Spoilers for An Enchantment of Ravens Margaret Rogerson and probably Lord of the Fading Lands by CL Wilson, depending on what you call a spoiler.
Tl;dr: (also length warning!)
The idea of sidestepping age gaps via... I dunno, magical lobotomies, may not 100% make everyone comfortable. But for the moment it works for me, with the added bonus of dealing with time abysses and meaning literally anything could be an armed memory bomb.
Is there a stepping stone path that has been artfully tied into someone’s memories ascending from grief to new appreciation for life? If new construction means a place needs to get torn down, are there calls sent out offering people with good memories to come sew them into the area so people can see how it was before? ARE there artists who seek out wonderful experiences and then sell them?
Are we looking at Augmented Reality and vid stuff from a magic perspective? Maybe. Is there way too much here? Definitely. Will it all hit the reader at once or, maybe, at all? Hell no!
I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy romance novels lately, mostly because Reddit recommendations throw worlds that sound super neat in my direction. But then the worldbuilding or plot doesn’t go far enough, or the relationships are inherently problematic in a way some people probably find appealing, but I don’t (current gripe: thousand year age gaps, fated mates). Most of those suggestions have fae, although some have dragons or other species inherently more powerful and “wonderful” than humanity. “in this essay I will...”
Fae have always been an interest for me. The actual mythologies, as well as what people do with their fantasy takes: their relationships to mortals, to each other—are they elemental forces given faces by contact with humanity, or an elder race fading as younger energies take precedence and the magic fades away, or actually aliens?
My brain wants to organize fae into three categories, and I’m not sure they can all live in the same plot: elemental versus physical, seasonal courts, and manner of existing.
Elemental fae are those who correspond to winds and heat and life energy. They may connect with flowers or work with frost on window panes, but they would still exist and thrive without those physical trimmings. Physical fae like dryads and brownies and fairy god parents tie themselves to trees or households or people. They are more powerful in the physical sphere than elemental fae, but it does give them... weaknesses. Typically, the greater the power, the more irrevocable the bond: more than one villain has a reluctant FGP behind them, while brownies can pick up sticks and find a new house if their customary cream is expired.
Seasonal courts are very popular ways to sort fae. That ties into the elemental nature noted previously, but I’m intrigued on how some fiction has all four courts and some only have the two extremes of Summer and Winter. What if, in the past, there were only two seasons, only two courts, and it took a lot of death of lesser fae and people who were not able to live in those extremes for them to acknowledge the need and place and rightness of Spring and Autumn? This could be a recent change as far as the fae go—or maybe it’s just about to happen. Maybe some ascended human plays Persephone as the land either bakes or freezes
Have the original courts selected candidates for the role of Autumn and perhaps other contenders for the role of Spring, and the “”love triangles”” are just seeing who wants to see who spending eternity alongside them? Is the trick, the ending... Spring and Autumn actually must be shared crowns with a king and queen or two queens etc otherwise, they fall into human or abhuman extremes? The rigid fae would not be able to do that willingly; it would not occur to them to have shared crowns, as the original courts don’t.
That dipped into a bit of plot building, but it does bring me to my last metric for fae: existence. Are they: timeless, elemental beings who do not age at all and may or may not be killable and may or may not be able to pass on the helm; physical fae who age and can die, but “respawn” via taking over a nearby animal or object of their type when they die (I was VERY influenced as a kid by the stark picture of the Cat Lord staring out at me from a D&D monster manual...); or fae that live and breed and die like mortals?
If there are such fae in that last category, they may be considered “lesser spirits” AND there may be no distinction between “fae” and mortals. Humans are lesser spirits and are—according to the fae—subject to the same laws that govern all people... and given all the respect the People give to very smart dogs. Not ALL fae would regard humanity in that light, especially those who know the secret to the “high fae” and their natures and problems.
See, powerful and knowledgeable beings are intriguing. But a warrior with two hundred years under his belt in love with a seventeen year old, or a warrior over a THOUSAND years old in love with someone in her twenties is... suffocating, to me.
Sometimes people have like... an odometer reset regarding ages, I think. Other than just “it’s fiction, let me enjoy my unicorn fantasy.” Someone who is 1500 years old, who has been away from the world, sure he’s powerful but he’s driven to his knees by the thought of hurting her—that’s fine. Things are SO different that they both have to find new ground and understanding, right? I guess. There are opportunities for the younger of the pair to restore wonder and hope in the other, which is nice.
