Liner Notes for Into The Forest
Liner Notes for my story Into The Forest
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What if Sleeping Beauty were a gorgon? As an idea this is pretty good. My initial thought was to make this a light-hearted elf-adventure, Cat Step Walker and a companion or two going into the woods, discovering a thorn-covered palace, slowly coming to the realisation that these frozen people are statues, then, maybe, mirror, needle, kiss, something something. You can see the bones of that.
This became something darker. I wanted an arc where Cat Step Walker loses his powers, and a little of his elf-arrogance. To make him less reckless and more shifty. This better matches his appearances in Tapping The Admiral. As I wanted the devil-may-care elf rogue for most of the stories, this is chronologically later in the sequence.
Elves being immortal will learn a lot in their lives, and probably forget a lot too. So I had the teaching rhyme, as with the meter and rhyme scheme it’s easier to spot where there’s a missing phrase or incorrect one. Any formal scheme would do as well, but rhyming couplets are fun.
What is an elf is a question that I put in my notes when I started the sequence, and later put it into the text. There’s no definitive answer that I give, or that any character can pin down. Yet there are things that elves generally are, and do, and things that mortals mostly aren’t and don’t. Here I take away Cat Step Walker’s magic, his senses and connection, and even his strength. What’s left? Is that enough to be an elf?
The empty throne cannot stay empty of course. It’s late in the day for feudal nonsense like this, different jurisdictions with different laws under the same, personal rule of a noble. It’s canonically a decade or two at most before The Trial Of Cat Step Walker which is approximately contemporary with the start of Tapping The Admiral which is 18th-century-ish. I imagine Mittelland is a backwards place, but it’s only moments from the Generalissimo marching across the continent, tearing down monarchies and replacing them with… other monarchs from his family?
As above, so below. The forest being a realm in limbo, ruled
but not ruled, owned but not owned, that bleeds through into the magic. It is
an inbetween place, frozen, outside of time. Cat Step Walker’s magic is sleep,
that’s his powerful ability, and so putting him into Sleeping Beauty is
obvious.But if the beauty has been stolen, if the curse is otherwise, then we have a clash of magic. And in the clash everyone loses something.
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