Last time, a lot of weirdness and then Lena didn’t die.
11.01
So he wakes up to find himself in Lena’s room again. And his cellphone-alarmclock then rings, but it’s the wrong song.
Sixteen moons, sixteen years,
Sixteen times you dreamed my fears,
Sixteen will try to Bind the spheres,
Sixteen screams but just one hears…
“Stop it!” She grabbed my cell and turned it off, but the verse kept playing.
“It’s about you, I think.
God damn Emothan could you react to something already?
But what’s Binding the spheres?”
She rants that she Does. Not. Care. She is sick of magic and being important and everything being about her! This is the proper base for a story where the mundane character wants to know stuff and is blocked by the magic character just not wanting do deal with this shit any longer. Maybe the story was trying to do this all along and just doing a bad job.
She then suggests that maybe the song’s about him, since after all, she’s not sixteen.
And…hm……
Sixteen moons, sixteen years,
Sixteen times you dreamed my fears,
Sixteen will try to Bind the spheres,
Sixteen screams but just one hears…
Seems legit.
Let’s look back
Sixteen moons, sixteen years
Sixteen of your deepest fears
Sixteen times you dreamed my tears
Falling, falling through the years…
Sixteen moons, sixteen years
Sound of thunder in your ears
Sixteen miles before she nears
Sixteen seeks what sixteen fears…
Okay, so it’s dreaming her fears in the most recent, but the original one refers to “your deepest fears” and “my tears” could actually be him trying to grab her. So it might just be about both of them.
I think Ridley’s seventeen, otherwise she might be another of the sixteens in here, maybe the spherebinding one or something.
“she nears” might be Lena, but it could also be Ridley or Sarafine or even Genevieve, all we know is it’s not Emothan. The book really has no lack of evil women, we’re spoiled for choice!
Frustrated, Lena flung her hand up in the air and opened it. She closed it into a fist, and banged it against the floor like she was killing a spider.
The music stopped.
So the fact she can do a spell in response to stop it would seem to suggest she knows what it is, but probably it doesn’t mean anything.
I crawled up onto the bed and pulled Lena into my lap, running my hand through her crazy hair. “Are you okay?”
Also, can I just say there doesn’t appear to be any mortal/caster relationship prejudice here or they wouldn’t have left the two completely unsupervised in her room. Honestly, I’m pretty sure you only do that if you’re actively seeking grandchildren from the pairing.
She explains the telepathic thing is kelting with a capital K. Google just throws up the Beautiful Creatures wiki, so I guess it’s made up. Why the fuck isn’t it called telepathy? Also, only some casters can do it, and it also seems like they can only do it to some people – she used to be able to do it with Ridley, suggesting that it can change, and it’s super rare to be talking to a mortal. Well, at least it’s not a complete exception to the normal magic rules like so much else.
Lena nudged me. “It’s from the Celtic side of our family. It’s how Casters used to get messages to each other, during the Trials.
oh for fuck’s sake.
I will grant that super pale skin with jet black hair is pretty fitting with Celtic bloodlines. But on the other hand, so now magic abilities are inherited except for the primary power that’s a total wildcard.
“But I’m not a Caster.”
“I know, it’s really weird. It’s not supposed to work with Mortals.”
YOU JUST FUCKING SAID IT HAPPENS IT’S JUST RARE!
THEN I PRAISED YOU FOR, FOR ONCE, NOT HAVING IT BE SOMETHING THAT FLAT OUT BREAKS THE MAGIC RULES.
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU DO THIS BOOK.
But no, time for more Emothan wondering why he’s so special, because it’s obviously him and not her.
She leaned into my shoulder. “Maybe you don’t have to be a Caster to have power.”
Well it’d sure help us if we knew what the fuck a caster was.
Pretty Suit or one of the others, it’s all a blur of interchangeable cardboard cutouts, said that mortals couldn’t have power of their own, but there’s no way to know if he meant that in definition terms or just that they didn’t know of it.
