Notes on the Mirror sequel

In the sequel to The View from the Mirror, which I’m working on now, there are two main plots. Spoiler alert! If you haven’t finished The View from the Mirror, you may not want to read on.

I’ll be posting more about the sequel over the next few months. Stay tuned!

Seven years after the ending of The Way Between the Worlds, the west is riven by the Anarchy, and things are getting worse every day –

The first plot

As many people will be aware, this plot has to do with Maigraith’s relentless  pursuit of Karan and her daughters. Maigraith wants to mate one of them with her thuggish son, Rulken, in a desperate attempt to create  a new human species to make up for the loss of her beloved Rulke. Naturally, Karan isn’t going to have a bar of this, but she is broke, while Maigraith is wealthy, powerful, and utterly obsessive.

I also wish to point out that certain lies were told about Karan and Llian in The Well of Echoes quartet, and The Song of the Tears trilogy, by people with secret agendas. Believe what was said about them at your peril!

The second plot

Though mancery (the Secret Art) has been used in the Three Worlds for thousands of years, it’s always been difficult, dangerous, painful and limited. Over and again, knowledge that a mancer painfully gleaned in a lifetime died with him or her, for it is a dangerous and unpredictable Art. Whole fields of mancery known to the ancients have been lost.

Only the incomparable magister, Mendark, ever came close to understanding where the power really came from, and how to use it properly. In the last half century of his long life, he sought a way to pull all the threads of the arcane together and truly master mancery.  But Mendark burned his library before he died, and all his work is believed to have been lost …

Previously he had given Llian (a brilliant young Chronicler, now disgraced) access to his library to write the tale of his long life and incomparable deeds, though after Mendark’s unforgiveable corruption came to light Llian vowed never to tell the story. However for the past seven years he has been forbidden to work as a chronicler. It’s crippling his family, causing unbearable conflict with Karan, and eating him alive.

It has never occurred to Llian that his notes for Mendark’s Tale, and his own incredible memory – what he knows that he doesn’t know – could allow Mendark’s great work to be reconstructed, and completed. But it has occurred to others and, in his desperation, Llian will be easy prey for the unscrupulous …

Chassimer Planck, whose Machiavellian struggles with the Council have caused the Anarchy now crippling the west, plans to have Llian accused of a heinous crime, then blackmail him into recovering Mendark’s secret. If Planck gets it, he’ll be able to control the source and the power of all mancery – and every other mancer in the Three Worlds.

And no one will ever be safe again – especially not Llian.

Filed under: Mirror Quartet Sequel, Three Worlds series