Writers' Salon!

[isana]

All right, guys, let's get this started.

This is a post for members to post their burning questions to each other. They can be simple, like "when is Character X's birthday," or not so simple "how would you define the relationship between Character X and Character Y?" If there's a story you want that author to talk about, throw in the title (and some points you'd like covered!) and if said author's willing, they can write their answer in a separate post, since I have no idea what the comment word limits are.

Here's how it'll work: an author who's up for answering questions/writing commentaries about stories will leave their name in a comment. Readers who want to ask questions or request stories reply to that comment, and hopefully we'll have some good conversations going!

If you guys request stories, it may be best if you limit them to rainbowfic for the time being, unless the story you've got archived outside the comm is in a public entry.

EDIT: If it's not already obvious, you can ask authors more than one question in however many comments you like. The point is to have a discussion, and it wouldn't be very lively if it stopped at one question per author! Just give the author a chance to finish answering your previous questions, of course.

Comments

[kay_brooke]

I am still confused by what you mean by "Threaded." I think it has something to do with how magic is passed on through families or something? Could you tell me more?

[shadowsong26]

Absolutely.

There are eight kinds of elemental magic in this world: earth, fire, air, water, metal, lightning/magnetism, sound/music, and blood. Each mage only has one kind of magic, usually referred to as a 'thread.' The ability to wield magic is hereditary, as is a mage's thread. However, threads can skip generations--sometimes even several generations. Someone who's Unthreaded has a magic different from their family/the majority mage population of their birth town. This is mostly a big thing in the relatively isolated areas of the North, the Islands, and the City of Glass, since most of the other nations (particularly the big/wealthy ones of Asendar and Feredar) are fairly blended. So, an earth, fire, air, metal, lightning/magnetism, sound/music, or blood-mage born in the Islands (like Taz's father and sisters) would be called Unthreaded, and a mage gifted with anything other than fire-magic born in the City of Glass (like Lonura) would be. Being Unthreaded carries a significant stigma in the Islands, where Clan ties are everything. In Glass, it's not so much a stigma, but can cause difficulties depending on where in the desert you are and what your Thread is.

The other difficulty with being Unthreaded comes from environmental impacts on mages. A water-mage couldn't survive long in the desert, for example. Most Unthreaded these days are from mixes about a thousand years ago, before the Blood War.

For more information on how magic functions and the world mythology that basically every nation shares, see this post.

[kay_brooke]

Oh, that's interesting! Thank you!