I mean, let’s take Exalted, the RPG which most of you here probably only know from the bad book tie-in. In Exalted, mortals can’t use essence, which fuels all magic. There aren’t any special exceptions to that, for the simple reason that if you use essence, you’re no longer considered a mortal. It’s nice and binary. And this is a physical truth of the setting – if you cast your mass-mortal-instadie spell, any essence user is going to survive that by virtue of not being one, even if they’re a squishy human in all other respects.
So, if caster is the word we use for a magic user, then what she’s saying doesn’t make much sense. At most, there might be some secondary class of people who have passive ability – he can’t do anything himself but he’s boosting/nullifying those who do have power.
But if caster is a term specifically for people who cast her kind of magic, then sure, maybe he’s from some other tradition or a mutant – I mean, the initial magic ability had to come from somewhere, right?
Actually, that’d be a cool plot! Some giant magic user society stumbles over someone clearly doing magic, but it doesn’t work anything like theirs and how is that possible, and it turns out that magic users are born occasionally from mutation, but usually don’t end up breeding a huge clan of people to carry it on and turn it into a tradition.
Anyway, he repeats his line about maybe it’s because he fell for her.
I said it, just like that. No stupid jokes, no changing the subject. For once, I wasn’t embarrassed
He used the exact same damn line about falling for her already. The author did not even proofread this, did she?
there was writing on the wall. It appeared slowly, one word
at a time.
You’re
not
the
only
one
falling.
It wrote itself out, in the same curling black script as the rest of the room.
That’s right, her room isn’t just covered in pretentious teen poetry, it’s covered in magic pretentious teen poetry.
She explains her family meant to rebind Ravenwood and Halloween is a powerful night for Casting except it’s DARK aligned remember? Even if we assume Pretty Suit is actually solidly dark-aligned, the rest of her family is definitely light and the spell itself seems it should be light.
You know what’d have worked? Just saying Halloween supercharged whatever the existing alignment was. If this Halloween had a half moon, it’d be supercharged white magic, which would make the attack legitimately impressive.
Whatever it was, whatever she was, don’t you think she was coming for me, because in four months I’m going to go Dark?”
Another interesting option would be for Sarafine to be light aspected. We’ve established that if Lena goes dark, everyone is completely fucked for unexplained reasons. So, maybe the rest of caster society isn’t ready to take that chance.
Because I mean, otherwise we have this stupidity, where the evil person is sure Lena will go evil and join her, therefore she’s trying to kill her early.
Emothan, shockingly, actually realizes that and tells her as much, complete with the fact that if she were going evil the good people would be the ones launching the assault. I have faint hope that perhaps that might actually happen now.
They kiss. And everything gets explosive and supercharged as we move through a metaphor for sudden teen lust, followed by Ryan coming in and making it all calm down again in a metaphor for being walked in on by your family member.
Which is apparently a particular power:
She pulled Ryan close. “A Thaumaturge. We’ve never had one in our family.”
And…does that mean anything? We haven’t seen any two people with the same ability yet. The closest was that Ridley seems to have met at some point a dark-aligned former natural. And it doesn’t seem like she knows anything much about her historical family, since she had no idea about Genevieve or even her own parents, so presumably she’s just referring to her current family, which seems to be a half dozen people in size.
“I’m guessing that’s a fancy Caster name for a healer,” I said, rubbing my head.
Except there wasn’t healing, she just turned off whatever was making the bed spin in a tornado and stuff. But because stupid Emothan said that instead of asking, Lena’s just yeah sure kind of and doesn’t explain. Emothan ruins everything.
I’m betting it’s some alignment that can only be light and that’s why Ryan is raised by her family.
I mean, consider that we know there’s a separate word for a natural who becomes dark aligned and they apparently have different abilities. But Ridley displays her siren power prior to turning sixteen, and there’s no mention that she was something else but is now a siren after going dark. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if siren powers were dark-only, because that just seems like something the book would think about manipulative women powers.
Of course…if that was a factor you’d think it’d come up regarding Lena not knowing for sure what she is yet, and the fact naturals are one of the subtypes that can go dark would be fuel for Ridley’s accusations rather than her dismissing the possibility. But this book’s grasp of its magic system is pretty crappy, so a plot hole like that seems possible.