Liner Notes for On The Nature Of Magic

 Liner Notes for On The Nature Of Magic

I have, of course, written myself into a corner here. A fictional letter, that is an essay on the debate of firearms in elven lands, hardly needs liner notes at all. It ought to explain itself!

Still, there’s a few bits and pieces I can expand on. We’ve met Swift Tail, Cat Step Walker’s protegee (and cousin) in Six Knives, and we’ve learned about her family background in Drowned. Tolian Starborn argued with his mother Immaterial Tricks (see Tapping The Admiral for a tiny bit more on her). He left the elflands and wandered the world. He lived with a human woman and she bore a child, Adorn Startail, who joined Cat Step Walker and his sister Chill Decider in their age cohort and their walk amongst the houses. (See Liner Notes for Drowned – again I have shot myself in the foot by already covering this). Unlike Decider – bold, and Walker – reckless, Startail is very conventional for an elf, despite being half-human.

Startail’s daughter Swift Tail is not so conventional, and not just her quarter-human ancestry. Startail may (or may not!) disapprove, but convention suggests that an elf should have at least one mentor that matches their own personality.

Having created Swift Tail and started to write her into these stories I realised that she was absent from Tapping The Admiral. Too young? Busy elsewhere? Ah well, I’m probably the only person who cares about the consistency that much.

I fix this in a later story.

Walker’s dismissal of firearms compared to muscle powered weapons is me riffing off the fact that the English longbow vastly outperforms the musket. All true of course, if you have a nation that for not especially good reasons spends years training archers. Still, the crossbow is not that inferior, if used properly in the hands of experts. And that’s just it, experts. Whereas a musketeer can be trained in weeks, archery is a matter of years of practice. You can drill up an army in months if you have a supply of guns and equipment.

Elves have nothing but time, so learn to be expert warriors almost as a matter of course. They can field small but immensely skilled units for almost any type of warfare. If they choose to. And so a pistol or a musket is of lesser utility.

I said I’d written myself into a corner but it looks like I did have some things to say about it after all. And there’s one final thing. Walker does not, quite, get to the heart of the nature of magic. And that’s because Swift Tail already feels it, in her lungs, in her hands, in her bones. Magic is celestial and personal. It inhabits the magician and it inhabits the world. Magic is that which is, and that which becomes. It is universal.

That’s magic.