, even though Morgana and Nizoni can both bring passengers along while shadow-walking. But by that point in the series, Vedya can not only shadow-walk on her own, but also Blink.

Anyway, San Diego is like, 1000 miles from Portland, and even for an adult witch, that's a bit too far to shadow-walk in one go, unless one's magic is being super-charged by panic and desperation. But Seattle, a place they go to semi-regularly anyway because Kira tends to stay up there, is only about 130 miles away from Portland. And they have already been shown to be able to shadow-walk / Blink from Portland to Seattle with relative ease. And if even that distance was too much for Vedya, it'd still be a three hour drive as opposed to a SIXTEEN HOUR drive. (They didn't drive that long in the current version, as they drove one of their cars through a portal that took them to San Diego. Still, why go there instead of Seattle? In the unlikely event their car, magical as it is, got stolen or something, 138 miles is a lot easier of a distance to get home without a car than 1000 miles would be. Plus, they have friends and allies and connections in Seattle that they don't have in San Diego.)

So basically, it makes so much more sense for both groups to go to Seattle instead of San Diego that I am going to have to edit those scenes to take place in Seattle instead of San Diego. Just... not today.

"#WritingQThursday Let's talk your characters' names. What do they mean? Do they signify anything special? Does your character have any nicknames, and if so, what's the story behind those?"

I usually put a lot of thought into my characters' names. Everyone but the minor side characters has thought out names. "Random extra #47" gets a random name from a list of most popular names, if they get a name at all. Dalia, her name means "a strong branch," for instance. It's also a pun, because she's black and her name is usually pronounced the same as the flower, 'dahlia.' (Sometimes it's pronounced "Doll-yah.") Her middle name is Delphinium, which is the name of a genus of poisonous flowers because Morgana's family has a history of at least one of their names being named after poisonous flowers. (It's a goth thing for them.) Like Morgana's middle name is Belladonna (AKA deadly nightshade). Morgana's mother's first name is also Belladonna. (Her middle name is Hemlock.) Morgana also has a brother named Oleander. (Dalia canonically chooses her own first and middle name, after having her parents read a lot of possible names for her out of a baby names book. Chooli also chooses zeer own name, naming zemself after one of Nizoni's cousins, Chooli Peshlakai. Said cousin was the first person Nizoni came out as trans to.)

( Rest is VERY long )

So I'm close enough to finishing book 7 that I'm starting work on book 8. Today I was working on class schedules for the main group of kids. A problem I've come across already is that Vedya -- a math genius -- was taking Calculus in book 7. I have no idea what's beyond Calculus, and it's proving difficult to Google, especially as Google and even my go-to search engines Ecosia and DuckDuckGo are getting more difficult to use because of AI creep. Hell, Google itself has been unusable for years, long before it added AI and become completely useless.

Anyway, if anyone has any idea what I can say Vedya is learning, math-wise, for grades 11 and 12, please let me know.

I stole the sleeping god idea for the cosmology of my own fictional series. Called The Dreamer, It Dreams reality -- the whole multiverse. It combines that Lovecraftian idea with my thoughts on the concept of God, mainly that any entity with a mind vast enough to create and run the mind-bogglingly vast universe is not going to be comprehensible to humans and is probably not going to notice us at all or care about us more than it cares about any random atoms in the universe.

And then take that idea and multiply it by an infinite multiverse -- taking a universe that's already impossible for the human mind to truly comprehend the scale of -- and multiplying that by trillions upon trillions upon trillions unto infinity. Any entity capable of Dreaming all the infinite universes in the multiverse would be as vast and unfathomable to a single-universe god as that single-universe god is to us.

Bringing Dwarves into the story a bit, for book 8. Pursuant to that...

"Sure, (Dwarves) could see well in the dark, but gemstones and precious metals don’t look very impressive in the dark, even to someone with dark-vision, especially since Dwarves were partially color-blind; they could see browns, some of the darker reds, some yellows, and gray/silver; in fact, the green light of the various glowing life-forms like the glow worms looked white to them. They had names for hundreds of shades of the most common earth tones, but when it came to gemstones, they needed help from surface dwellers with full color vision to identify most of them.

"They could usually tell gold apart from other metals, though since it was so soft, they’d never had much use for it themselves, initially. Once they figured out that making it into things could net them a LOT of resources in exchange, they had gotten really good at using gold to make things for surface-dwellers, with a little help from their surface-dwelling employees."

I'm struggling to figure out if this level of color blindness is realistic. First, is it possible? Second, would a species that lives entirely underground and rarely goes to the surface at all have any color vision at all?

Keep in mind they do have pretty strong dark-vision, but of course there's not really much color in the dark. Sure, they could use various light sources, they even have magical crystals that make light. But their eyes are very sensitive to light, and the light sources they scatter through their tunnels for their surface-dwelling friends and allies are very dim indeed. (Like glow in the dark tape.) Even a first-year student at Fae Springs could easily make a bright enough witch-light to blind a Dwarf, if only temporarily. I'm pretty sure they would need special glasses or a spell over their eyes to be on the surface in the daytime, as they would consider a full moon to be almost unbearably bright.

Now I'm pondering what the inside of a magical lock would look like. Because there's two particular kinds of magical locks I'm thinking about:

1. Magical locks where the key is just a rod or a flat piece of metal with runes or other enchantments on the key that magically interact with the lock to open. Useful if you need multiple people to be able to access something, while still restricting access. Would make copying keys difficult, I imagine a lot of artificers go into key and lock making.

