Schooling, Part 2

After my diatribe about bad schools in fantasy/sf, I have to confess that a bad school was one of the main things that inspired my Minstrels of Skaythe series. In the video game series Dragon Age, the society does a lot of things that I mentioned in my previous post. Young mages are conscripted (often by force) into the Circle of Magi, where they are isolated from their families and constantly hounded by Templar knights who harshly punish any who stray from doctrine.

This shouldn’t be a spoiler, by the way; the most recent Dragon Age game was released in 2014.

It was all very dramatic for game purposes, but as I played (and replayed) the games, I looked at it through the lens of a school worker. And I thought, no wonder so many mages go crazy in Dragon Age — they were traumatized in their most vulnerable stages of youth. This was one of the knots I was trying to untie with Minstrels of Skaythe.

If you’ve read the novellas closely, you know that young mages in Skaythe are forcibly removed from their families and imprisoned in the Temple Schools, where they are “trained” ruthlessly to become the violent rulers who terrorize the land. But you also know there was an underground movement by mages who understood the ways of vitalis. Most notable is Ar-Thea, who rescued her six magelings before they were imprisoned in the Temple Schools. (Or in one case, as she fled from a school.)

Rather than mashing all the magelings together and making them fight for dominance, Ar-Thea worked with her small group individually. Although they were constantly on the move and under a different kind of threat, they still had more freedom than they would have had. And, they all came out sane!

This is where I sneakily remind you that The Tale of the Drakanox is the capstone of that whole series, and it will be coming out in November!

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