The idea of true immortality and how humans and their memories would work with that—sure, fae operate differently because they’re not human, but what if they were? What if, instead of the one SPECIAL (or few...) human woman being reborn with awesome power in some giant cauldron, what if that was the standard MO? If high fae (that is, a placeholder for “humanoid”) MUST come from human stock... What if they can’t cope with their memories as time passes?
Alistair Reynolds’ sci fi work is HUGE for me in terms of imagery and ideas, even if the “... okay, and then where does it go?” can get a bit much. In House of Suns’ incredibly far future, human subspecies have their own individual ways of dealing with memory overload. The shardlings (clones of one person) have regular conclaves where they “spin” their memories off so that they can be reviewed by the others in their house and, more importantly, be stored. There is another subspecies that deals with the demands of time by constantly growing, so there is more room to store more everything—to such an extreme that a main character having a conversation has to enter SUSPENDED ANIMATION between exchanges because it takes so long for other person to respond.
In an Enchantment of Ravens, there is a well whose waters will turn a mortal fae. They pretty quickly lose their... spark, I guess. Human willpower and ingenuity and Craft cannot live in a fae body. The high king of the fae demands that any human who falls in love with a fae (probably because of that Craft...) must drink the water and join the fae world. From what I remember, there’s no reason given for this, it’s his decree and sets a terrible pain on love: if you bond over your gift (or in general) you must then forsake that light to keep your love, which will probably then be very very shallow. Rule of drama, basically.
I’m seeing a river whose banks gleam with precious gems. Mortals or lesser spirits who bathe in its waters emerge as high fae able to feel and bond with the elemental and physical matter of the world as their inclinations and those of the world permit. But the cost is some memories, preserved on the banks as those gems—and another layer of the price is the inherent knowledge of how to offload memories at your own convenience.
How good it is, to set aside the awkward how-was-I-supposed-to-know of childhood. How tempting to turn bad dates, food poisoning, long days at work, parents’ divorces and drunken husbands into rubies and sapphires and pearls. How beautiful they become at a distance divorced from yourself—touch them, and feel it again. But not for long.
Or you bind your memories to places. When they tear your old high school down, maybe the nostalgia and homesickness for the past is too great, so you stand where it used to be and sew your memories to that grass. It won’t bother you unless you come back to this place—but since you don’t remember it now, why would you do that?
The ability to do more magic is a consequence of stripping off the memories, not a price. As you hollow yourself out because it’s easier, or because you just can’t keep the days straight, the anima of light or earth feels so good in those gaps. Or maybe you stop to clean a house for a struggling single father, and then that’s your household; you don’t remember your old one anyway. Or you hear a child crying, and the bond lets you soothe them, dress them, help them make a good match, and you’re a fairy god parent before you realize you have any power at all.
When you remove who you were, you open the possibilities for who you could be; the magic of the land mindlessly knows that.
So Titania heads the Summer court as a timeless elemental filled with power and a few core memories, while Oberon shelters most—but not all—of the physical fae in Winter; he is also an elemental, but he has shed fewer memories and has a soft spot for a warm seat before the fire and ice skating on the lake.
They both acknowledge—mostly at Oberon’s insistence—that their elements are too harsh. Lesser spirits have been spawning, living, and dying short lives for too long. They must make room in the pantheon. They each have one or more candidates who are either humans or high fae whose age doesn’t matter (theoretically) because they’ve been stripped mentally bare to make room for the seasons. I don’t think either reigning ruler would forcibly almost-drown their near candidates in this river Lethe to get them into the running, but an underling might. If one of these high fae candidates is super old and has better command of his or her magic—that’s news to them, and genuinely doesn’t matter unless they have a Chekov’s gun sewn into the lining of their coat—an enemy's weakness, or a big working they removed from their mind because it is a BIG working and they almost died last time.
The idea of sidestepping age gaps via... I dunno, magical lobotomies, may not 100% make everyone comfortable. But for the moment it works for me, with the added bonus of literally anything could be an armed memory bomb. Is there a stepping stone path that has been artfully tied into someone’s memories ascending from grief to new appreciation for life? Are there artists who seek out wonderful experiences and then sell them?
Are we looking at Augmented Reality and vid stuff from a magic perspective? Maybe. Is there way too much here? Definitely. Will it all hit the reader at once or, maybe, at all? Hell no!
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