Yelen & Yelena Chapters 08 and 09 – Audio Release

Audio Release for Chapter 08: The Rot Room and Chapter 09: Mirror Magic is out today!

This read-along is for everyone who prefers audio over print/eBooks, and it’s free, but if you want to support the podcast then please head to Ko-Fi and join as a monthly Tip Jar member (or above) for early access to the episodes and mp3 downloads, as well as some eBook freebies in epub and PDF format.

There is no transcript as the book is the transcript, the audio is for accessibility – grab your copy now!

ListenRead along

Episode Music Credits:

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Intro/Outro: Quinn’s Dream: The Dance Begins

Soundtrack: SCP-x4x, SCP-x6x, Folk Round, Morgana Rides.

The Magic System

Magic in Yelen & Yelena‘s universe operates along the lines of radio waves and electricity, where it is a naturally occurring force and part of the normal background noise of the universe that very few people understand at this stage.

The rot is something else – yes, it’s magical, but instead of being a naturally occurring wavelength in the atmosphere, it’s a physical substance with magical qualities. It needs a vessel to carry it out into the living world, and then it escapes as the vessel breaks down.

The understanding of magic as wavelengths with different charges interacting with different materials and impacted by the natural topography of the landscapes it encounters is only recently (in this book) being understood, and they understand it based on their observations of water, and the way rivers and tides and waves behave, and patterns of currents over uneven riverbeds, and so on.

This is also the in-world reason magic circles work for protection, but why they don’t always work the same way (or at all) from place to place, so for years were written off as superstition. Magic bounces off certain materials, so a circle the right size for the wavelength would result in the magic cancelling itself out inside the circle, making the charge inside the circle = 0. In other places, you’d need a series of concentric circles to cancel out different wavelengths, possibly of different materials. Trial and error is required!

Magic is also unpredictable – there are many different kinds of charge, not all of which have been discovered, and different regions have their own set of background waves. So you could turn on a machine that in one place is a magically enhanced steam engine in one area, and in another area the same machine will turn itself inside out and present you with a bouquet of flowers, because the charges of the magic in that area are totally different, and merely controlling them in the same way produces wildly variable results.

This is why Yelen’s mirror had to be given to him by the Mortress – it is linked to the curse and presumably works using a charge that is unfamiliar to that region, and his original time period, so if she hadn’t given it to him, a normal magic mirror for the Provinces wouldn’t have worked at all in the same way. The magical charge of the mirror would have been cancelled out by the charge of the curse, and nothing would happen.

(Magic also interacts with noble metals like silver and gold, but glass is good for magical containment, which is why mirrors can be very useful objects; especially silver-backed mirrors in silver or gold frames. This is why the nobility used to have magic mirrors for communication devices, but they were out of reach for the majority of the population.)

Magic & International Relations

This also opened up a lot of other worldbuilding possibilities. I wanted a world without colonialism and conquest in quite the same way as this world had, and so the Guild Mistress Venturer from the Lalaris Islands that you met in the hostelry did not have her islands raided and her people exploited, but she did meet and marry a Trading Guild Master through the pearl trade.

Now, this trade may result in exploitation via soft power and political reactions to networks of supply/demand, but it’s not the same thing as the East India Trading Company, and the people of Lalaris have a much stronger hand in what happens in that trading arrangement.

The in-world reasoning for this is that when merchants encountered the Lalaris Islands, they didn’t understand the different charges of magic in the archipelago, and none of their own rudimentary understanding about magic applied there; like trying to force microwaves down a copper wire instead of a tube. If they had turned up with hostile intent, the indigenous people would have simply wiped the floor with them.

This puts everyone on different footing with one another, and different relative power dynamics can exist, simply because magic is unpredictable and a science of its own that needs study and experimentation.

When you realise that travelling to other countries means you will encounter people well-versed in the use of their own magic, while you do not know how to use any in that region and what you have reacts in wildly different ways to how it’s meant to work, diplomacy becomes paramount, or you’ll all die very fast.

So that creates a new set of power dynamics and imperatives that our world doesn’t have, and renders technological arms races less important, as you could turn up with a war machine that doesn’t use magic and have it immediately blown to smithereens and take the whole fleet with it. Similarly, gunpowder and arrows and bullets are all very well until you realise the other side all have a personal forcefield that renders them invincible, and you… do not.

War ends up being a very local affair – whether that’s neighbouring countries or civil war – where everyone’s magic is more or less the same. Also, if it’s the same AND unpredictable, you just wouldn’t bother using it most of the time if you had technology that worked more reliably.

The main way of interacting with foreigners is through trade and diplomacy, which can create soft power dynamics and a lot of intrigue, rather than hard power and military conquest. It also becomes a thing of the past, where people didn’t understand magic at all and mostly relied on weaponry.

Also, people can’t always explain their own magic to outsiders. They know from their own history of magical experiments what works and what doesn’t, but they can work that out without being able to explain the fundamental physics behind it, so nobody is any the wiser what charge it is, or whether it’s low frequency or high frequency, or what that means.

Spark Lines & the Provinces

Spark lines were mentioned in an earlier chapter – these are basically aqueducts for magic, and you’ll get to see what they look like (they’re very weird) in later books and stories set in this world. They don’t carry generated magic – they pull magic out of the atmosphere and channel it (like radio). There are big plants at either end of a spark line that filter magical wavelengths, bounce it around weird mesh and fans and all kinds of shapes, and get it to travel on down other spark lines.

You don’t have them in the Provinces because it’s expensive, and there’s no political will to invest in working out how the wavelengths interact with Province topography (magic behaves differently across different landscapes, like water behaves differently when flowing over different topographies, creating eddies and whirlpools and so on). Pockets of wild magic can and do still exist in regions like this, where magic is not channelled.

Layfolk like Yelena just don’t see this scientific side of things, and therefore buy into the “magic is tamed now” narrative, when it… is not. It’s just so normal that nobody notices it’s still swishing around, and unless you encounter a pocket of it, you wouldn’t know it’s there.

I’m going to expand on this (with some in-jokes for the physicists) in the next story I’m working on, As Below, So Above, which brings in alchemy and magic and the Interior City as a setting.

RSS Feed for Eldritch GirlYelen and Yelena – Chapter 08: The Rot Room and Chapter 09: Mirror MagicYelen and Yelena – Ch 07: Yelen's StoriesAuthor Interview with E.A. Noble: Worldbuilding and Intersectionally Diverse SFFYelen and Yelena – Chapter 05: The Wanderer and Chapter 06: YelenYelen and Yelena – Chapter 03: Last Orders and Chapter 04: Winds of Change