2. Magical locks without even a keyhole because they're blood-locked to you so all you have to do is grab and pull to open and nobody else can do that (maybe with you pushing some intentional magic into it or using a password you think at the lock at the same time, for added security, so nobody can force you to open it).

Either way, there's no tumbler, there's no pins or other mechanism inside. It's all magic. The only thing you need is the shackle or a bolt or whatever.

Literally pick-proof, the mundane way. Possibly there might be magical ways of picking it, but with a simple blood-lock (using a drop of your blood to bind it to yourself only) that would be made a lot more difficult. And such locks are often Adamant. You'd either have to be very skilled at picking magical locks, or you'd have to use magic to completely destroy the lock.

Now of course there are also spells you can put on the lock or the locked box/vault itself that can hit the would-be picker with offensive spells or trap spells. Or, if it's sensitive enough, destroy the contents before the lock can be picked.

But truthfully, I'm more interested in the physical mechanism. How similar to a mundane lock does the inside of a magical lock have to be? How much mechanism needs to be there? On the simple end: Obviously, since magic can move single items around, the inside can be as simple as the shackle goes in, a magical bolt locks the shackle in place. Just the two moving parts. Or better yet, have the magic hold the shackle in place and move it all on its own; just the one moving part.

On the complicated end: as fucking complicated on the inside as you want it to be. Gears, levers, springs, clockworks galore. As many runic arrays as you can fit into the lock and/or the vault door, each of them a different trap. Multiple bolts. Hell, multiple shackles, even. But in the end, one important factor is "if someone sucked all the magic out of this thing, would it open or would it be stuck closed? And which do you prefer?"

Obviously the "shackle only" design would fall open immediately if its magic was drained (which isn't an easy task in itself). "Bolt and shackle," with no keyhole, you'd have to either find a way to shimmy the bolt open, or destroy the lock. Or use your own magic to move the bolt. Same with more complicated locks.

I am, of course, interested in whether a magical lock could be made to be pick-proof. I've seen lots of lock-picking videos on YouTube by two different channels, LockPickingLawyer and McNallyOfficial. Most locks made are pretty shitty. Masterlock locks basically almost unlock if you so much as sneeze at them. The men on both of those channels can basically pick most locks in like three seconds. LockPickingLawyer has picked locks with all kinds of random things, from pieces of aluminum cans, to twigs he found outside, and many other things. McNallyOfficial has a recurring schtick of "This is (X brand make and model) lock. It can be opened with (another of the same lock)" and then he hits one lock with the other and it opens. He also uses pieces of aluminum cans. One video I saw had a stack of Masterlock locks at least ten locks thick, all held in place with vices, and he picked one after the other in a total of like ten seconds. All he did was ram a rake pick into the keyholes so violently that he basically was showing "hey, these take no fucking skill at all to pick. A toddler could pick this."

I think the most worrying videos I ever saw were the many, many, MANY videos by LockPickingLawyer where he picked the locks of GUN SAFES so quickly and easily that yes, a toddler could literally pick one of these things open in seconds. At least one of his "pick the lock with a random twig" videos was him doing that to the lock of a gun safe. I have concluded from years of these videos that "gun safe" is an oxymoron.

So yeah. Hence my wondering if magical locks could be pick proof. Basically me wondering if a pick-proof lock is even possible.

Oh and that reminds me: a few days ago I saw a video saying that before reliable locks, if someone needed to secure something, the best way to go about it was put it in a puzzle box. That way, either you have to know the exact trick of how to open it and be able to do so, or you have to be smart enough to figure it out, or you break the thing open to get at the stuff inside. So another possibility is "magical puzzle box." Or maybe a lock where you have to use the right sequence of complicated, difficult spells to open it.

Or something similar to the meme where the burglar forces the man to give his password, a keyboard flips down, and the second password is some ridiculously complicated piano piece.

On the magical security side, there's also spells that refuse to unlock the lock at all, even for the one person they're keyed to, if anyone else is in the room with them.

Anyway, another reason I started thinking about all this is because there's a scene in the current chapter I'm working on where one of the characters has to pick an extremely complicated and dangerous magical lock, that's part of a massive vault door.

Done rambling now.

As much as I love writing my Ravenstone series and re-reading the books, I really think it would be much better as an animated TV series or a live-action TV series once completed. So much of how I write it and how I think about it when I write it is in terms of TV or movie cinematography. The way the narration works tends to follow the camera shots in my imagination, and cuts to scenes feel like the way they're done in TV and movies. And there are so many things I struggle to describe even though I can clearly see them in my mind's eye. A lot of Dalia's clothing is like that, for a good example. What got me thinking along these lines was imagining Dalia discovering "elegant gothic lolita" style fashion, and trying to describe how she would look in one of those dresses, especially the softer, pinker, more blatantly girly ones. Best I came up with so far is another character saying "You look like one of those old Victorian era dolls with the poofy, lacy dresses and the fancy, lacy bonnets, but lacier, poofier, and obviously you're black where all those dolls were white."

Like, it would be such a great look on a TV series, whether animated or live-action, but I think even with my best descriptions, the reader would really have to google "elegant gothic lolita" and switch to the images tab to really get a good idea of what I'm going for.

But yeah... Dalia already often dresses in 'Victorian goth' style, so EGL would just be a logical progression of her sense of style.