luciferian_chick

Sometimes I wish I was a better artist, so that I could get my visions onto the page better. I've tried drawing the Myrkalves / Nua Sidhe before, and I can never quite capture how creepy they can look in their true form. They're described in the books like... well the Nua Sidhe are basically the Gray Aliens from folklore, but that doesn't really do them justice either. Both are avian beings; Nua Sidhe are usually entirely featherless with pale skin (ranging from paper white to medium gray, generally), but the Myrkalves have downy feathers where a human would have hair, but also on their arms. Both have backwards-bending knees and feet like giant ravens, and similar hands. And while they can look quite pleasant most of the time (IMHO), I have this image in my mind of their apparently tiny mouths widening into these impossibly wide grins that go literally from one ear-hole to the other, with two rows of sharp and pointed teeth.

Avian, yes, but also not. Their biggest obvious difference from birds is their large, almond-shaped compound eyes.

In case it wasn't obvious, they are technically the same species but the two peoples hate each other, mostly. For good reason. The Nua Sidhe have a tendency to abduct people. They initially did it to the Myrkalves, to enslave them. But they also do it to humans for various reasons ranging from pranks to much more serious things like experimenting on or even killing humans.

A dream I had yesterday had a very strange house in it. The house was basically internally bisected. IE, the living room and bedrooms in the front were fine, there was even a very nice basement with a large circular area for meditation or dancing. But the only way to the kitchen from inside the house was a tube that not even a greased-up infant would be able to squeeze through. To get to the kitchen, you had to exit the house, go around to the back, unlock an iron gate, climb up an iron ladder, and then you could enter the kitchen. But the door was so narrow that I have no idea how they got the appliances in and out.

I prefer the large dream houses that are like magical mansions where I can spend the whole dream exploring all the weird rooms inside them. I still remember one in particular from many years ago that had an entire professional-chef type kitchen in it that was at least three times bigger than my entire real-world apartment.

In my Ravenstone story, magical healing isn't always instant. Minor cuts, sure, those close up before your eyes. A broken bone will take at least a few hours to heal, though. And head wounds... well, one character gets a minor concussion and has the same recovery time as a mundane would. Bruises also take at least half an hour after the application of bruise healing cream, though the worse the bruise is, the longer the healing takes.

But yes, magical healing does get used in one of my books to enable torture. Everything has a dark side.

Also, there are conditions in my Ravenstone series known as "magic burn" and "magical exhaustion." Magic burn happens when you channel too much magic through a person's body (usually your own but not always) and the magic starts to damage their nerves and other tissues. It can be healed if it's caught soon enough, but the first step in the treatment is plastering the victim's body with hematite paste and getting them to swallow an anti-magic bolus, to bring their body as close to "zero magic" as possible to interrupt the process. Once the victim has been at zero magic for long enough, you can use small amounts of localized magic to heal any damage, unless they were damaged too much before the magic burn process was interrupted. Truly severe cases can even cause spontaneous human combustion. How much magic it takes to cause magic burn depends on how long you've been a witch and how much of a tolerance for magic you've built up through training. Already, Vedya can do a lot more magic at 15 before risking magic burn than she could at 12. But even at 12, she had more resistance to it than a mid-spectrum witch like Chooli would, even as an adult. (Chooli can't do most spells they teach in magic school; zeer magic mainly works to let zem see spirits and ghosts, and to fight them off if necessary.)

Magical exhaustion is when someone has been pushing their magic too hard and too long, and they're not just exhausted, their magic is exhausted as well. Since magic can keep a person going longer than is normal or safe for them, if someone is so exhausted that their magic was the only thing keeping them going, magical exhaustion can be fatal. (It's not always. Younger witches tend to exhaust their magic before they can reach a fatal point.) The treatment for magical exhaustion is various potions and spells that keep you alive until your body can start to heal, and other potions to aid the healing process.

What's really bad is if you manage to get both magic exhaustion AND magic burn at the same time. The treatment for magical exhaustion is anathema to the treatment for magic burn, after all.

As to trauma and PTSD... the human mind has defenses against magical intrusions, even mundanes. Telepathy and telempathy exist in their magic system, but even those kinds of intrusions can be blocked. Mainly what it means is that changing memories and altering personality traits, or even compulsion spells or other mind control, are so difficult to do that even experts in those magics have to work very hard to get those magics to work. Compulsion spells work best against highly suggestible people, people who struggle with impulse control, etc, but everyone else can usually fight such spells.

Of course, a big side effect of all that is the fact there's no magical solution for PTSD and mental trauma in general. There are some techniques that can help. Memory recorders can help you revisit a memory and get a more objective view of it, since the memories in a memory recorder can be slightly edited to be from an outside perspective. (Artificial dissociation.) That doesn't change the original memories, but viewing the dissociated memories can bring you perspective. Spells and rituals can help you use magic to wander through your own subconscious mind. There may be others, but I haven't really looked into it much in the series, apart from Dalia using the "visit your own subconscious mind" thing in one of the books.

If I hadn't grown numb from all the fascism months ago, I'd probably be screaming and crying right now.

Trying to say "highway robbery," I accidentally said "highway library," & now I'm wondering what a highway library would even look like. I'm picturing a 100 mile long road lined with bookshelves, manned by librarians riding motorcycles with cargo trailers for the books.