The Secret Origin of Dorothea

So one of the things I did while I was working on All the Birds in the Sky was that I wrote origin stories for 20 of the supporting characters in the book. Just so I could have a clearer idea of who these people were. None of this material made it into the actual book, with one or two exceptions, and I guess it’s not “canonical” or whatever.

But I’m going to be posting this stuff, along with deleted scenes and stuff, over the next couple months on this blog. First up – here’s everything there is to know about Dorothea, who is one of the witches that Patricia encounters in San Francisco.

Dorothea is a devout Catholic who never tells the truth, except in confessional. The rest of the time, she only speaks in weird riddles and strange fables. She works magic primarily by telling these bizarre magic-realist stories, which reshape reality as she tells them.  One of the things I wrote about Dorothea, which did not make it into the book, was that if she likes you, her face appears old and wrinkled. If she doesn’t like you, her face is completely smooth and looks very young. (So when she meets Laurence and her face is suddenly full of laughter lines, that means she likes him.)

So here’s her origin! (Warning: Minor book spoilers ahead…)

Dorothea
went to the magical school, Eltisley Maze, in the late 1960s.  In the late 60s,  the Trickster school, the Maze, went full-on hippie, and was threatening to overwhelm the Healer part of the school, Eltisley Hall, with psychedelic Trickster rebellion.

(As readers of the book know, Eltisley Maze was originally two schools,
one for Healers and one for Tricksters – and they still have very
different cultures, even though they’re now officially merged.) 

Dorothea got really carried away with this movement, believing that things were changing for good and the old ways were obsolete. She
dropped a bit too much acid in the middle of a particularly gnarly challenge, and when she came down from it, she found that she had become the slave of a particularly ruthless Trickster. Because
the real Tricksters saw all this
hippie shit as just another delusion that they could twist around. She asked her teachers
for help, and they were not overly sympathetic.

She was at the mercy of this evil Trickster, until she managed to trap him in a trick of her own, using sex and drugs and confusion and this
asshole’s perception that she was an idiot. She took this man’s power away from
him.

But the upshot is that Dorothea gained huge power at a price — she can
never speak the truth, about anything. She can only speak in riddles and
fables, and she gains power from lying. She’s basically an uber storyteller. She
is also super lonely because normal relationships are obviously kind of out of
the question. Like Ernesto, she is dependent on the other magicians. This
happens to everybody eventually – or else they die or burn out. One or the
other.

So Dorethea believes in loyalty to the group but she also kind of hates the
group on some level, because she’s so dependent on it. She loves Classic Rock. She was raised Catholic but came back to it when she was in her 30s. She sees something of herself in
Patricia, but that just makes her more hostile to Patricia. She kind of loves
Ernesto.

Top image: Still Life with Rosary Bead, Grufnik/Flickr