I’ve always been ambivalent about writing hard and fast magic systems with unbreakable rules. For one thing, from my perspective, that turns magic into science when…magic is intended to be a tricksy, fluttering, elusive thing that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. If it’s always predictable, with A + B = C for results, then what’s the magic there? It’s just science using spellcasting or innate powers to achieve a goal. Oh yeah, sure, Fate (aka dice rolls) can change things out a bit but…is that really magic?

In the world of the Seven Crowned Gods, spirits of different lands end up being strongly entwined with hereditary magical abilities. I don’t distinguish between sorcery and magic. All practitioners are called sorcerers. No differentiation between malign and good labels—they’re all sorcerers. And magic isn’t limited to the rich and powerful. The Healers in the lands of Varen all possess a certain degree of magic. Some of the rich and powerful have magic, while others don’t.

What is important for a ruler to have, however, is an actual relationship with the spirit of a particular land. Magic comes from the land. It can be a small gift, such as the ability to infuse clothing with magical protections or create healing potions. Or it can be a large and powerful gift, with the ability to summon up lines of power from the earth to survey the lands of a particular nation. Not all rulers have the big magic, but they need to have some sort of magic to relate to the land. In the nations of Varen, this takes the form of the ability to create a magical Tapestry that aids in their leadership. 

Magic also differs between the continent that contain the nations of Varen and the continent that contains Daran and its subject nations. Besides the spirit of the land and the patronage of one of the Seven Crowned Gods, the Varenese have mostly small magics, with the exception of powerful Leaders of the various lands. Until Rekaré ea Miteal became Leader of Medvara, there was very little integration of magic and technology. However, magic is expressed through the magical horses (singular, daranval, plural, daranvelii) from the Two Nations of Keldara and Clenda, as well as the magic-bearing fleeces of the Stardance line of sheep from the nation of Medvara. Some jewelers possess the ability to create necklaces, bracelets, and rings that can be infused with a wearer’s magic. 

The Healers of Varen possess much more power than their Darani counterparts. They can work great spells in the creation of healing potions. The more powerful sorcerers end up traveling as village circuit Healers in their youth, depending on their magic to keep them safe. There are substances such as glimmer dust (of varying degrees of purity) that even non-sorcerers can use to work small spells to make boots and clothing more durable. The Varenese also create woven speaking squares that allow people to speak across distances, but the use of speaking squares requires a God’s patronage in order for them to work.

Daran, on the other hand, has multiple powerful sources of magic. Goodwood and darkwood (later renamed angrywood) provide sorcerers with the tools to work spells. Both woods have been used by sorcerers—goodwood provides the foundation for the magical sailships operated by Sorcerer-Captains. Darkwood/angrywood has been used for communicators and listening devices. The Emperors of Daran have become alienated from their land’s magic over many years, which has led to the land expressing its discontent through venomous and toxic plants, along with the mysterious entities that haunt the mountains between the two major continental provinces of Daran, Adalane and Daraelen.

In order for the new Empress Witmara to successfully rule Daran, she has to fix many of the problems left to her by her predecessors—including regaining control of the land’s magic. Not an easy task when the land itself resists human control, due to misuses of that power over the years! Additionally, there has been a curse on Daran from its founding, and it is up to Witmara and her allies to fix that long-standing issue. Which—can have multiple impacts on the lives of Daran’s people.

Daily life in Daran functions through multiple spells, unlike in Varen. Those spells are often coupled with technology, such as the mix of magic and technology that powers Betsona’s wheelchair, as well as the spells encoded within her chair that allow her to open doors and other basic household management functions. Household items can be encoded to either allow someone to listen to conversations, or block conversations. Sorcerers in Daran keep their personal quarters stark, with minimal décor, to avoid being spied upon. 

In both continents, the Gods are also the source of a lot of the magic available to humans. Everyone has a particular divine patron but the divine patron is most influential in sorcerers and Leaders, whatever a particular Leader is called or how they reach that status. However, the Gods have limits on what they can do to help their beloveds—and the extent of those limits is not made known to humans. Some restrictions are ordained by Artel the Judge, who in most cases is the Leader of the Gods. Not all restrictions come from Artel, and their source is unknown.

 All in all, magic in the world of the Seven Crowned Gods is not limited to hard and fast rules. Some of those rules are unknowable and…perhaps with the exception of Artel, Gods can be deposed. Which is one of the factors in the Goddess’s Vision series.

The first book of Goddess’s Vision, Vision of Alliance, is currently available through all major retailers. Links here:
Books2Read (ebook)

Itch.io (ebook)

Ingram--paperback

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I plan to release Vision of Chaos in late June/early July, and Vision of Order in late October/early November. For more information about the timing of these releases, follow my website at https://www.joycereynolds-ward.com or check out my Substack (Speculations from the Wide Open Spaces, https://joycereynoldsward.substack.com/), or follow me on Bluesky at @joycereynoldsward.bsky.social. Note: please have SOMETHING in your Bluesky account if you follow me. Due to social media weirdness, I tend to block empty accounts with no posts.

What happens after the Big Bad Emperor is deposed?

The impact of a problematic tyrant doesn’t end with their death. The policies of that autocratic ruler don’t just go away overnight. The despot’s allies don’t fade away into the shadows. The social and economic impact from that oppressive regime reverberates down through the assorted social classes from top to bottom and—measures have to be taken to replace the unjust previous policies.

Not an easy thing to do, even if the new ruler is anointed by the Gods and acclaimed by the people.

Nor is it an easy thing to write, as I know far too well.

When I finished Judgment of Honor, the last book of the previous series, Goddess’s Honor, in 2020, I fully intended to quickly pick up the story in a new series showing the new Empress of Daran, Witmara, wrestling with the implications of reforming the previous Emperor’s despotic practices.

