(Don’t worry-this is all revealed in the book’s first few chapters.) “This leaves these two who don’t even know about each other at the beginning of the book as the heirs to this tiny conspiracy to try to save civilization,” says McClellan. When Demir sets about solving the mystery of his mother’s untimely death, Thessa becomes a natural ally as Thessa’s master was also murdered, seemingly because he had a secret alliance with Demir’s mom to figure out why the world’s magic is running out. ‘I’m sent in to destroy things and and to protect the rest of my troop, but what happens when I can’t do that job?’”įinally, we have Thessa, whom McClellan calls “our reader’s window into the magic system of the world.” Thessa is a godglass engineer who studied under one of the great masters of silica engineering. “And that creates a bit of an existential crisis for someone who considers himself a bit of a blunt instrument. “‘If this madness advances, I can’t be a soldier anymore, I can’t be trusted to defend the people that I care about and love and do my job,’” McClellan says, channeling the Idrian mindset. However, when the creator of said magical eye is murdered at the beginning of the book, Idrian is left to wonder what his future might look like. “He is sent in to just absolutely wreck the infantry and create openings for his own battalion.” Idrian allows McClellan to give a military perspective of this world, one that is complicated by a “childhood madness” kept at bay by a godglass eye. “Basically, his job is to break the line,” explains McClellan. McClellan calls Idrian one of his “almost anime-style action characters.” A Breacher who works in the elite military wing of the Ossan military, Idrian wears armor made of a godglass stronger than steel, and carries a sword and shield in an era of muskets. Even though she is the type of person who is sent to break knees when needed, she always tries to be as honest as she can and to deal fairly with people.” As the story progresses and war looms, Kizzie’s must decide where her loyalties lie: with the family who has never accepted her, or elsewhere? “When Demir is forced to return to the capitol,” teases McClellan, “one of the first people he goes to is Kizzie because she shares his moral center. She is also one of Demir’s childhood friends. Kizzie is an Enforcer, and a bastard from one of the most powerful-guild families in the empire. In addition to Demir, In the Shadow of Lightning gives us three other POV character through which to explore the complex world of Glass Immortals: Kizzie, Idrian, and Thessa. “And so that turned into, ‘OK, this would be an industry, like a major industry in the world.’ And then that extrapolates to, ‘How does it affect the economy? How does it affect the wars? How does it affect individuals?’ And then, from there, it started snowballing into the world and the characters and how everything would interact.” “We landed on these little glass baubles that enhance people, depending on the impurities in the sand that they’re made with,” explains McClellan. McClellan’s thorough exploration of this industrial magic system is one of the strongest elements of the epic story, as the author follows questions about how such a resource would impact a society’s various systems. That doesn’t really quite work with my style.’” And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of like Pokemon. “There was a point at which I was trying to figure out how to work out like demon summoning that you would trap in glass balls. “I went through lots of different iterations of how to use glass in a magic system,” says McClellan. McClellan said he had been thinking about building a magic system with glass since about halfway through the process of writing the Powder Mage series, but it took a particularly productive conversation with his wife while they were in a London hotel for a convention for the idea to settle into something he wanted to move forward with.
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