I finished Part Two today! I will celebrate tomorrow (somehow). It is ~21,000 words.
The very end of Part Two explores what it is like to exist as a body without magic. Check out the following excerpt. Keep in mind, there are a TON of spoilers right here.
I blinked again, and Dolgof was on the ground.
I staggered back, clawing for Hota's arm, pulling them back as well as I stared at the Hero of Life's limp body, laying up against the lemon tree. Behind her stood the Hero of Earth. She gripped a syringe with white knuckles.
"What did you do," I shouted, "you killed her!"
Fangs bared, she kicked the Hero of Life. "Go on, tell him your dirty lie," she growled.
"Come," Dolgof whispered. "She won't hurt you."
Against my better judgment, I knelt down beside her. Her breathing slowed. Her hand laid over her stomach. Her cheeks drooped with fatigue. She was barely alive now, and she wouldn't be for much longer.
"I hid so much from you," she continued. "I hid myself from you for eighteen years. Only now-" she coughed "-only now do I tell you that, In Iziser."
She struggled for a breath. I lifted her head up. "What, what," I cried. My body shook, tears forming behind my eyes. "What is it?"
"You're my son."
No.
"I'm your mother, Izi."
I gasped and staggered back, hands covering my mouth until I fell hard on the ground. Hota picked me up. Still wielding her syringe, I begged the Hero of Earth, "what did you do to her?""I took her magic," she snarled. "I took the Hero of Language's, too. I'm going to combine them all, myself, and save Meiste. That's the easiest-no, only-way."
A body without magic is, too, aimless and stumbling through existence. An existence without the magic that fundamentally makes people people in Meiste is a painful one. Dolgof, once the Hero of Life, will remain a vegetable until the end of the novel, once they're able to reunite her and her magic.
Today I explored one of two very important concepts in my novel: what does magic look like without a body to bind to it? Read ahead to learn more, but there are technically spoilers here.
"No," I decided. "It's-" A foul stench slashed at my nose, popping my eyes open. "What the hell?" I stood and plugged my nose, sticking out my hand. "I don't smell it." Hota stood beside me, hands in their pockets while they looked around. From the forest came a rotting buck the size of a semi truck. I could see its skull from beneath the skin that had fallen away, and only one eye remained on it. "I don't see that." Hota gulped and stood behind me. The buck wasn't real, I realized. The buck was made of magic. This was the consequence of failing to restore magical balance quickly enough. This putrid thing, made from unguided magic, wandering aimlessly in a world where it couldn't interact. Had I failed? Would Meiste soon perish?
Magic without a body is aimless. It is undead. It has no will nor way, rhyme nor reason, nothing like that. In fact, the perception of that magic is what caused it to take a form in the first place. It is only putrid-smelling because Izi perceived it that way, and it only looks like a rotting deer because that's what Izi saw.
Day Six of Writing my Novel again (follow up from last night because I forgot.)
I smashed past 8600 words in Part One last night, and if my novel has 4 parts like I plan for it to, then the total word count should be somewhere along the order of 60-75,000 words. Not a lot, but good enough for draft 1!
In a later post I will explain magic in my conworld, Meiste, but one form of magic is Language magic. An overpowered ability some language magicians hold is the power to turn locutionary actions into perlocutionary results.
J. L. Austin was a philosopher interested in language, and he coined the terms "locutionary," "illocutionary," and "perlocutionary" to refer to sentences which invoke actions and the result thereof. Locution is literal meaning, but illocution refers to what an utterance has done, and perlocution refers to what happened thereafter.
For example, when you say "have a good day," you invoke perlocution to enforce that the person to whom you spoke should have a good day. When you say "please pass the salt," perlocution involves somebody passing the salt.
It's not hard to see why this is overpowered, then. If a perlocutionary language magician says "damn you!" then you may or may not be damned, depending on the magic behind it. Or if they say "bless you!" you may literally be blessed.
This may even be extended to sentences like "give me money," where now somebody may give the person who spoke money.
This is definitely overpowered, but I argue definitely not as overpowered as most Earth magic.