It’s not like I hadn’t written about those problems before. After all, a big chunk of Goddess’s Honor deals with the struggles of Rekaré ea Miteal after she eliminated her tyrant father’s rule over the land of Medvara. In Challenges of Honor she ends up failing this test, brought down by the schemes and traps created not only by the evil Emperor of Daran, Chatain, but also by her father and his divine patron, the Goddess Nitel. It takes Rekaré’s cousin Katerin, who is also Witmara’s mother, to finish the task that Rekaré began. Rekaré goes on to win redemption by helping Witmara defeat Chatain and Nitel, ending up as Nitel’s replacement in the pantheon of the Seven Crowned Gods.

But—I started having problems figuring out just what Witmara’s quest needed to look like once she became Empress. Instead of wrestling with what happened to Witmara, I worked on an intertwined set of series featuring a powerful family in a science fiction/science fantasy multiversal setting, the Martinieres. Every time I poked at Witmara’s story, the basic concepts seemed to dodge away and well, hey, I’d just thought up another facet about the Martiniere Family Saga.

Eventually, I ran out of Martinieres, culminating in what I think is the best subset of the Saga, The Cost of Power trilogy. Ironically, writing the three books of The Cost of Power showed me the path to figuring out Witmara’s story, between the redemption of Philip and Gabriel Martiniere, and the compromises and costs for Gabriel and his wife Ruby as they become more powerful. However, The Cost of Power didn’t give me the answer to my biggest issue, until a few months after I had completed the books.

One of the problems I’ve always had with the world of the Seven Crowned Gods has been settling on the viewpoint characters. I struggled for years to capture the voices of Rekaré and her mother Alicira. Eventually, I settled on Katerin as the first voice, in what is now the second book of Goddess’s Honor, Pledges of Honor. That opened up the pathway to first Alicira (in the collection that’s now the first book, Beyond Honor), then Rekaré in Challenges and the other three books in Goddess’s Honor.

The same thing happened with Vision of Alliance. At first, it was the voice of Chatain’s exiled half-sister, Betsona ea Ralsem, that came most clearly to me. Betsona is a minor character in Choices of Honor, then becomes one of the protagonists in Judgment of Honor.

Betsona has reasons to see her brother deposed. A powerful sorcerer in her own right, she was badly injured during a magitech performance that she and Chatain worked on when they were children. Chatain covered up his role in sabotaging that performance but privately gloated about what he did to Betsona. After their father died and Chatain became Emperor, he systematically destroyed the rest of their close family. It was only through Betsona’s magical skills, political scheming (including recruiting Witmara to strike at Chatain), and the obvious love and devotion from the people of Daran that she survived. She can’t rule on her own—she lacks the strength to manage her full magic, and has limited mobility as a result of that disabling incident.

But—Betsona’s mind is not impaired. And she has learned political manipulation over the years from excellent teachers, including her observations of Chatain’s missteps and abuses.

We see the early days of Witmara’s rule, both good and bad, through Betsona’s eyes as Witmara struggles to gain control over the much-abused land’s magic—a key element for rulers to succeed in this world. Someone was missing, though—and it took my experience with the Martinieres to figure out who that was. One of the influences in Witmara’s early life was Heinmyets, one of the Three Leaders of the Two Nations. Heinmyets served as Witmara’s Heartfather, a surrogate standing in for a missing father, since Witmara’s father Metkyi had died in the battle to control Medvara.

Heinmyets’s voice turned out to be the balance I needed to Betsona’s perspective. There’s also another element—a nameless, cream-colored, magical stallion from the breed called daranval (plural daranvelii) who cannot be ridden due to his own impairments. Despite his physical handicaps, this little stallion possesses strong magic. Heinmyets is also a strong earth sorcerer, and kept the nameless stallion from being culled, which would be the norm for a daranval with his problems. However, Heinmyets has lost both of his bondmates, Alicira and Inharise, and seeks a new purpose for the remainder of his life.

That purpose appears to be over the ocean in Daran, helping both Witmara and Betsona.

There are complications, of course. Once I figured out that Alliance featured both Betsona and Heinmyets, and the process by which the two of them ally to help Witmara, the story started flowing…and here we are.

Things are far from perfect in the land of Daran, even with Chatain gone. Witmara and Betsona need to overcome multiple obstacles to Witmara’s rule. The forces allied against them are very real, including semi-divine entities who would just love to upset the pantheon of the Seven Crowned Gods to become fully divine again. While Rekaré’s ascension to divinity and the demotion of Nitel as Goddess may have appeared to resolve conflicts between the Gods, that isn’t necessarily the case.

Stabilizing Daran is also key to the survival of the Seven Crowned Gods—and, as we’ll see in the next two books of Goddess’s Vision, Vision of Chaos and Vision of Order, that is not so easily done. Not when Daran’s problems go back to its founding, and the malign influences that seek to bring about its final destruction.

Vision of Alliance is available in ebook through all major retailers. It is also available in paperback and hardcover. Find your preferred retailer at the book landing site on my website: https://joycereynolds-ward.com/books/vision-of-alliance/ef7ac7a1-fb6b-4a6b-8c5a-203b9915fda6

I plan to release Vision of Chaos in late June/early July, and Vision of Order in late October/early November. For more information about the timing of these releases, follow my website at https://www.joycereynolds-ward.com or check out my Substack (Speculations from the Wide Open Spaces, https://joycereynoldsward.substack.com/), or follow me on Bluesky at @joycereynoldsward.bsky.social. Note: please have SOMETHING in your Bluesky account if you follow me. Due to social media weirdness, I tend to block empty accounts with no posts.