The master list of all NFE 2013 fics is up!
I wrote Into Something Rich and Strange: "The siren is a creature of reflections, born of lightning on the winter sea," the mer-woman said, her tail fins twitching in signs Susan had no skill to read. "Cold and light feed its power and no being born of the sea can gainsay its command, though we who are female can at the least resist its lure. You are a Daughter of Eve, born of dreams and flesh. Your power comes from the warmth of blood and the darkness of the beating heart; the siren has no strength against that magic. You must close your eyes and dream the enemy into the final dark." 4,375 words, written for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
snacky!
(The fic is also available via the handy-dandy AO3 crosspost, wherein I fixed a single typo that drove me nuts the moment I noticed it in the LJ post, argh.)
...
So, thoughts.
As you can see, this story has nothing whatsoever to do with stars, which was the world-building issue I complained about at length midway through my flailing attempts to corral some kind of useable narrative incident. I started out with the notion of writing about the Sea Girl whom Lucy sees near the end of VDT. That led me to wonder about the nature of the Last Sea, which led me to the conclusion that Lewis fails astronomy forever, and also the Narnian world cannot actually be flat no matter what Caspian believes, or the English characters would have noticed and remarked upon the lack of a horizon in both prior books and all through the early sections of VDT. I think, in the end, it's sort of a section of a globe -- like if you took a giant knife and hacked off a quarter to a third of Earth, stuck magical mountains around the edges, and messed with physics to keep gravity acting as if the rest of the planet exists. But this is a tangent, so back to my writing woes.
Wondering about stars made me curious about Ramandu's daughter, specifically why she is never textually identified as a star in her own right, and also why we never hear anything about her mother. We don't even know if her mother was a star, or a human, or -- most interesting possibility! -- something utterly metaphorical. We also don't know how Ramandu got to his island in the first place, particularly since it's in the uttermost east but he only talks about setting one last time, which would necessarily have been in the uttermost west. He probably had to be carried there... but by what or by whom?
I started thinking maybe Ramandu's daughter was born of the reflection of her father's light on the sea as he fell. Which I still think is an awesome idea and I want to do something with it someday, but the only practical result so far is that I took that same general idea and changed both the light source and the state and location of the ocean -- from a star to lightning, and from the warm, sweet waters of the Last Sea to the icebound coast of Narnia during the Long Winter -- and created a siren.
Some of my musings on Lewis's oceanic geography fail also made it into the story in the brief mentions of Terebinthian pearl fishers and the wind-weavers from Seven Isles, but those are more placeholders than proper world-building. Again, I want to go back and explore those ideas someday, but here they are just background color and something to play up Susan's sense of duty.
( you should probably read the story before continuing )
Lastly, this story is canon for the bulk of my other Narnia fic -- what I have been calling the Lost Chronicles sequence, for lack of a better name. Expect Queen Elwen of Archenland to get name-checked in "The Courting Dance" sooner or later. :-)
I wrote Into Something Rich and Strange: "The siren is a creature of reflections, born of lightning on the winter sea," the mer-woman said, her tail fins twitching in signs Susan had no skill to read. "Cold and light feed its power and no being born of the sea can gainsay its command, though we who are female can at the least resist its lure. You are a Daughter of Eve, born of dreams and flesh. Your power comes from the warmth of blood and the darkness of the beating heart; the siren has no strength against that magic. You must close your eyes and dream the enemy into the final dark." 4,375 words, written for
snacky!(The fic is also available via the handy-dandy AO3 crosspost, wherein I fixed a single typo that drove me nuts the moment I noticed it in the LJ post, argh.)
...
So, thoughts.
As you can see, this story has nothing whatsoever to do with stars, which was the world-building issue I complained about at length midway through my flailing attempts to corral some kind of useable narrative incident. I started out with the notion of writing about the Sea Girl whom Lucy sees near the end of VDT. That led me to wonder about the nature of the Last Sea, which led me to the conclusion that Lewis fails astronomy forever, and also the Narnian world cannot actually be flat no matter what Caspian believes, or the English characters would have noticed and remarked upon the lack of a horizon in both prior books and all through the early sections of VDT. I think, in the end, it's sort of a section of a globe -- like if you took a giant knife and hacked off a quarter to a third of Earth, stuck magical mountains around the edges, and messed with physics to keep gravity acting as if the rest of the planet exists. But this is a tangent, so back to my writing woes.
Wondering about stars made me curious about Ramandu's daughter, specifically why she is never textually identified as a star in her own right, and also why we never hear anything about her mother. We don't even know if her mother was a star, or a human, or -- most interesting possibility! -- something utterly metaphorical. We also don't know how Ramandu got to his island in the first place, particularly since it's in the uttermost east but he only talks about setting one last time, which would necessarily have been in the uttermost west. He probably had to be carried there... but by what or by whom?
I started thinking maybe Ramandu's daughter was born of the reflection of her father's light on the sea as he fell. Which I still think is an awesome idea and I want to do something with it someday, but the only practical result so far is that I took that same general idea and changed both the light source and the state and location of the ocean -- from a star to lightning, and from the warm, sweet waters of the Last Sea to the icebound coast of Narnia during the Long Winter -- and created a siren.
Some of my musings on Lewis's oceanic geography fail also made it into the story in the brief mentions of Terebinthian pearl fishers and the wind-weavers from Seven Isles, but those are more placeholders than proper world-building. Again, I want to go back and explore those ideas someday, but here they are just background color and something to play up Susan's sense of duty.
( you should probably read the story before continuing )
Lastly, this story is canon for the bulk of my other Narnia fic -- what I have been calling the Lost Chronicles sequence, for lack of a better name. Expect Queen Elwen of Archenland to get name-checked in "The Courting Dance" sooner or later. :-)
