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edenfallingYuletide reveal day!
I only wrote one story this year -- so much for grand intentions! But that single story is about eight and a half thousand words long, and I was sunk in a slough of depression for a good chunk of what should have been my prime writing time, so I count it a successful year nonetheless. :-)
Dreams From My Mother: Wilhelmina Benedict never knew her mother. That didn't stop Adria from shaping her daughter's life. (8,700 words) Written for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Morbane.
Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series is one of my beloved guilty pleasures of the past decade. It has its fair share of issues, plot holes, and utter ridiculousness, but it hits a lot of my buttons Just Right, and so I forgive the world and the characters pretty much anything. *hands* What can you do?
Anyway, Morbane provided the following prompt: I would really like worldbuilding. The books focus on very high-powered characters, and I'd be delighted if you would instead explore life for Landens or lighter-jewelled Blood. The books cover a lot of mythical realms, a lot of major political shifts, and dramatic events - ways of life and changes to ways of life that affect everyone. Tell me some of these stories. Original characters very welcome! But if you have favourites among the nominated characters, take your favourite and write me an interaction with an obscure corner of canon.
I requested "any", and I realise you may have signed up to specifically write about Lucivar, or Surreal, or Wilhelmina, and OCs may not be your cup of tea. So I have optional thoughts on each of the nominated characters in my letter on livejournal.
With that in mind, I initially thought about hauling out and reworking a massively self-indulgent story set in Hayll after the end of Queen of the Darkness, which would need a LOT of fixing to make it compliant with the incidental world-building in The Shadow Queen and Shalador's Lady, but that's a novella-length story at the very least so I set that aside and started hunting for very minor canon characters and/or places where I thought an OC-centric story might illuminate something interesting about the world of the series. And for a while I was going to write about Lady Broghann (whose name you will not recognize because she was on-page for all of, I think, two pages, in "Zuulaman," which is a prequel story about Saetan's past contained in Dreams Made Flesh -- she is Mephis and Peyton's governess), but somehow I ended up thinking about Wilhelmina's mother instead.
Adria-of-no-canon-surname is mentioned in passing on one page of Daughter of the Blood, when Jaenelle is telling Daemon a little about her family situation and mentions that not only is she not the child of Robert Benedict, her nominal father, her half-sister Wilhelmina is also not Robert's child -- that Wilhelmina's mother, Adria, was a broken Black Widow who used her little store of remaining power to cast a dream web and enchant Robert's half-brother, Philip Alexander, into fathering her child instead. Which is... um... dubious consent at best, but in her place -- it's not stated outright, but there's some situational implication that Robert may have been the one who broke her (i.e., raped her and destroyed her ability to use magic) -- I can understand why Adria was willing to do whatever she could to even slightly lessen the horror of her fate. Then she died anyway, whereupon Robert promptly made a politically advantageous second marriage. That always seemed somewhat suspicious to me.
Long story short, I decided to write about Adria from Wilhelmina's point of view, via stories people told Wilhelmina about her mother over the years. Initially this was going to extend all the way through "Kaeleer's Heart" (a story in Dreams Made Flesh, set about a year after Queen of the Darkness) and end in Scelt with Jaenelle finally telling Wilhelmina about having met Adria in Hell, and maybe an exchange of a letter Adria had written for her daughter before she returned to the Darkness, but as I wrote the timeframe of the story compressed itself a LOT and I wound up ending on what, in my original outline, was the fifth of nine planned scenes. The story also ended up being much more about Wilhelmina and her family in general than about Wilhelmina and her mother specifically, but I like to think that Adria is still a notable presence (or absence) throughout the fic.
I only wrote one story this year -- so much for grand intentions! But that single story is about eight and a half thousand words long, and I was sunk in a slough of depression for a good chunk of what should have been my prime writing time, so I count it a successful year nonetheless. :-)
Dreams From My Mother: Wilhelmina Benedict never knew her mother. That didn't stop Adria from shaping her daughter's life. (8,700 words) Written for
Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series is one of my beloved guilty pleasures of the past decade. It has its fair share of issues, plot holes, and utter ridiculousness, but it hits a lot of my buttons Just Right, and so I forgive the world and the characters pretty much anything. *hands* What can you do?
Anyway, Morbane provided the following prompt: I would really like worldbuilding. The books focus on very high-powered characters, and I'd be delighted if you would instead explore life for Landens or lighter-jewelled Blood. The books cover a lot of mythical realms, a lot of major political shifts, and dramatic events - ways of life and changes to ways of life that affect everyone. Tell me some of these stories. Original characters very welcome! But if you have favourites among the nominated characters, take your favourite and write me an interaction with an obscure corner of canon.
I requested "any", and I realise you may have signed up to specifically write about Lucivar, or Surreal, or Wilhelmina, and OCs may not be your cup of tea. So I have optional thoughts on each of the nominated characters in my letter on livejournal.
With that in mind, I initially thought about hauling out and reworking a massively self-indulgent story set in Hayll after the end of Queen of the Darkness, which would need a LOT of fixing to make it compliant with the incidental world-building in The Shadow Queen and Shalador's Lady, but that's a novella-length story at the very least so I set that aside and started hunting for very minor canon characters and/or places where I thought an OC-centric story might illuminate something interesting about the world of the series. And for a while I was going to write about Lady Broghann (whose name you will not recognize because she was on-page for all of, I think, two pages, in "Zuulaman," which is a prequel story about Saetan's past contained in Dreams Made Flesh -- she is Mephis and Peyton's governess), but somehow I ended up thinking about Wilhelmina's mother instead.
Adria-of-no-canon-surname is mentioned in passing on one page of Daughter of the Blood, when Jaenelle is telling Daemon a little about her family situation and mentions that not only is she not the child of Robert Benedict, her nominal father, her half-sister Wilhelmina is also not Robert's child -- that Wilhelmina's mother, Adria, was a broken Black Widow who used her little store of remaining power to cast a dream web and enchant Robert's half-brother, Philip Alexander, into fathering her child instead. Which is... um... dubious consent at best, but in her place -- it's not stated outright, but there's some situational implication that Robert may have been the one who broke her (i.e., raped her and destroyed her ability to use magic) -- I can understand why Adria was willing to do whatever she could to even slightly lessen the horror of her fate. Then she died anyway, whereupon Robert promptly made a politically advantageous second marriage. That always seemed somewhat suspicious to me.
Long story short, I decided to write about Adria from Wilhelmina's point of view, via stories people told Wilhelmina about her mother over the years. Initially this was going to extend all the way through "Kaeleer's Heart" (a story in Dreams Made Flesh, set about a year after Queen of the Darkness) and end in Scelt with Jaenelle finally telling Wilhelmina about having met Adria in Hell, and maybe an exchange of a letter Adria had written for her daughter before she returned to the Darkness, but as I wrote the timeframe of the story compressed itself a LOT and I wound up ending on what, in my original outline, was the fifth of nine planned scenes. The story also ended up being much more about Wilhelmina and her family in general than about Wilhelmina and her mother specifically, but I like to think that Adria is still a notable presence (or absence) throughout the fic.
